Brilliant Light Power

Brilliant Light Power, Inc.
Founded HydroCatalysis Inc.[1] in 1991.[2]
Founder Randell L. Mills
Headquarters 493 Old Trenton Rd.
Cranbury Township, New Jersey, USA
Number of employees
 20 fulltime, 14 consultants[3]
Subsidiaries "Millsian, Inc.". 
Website BrilliantLightPower.com

Brilliant Light Power, Inc. (BLP), formerly BlackLight Power, Inc. of Cranbury, New Jersey is a company founded by Randell L. Mills, who claims to have discovered a new energy source. The purported energy source is based on Mills' assertion that the electron in a hydrogen atom can drop below the lowest energy state known as the ground state. Mills calls these hypothetical hydrogen atoms that are in an energy state below ground level, "hydrinos".[1] Mills self-published a closely related book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics and has co-authored articles on claimed hydrino-related phenomena.[4][5]

Critics say it lacks corroborating scientific evidence, and is a relic of cold fusion. Critical analysis of the claims have been published in the peer reviewed journals Physics Letters A, New Journal of Physics, Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. These works note that the proposed theory is inconsistent with quantum mechanics, and that the proposed hydrino states are unphysical and incompatible with key equations that have been experimentally verified many times.

In 1999, the Nobel prize winning physicist Philip Warren Anderson said he is "sure that it's a fraud",[6] and in the same year another Nobel prize winning physicist, Steven Chu, called it "extremely unlikely".[7] In 2009, IEEE Spectrum magazine characterized it as a "loser" technology because "[m]ost experts don't believe such lower states exist, and they say the experiments don't present convincing evidence" and mentioned that Wolfgang Ketterle had said the claims are "nonsense".[8] BLP has announced several times that it was about to deliver commercial products based on Mill's theories but has not delivered a working product.[8]

Company

The company, originally called HydroCatalysis Inc.[1] was founded in 1991 by Randell Mills [2] who claimed to have discovered a power source that "represents a boundless form of new primary energy" and that will "replace all forms of fuel in the world,"[9]

In 2008 Mills said that his cell stacks could provide power for long-range electric vehicles,[10] and that this electricity would cost less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour.[11]

BLP holds several patents based on graphic modelling software.[12]

Randell Mills

Randell Mills, the founder and CEO of Brilliant Light Power, received a degree in Chemistry from Franklin & Marshall College in 1982.[6] and graduated with a medical degree from Harvard Medical School.[2]

Funding

By December 1999, BLP raised more than $25 million from about 150 investors.[2][13] By January 2006, BLP funding exceeded $60 million.[10][14][15][16] In December 2013 BLP was one of 54 applicants to receive ~$1.1M grant from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.[17]

Among the investors are PacifiCorp, Conectiv, retired executives from Morgan Stanley[13] and several BLP board members like Shelby Brewer who was the top nuclear official for the Reagan Administration and Chief Executive Officer of ABB-Combustion Engineering Nuclear Power[18][19] and former board member Michael H. Jordan (1936 – 2010), who was Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo Worldwide Foods, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, CBS Corporation and Electronic Data Systems.[18]

In 2008, Robert L. Park wrote that BLP has benefited from wealthy investors who allocate a proportion of their funds to risky ventures with a potentially huge upside, but that in the case of BLP since the science underlying the offering was "just wrong" the investment risk was, in Park's view, "infinite".[20]

Claims

Mills first announced his hydrino state hypothesis on April 25, 1991, in a press conference in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as an explanation for the cold fusion phenomena that had been reported in 1989. According to Mills, no fusion was actually happening in the cells, and all the effects would be caused by shrinkage of hydrogen atoms as they fell to a state below the ground state. Mills added that the increased proximity between the atoms would cause them to fuse sporadically, and some of those atoms would be deuterium atoms (a hydrogen atom with one extra neutron), which would explain why there were occasional readings of neutrons. No experimental evidence was offered by Mills at the time to support his claims which violate accepted nuclear physics.[1][21][22][23] In a 2007 review of cold fusion research, researcher Edmund Storms put forward the hydrino model as a possible explanation for cold fusion.[24]

