Perpetual motion, for real?

[Flying_Monk]

I’ve just been notified of the existence of a company called Black Light Power (www.blacklightpower.com) which claims to be working on a form of free energy. It’s not as transparent as most pseudoscience, but I’ve got only the most rudimentary understanding of physics. Can someone more educated in this field tell me if there is anything to this process at all, or is this just more fraud?

[Achernar]

First of all, I’m just warning you, whenever anyone opens a thread like this, they get a dozen posts just quoting the Second Law or something like that, which don’t address your question at all. You want to know about this specific site.

It doesn’t sound like they have a very good idea of what they’re talking about. Their theory page just breaks down into a string of relativity and quantum buzzwords before long:

The magnetic moment of a Bohr magneton, Stern Gerlach experiment, g factor, Lamb shift, resonant line width and shape, selection rules, correspondence principle, wave particle duality, excited states, reduced mass, rotational energies, and momenta, orbital and spin splitting, spin-orbital coupling, Knight shift, and spin-nuclear coupling are derived in closed form equations based on Maxwell’s equations.

It’s not clear that they’re making complete sentences, much less actual claims.

Now, on to their Process page:

BlackLight Power (the “Company”) cells generate energy through a chemical process (“BlackLight Process”) which the Company believes causes the electrons of hydrogen atoms to drop to lower orbits, thus releasing energy in excess of the energy required to start the process.

There is in principle nothing wrong with a chemical process that generates energy. This is what burning fuel is, after all. They say that they’ll de-excite Hydrogen and produce energy. But the thing is, most Hydrogen is already in its ground (lowest energy) state; it can’t be de-excited any more. They say they’ll get Hydrogen from water, but you can’t just crack open water and get excited Hydrogen out. I’m thinking there’s something more obvious than this that’s a problem, but that’s one thing I thought of.

[Achernar]

Uh-huh. I see. I started reading the paper “The Hydrogen Atom Revisited” on that site. He cites his own book as evidence that Hydrogen has states below the ground state with fraction quantum numbers.

The nonradiative state of atomic hydrogen which is historically called the “ground state” forms the basis of the boundary condition of Mills theory [16] to solve the wave equation. Mills further predicts [16] that certain atoms or ions serve as catalysts to release energy from hydrogen to produce an increased binding energy hydrogen atom called a hydrino atom having a binding energy of
Binding Energy = 13.6 eV/n[sup]2[/sup]
where
n = 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 ,…, 1/p

This, I’m afraid, sounds more like the pseudoscience I’m familiar with.

[Flying_Monk]

Well, I’ve since gone over some other info on the web about this, and I’m convinced it’s bunk, but I’m being told by the friend who showed me this site to look closer, and check out the test results. It seems to me not worth the effort; however, my friend is a highly successful and intelligent inventor who owns several companies. (For all I know, he could have given this guy some, or all, of the $25 million he’s raised)

I see that BLP was given a $75,000 grant by NASA to build a thruster, and I’ve seen hints of possible net energy gain, and there have been a few references to “unexplained processes” which warrant further testing. As I see it, he’s had 13 years and $25 million, and he hasn’t produced a single hydrino - if he did, science would be turned on its ear, and he’d win the Nobel prize. Also, he’s speculating on all these new materials with fantastic properties, with nary a clue as to how he deduces these things. Can someone tell me what unexplained things are going on here, and if there have, in fact, been any test results showing more energy coming out then going in? Could we actually discover something important from his plasma research, whether or not the hydrino exists? What, if anything, is NASA doing about further research?

[Thin_Ice]

IMHO, this type of site is run by crooks whose only business is separating gullible people from their money.

[kniz]

@Flying_Monk

Can someone tell me what unexplained things are going on here, and if there have, in fact, been any test results showing more energy coming out then going in?

When they say there is more energy produced than used that is when you run like hell

[Bongmaster]

I suspect we’ll read about free energy in a respected scientific publication long before we see it commercialized on a .com.

[UncleBeer]

Randell Mills. Heh. That guy, and he’s an MD, not a physicist, has been around for years promoting some kind of free energy scheme. Before it was hydrinos, it was something else. Check Robert Park’s book, *Voodoo Science out of your local library for the complete story on this guy and BlackLight Power. Interestingly enough, Randell Mills sued Park attempting to prevent his book from being published.

Mills “process” creates a hydrogen atom with a lowered energy state and one of the by-products of this process is the hydrino. And he thinks this is be done by lowering the “ground state” of the hydrogen atom - essentially shrinking its electron orbit. Unfortunately for Mills, the hydrogen atom is the atom that most of the basis for modern particle physics is built upon owing to its inherent simplicity. For hydrinos to exist, we’d have to toss out about 75 years worth of very successful and very well proven particle physics and quantum theory; in addition we’d have to forget everything we know about the ground state. And as a kicker, Mills theory precludes existence of the Big Bang.

All this just ain’t very likely to happen. And especially not through the the theories of an MD.

Here’s a little background about Mills and his “hydrino.”
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/blacklight_power_000522.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/blacklight_hydrinos_000523.html
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/blacklight_plasma_000523.html

[spingears]

@Flying_Monk

I’ve just been notified of the existence of a company called Black Light Power (www.blacklightpower.com) which claims to be working on a form of free energy. It’s not as transparent as most pseudoscience, but I’ve got only the most rudimentary understanding of physics. Can someone more educated in this field tell me if there is anything to this process at all, or is this just more fraud?

1. NOTHING of value.

2. Come back next year and look at their site again. If it is still up and running they are in the fund raising business, not ANY form of alternative energy.

3. There are a multitude of sites touting free energy, perpetual motion, over unity energy, etc. ad nauseum.

4. Check out this site: <http://www.electricity4free.com/>
   This character has been touting this for several years but has no real unit to even demonstrate. Changes site name, halds fund raising meetings, has a mock up to show and gets money to develop the machine. Just order one for some ridiculous price and when he gets 1,000,000 orders he will install one in your house so you can power your house, have power left over to sell to the power company and live free, electrically.

[spingears]

Check out the Gentle Wind Project on Goggle and/or dogpinle.

They will take anyones money for worthless junk health charms.

[Flying_Monk]

Can someone provide a link, or info, about any previous scam Randell Mills was involved in?

[spingears]

One example from Black Light Power, under Development/Microdistributed power/pdf document.

Pg. 3 The "plasmadynamic power converter (PDC) is being developed to convert the plasma directy into electricity.

The scam here is misdirection. It is power that creates the plasma and not vice versa.

Pg. 4 Here we are introduced to the

Wait just a minute. Jump to the bibliography. Look no further

Here he is R. Mills has his fingerprints all over the place.