It’s not impossible in the sense that it violates mechanical principles and laws. But if almost all hydrogen atoms were not in their ground state, which is what BLP claims, and which is required for their energy from nothing schemes, that would be a staggering violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That is not completely impossible – respectable physicists discuss the possibility that the universe is currently stuck in a false vacuum and there exists a barrier between where we are and the true vacuum (and God help us, incidentally, if we do fall into the true vacuum).
But you need some very, very good reason – some massive mechanical barrier – that prevents things from reaching their ground states. In this case, they provide no such barrier. Indeed, their schemes for cheap energy require that it be quite easy to provoke hydrogen into its (hitherto unknown) ground state. (I mean, if they said it required colliding three black holes into each other at a precise angle, at 98% of the speed of light, you could actually maybe sort of believe it’s the kind of process that hasn’t naturally occured very much, and that’s why the ground state hasn’t generally been reached. But then they’d need a lot more than $75 million in development costs.)
OK, now we’re getting ridiculous: there is a ground state of hydrogen which has never before been found, because from the birth of the universe until now, no process or event – not star formation, fusion, novae, supernovae, neutron star formation, planetary formation, irradiation by everything from radio to gamma rays, *nothing * has been able to push almost all H atoms now on the Earth into their true ground states but mirabile dictu it turns out some relatively trivial and commonplace electrochemistry can. Uh…sure.
To put this in more plebian terms, it’s as if someone came up to you and said I have this fantastic scheme for making ridiculous amounts of money! You know how real estate in downtown Manhattan goes for fantastic sums of money? If we get 2 or 3 acres of virgin land right on 5th Avenue, and sell it – wow! will we be rich!
Er…you point out…but where would we get such land? It’s all owned already, of course. At this your friend smiles broadly. Nonsense! That’s where the real cleverness comes in. See, I have found that in fact there are 22 acres right in Manhattan that the Indians never sold to the white men, so they’ve been totally undeveloped since the early 1600s. All we need to do is give these guys I know, descendants of the original inhabitants, some beads and shells and stuff – and bob’s your uncle! What do you say? You in?
You’d be rightly skeptical, of course, that there existed unclaimed virgin land in Manhattan. It’s not that it’s impossible, literally, it’s just requires ridiculous assumptions about an extraordinarily unlikely chain of coincidences through the last 300 years of history. It’s the same way with BLP. The existence of a lower ground state for hydrogen which has not been reached in 14 billion years of natural events – but which a few schmoes with an electrochemical cell can easily reach – requires ridiculous assumptions about an incredibly unlikely chain of coincidences through the history of the universe to date.