Experimental results

NASA

In 1996 NASA released a report describing experiments using a BLP electrolytic cell. Although not recreating the large heat gains reported for the cell by BLP, unexplained power gains ranging from 1.06 to 1.68 of the input power were reported, which, whilst "...admit[ing] the existence of an unusual source of heat with the cell...falls far short of being compelling". The authors went on to propose the recombination of hydrogen and oxygen as a possible explanation of the anomalous results.[25]

Rowan University

Around 2002 the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) granted a Phase I grant to Anthony Marchese, a mechanical engineer at Rowan University, to study a possible rocket propulsion that would use hydrinos.[26]

In 2002, Rowan University's Anthony Marchese said that whilst "agnostic about the existence of hydrinos", he was quite confident that there was no fraud involved with BLP and although his NIAC grant was criticised by Park, Marchese said "for me to not continue with this study would be unethical to the scientific community. The only reason not to pursue this would be because of being afraid of being bullied."[26]

European Physical Journal D

In 2005 Šišović and others published a paper describing experimental data and analysis of Mills' claim that a resonant transfer model (RTM) explains the excessive Doppler broadening of the Hα line. Šišović concluded that: "The detected large excessive broadening in pure hydrogen and in Ne–H2 mixture is in agreement with CM [Collision Model] and other experimental results" and that "these results can't be explained by RTM". The collision model explanation for excessive broadening of the Hα line is based on established physics.[27]

Criticism

Publications

New Journal of Physics

In 2005, Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency, publishing in the New Journal of Physics, wrote that Mills' description of quantum mechanics is "inconsistent and has several serious deficiencies", and that there is "no theoretical support of the hydrino hypothesis". Rathke said it would be helpful if Mills' experimental results could be independently replicated, and suggested that any evidence produced should be reconsidered in the context of a conventional physical explanation.[28] One inconsistency of Mills' CQM with quantum mechanics regards its inability to be reconciled with the probability density function in quantum mechanics. Rathke stated, "However, while solutions of the Schrödinger equation with n<1 indeed exist, they are not square integrable. This violates not only an axiom of quantum mechanics, but in practical terms prohibits that these solutions can in any way describe the probability density of a particle."[28]

Journal of Applied Physics

In 2005, the Journal of Applied Physics published a critique by A.V. Phelps of the 2004 article, "Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in resonant transfer plasmas" by J. Phillips, R. Mills and X. Chen.[29] Phelps criticized both the calorimetric techniques and the underlying theory described in the Phillips/Mills/Chen article. The journal also published a response to Phelps' critique on the same day.[30]

Physics Letters A

In 2006, a paper published in Physics Letters A, concluded that Mills' theoretical hydrino states are unphysical. For the hydrino states, the binding strength increases as the strength of the electric potential decreases, with maximum binding strength when the potential has disappeared completely. The author Norman Dombey remarked "We could call these anomalous states "homeopathic" states because the smaller the coupling, the larger the effect." The model also assumes that the nuclear charge distribution is a point rather than having an arbitrarily small non-zero radius. It also lacks an analogous solution in the Schrödinger equation, which governs non-relativistic systems. Dombey concluded: "We suggest that outside of science fiction this is sufficient reason to disregard them."[31] From a suggestion in Dombey's paper, further work by Antonio Di Castro has shown that states below the ground state, as described in Mills' work, are incompatible with the Schrödinger, Klein–Gordon and Dirac equations, key equations in the study of quantum systems.[32]

Journal of Physics D

In 2008, the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics published an article by Hans-Joachim Kunze, professor emeritus at the Institute for Experimental Physics, Ruhr University Bochum,[33] critical of the 2003 paper authored by R. Mills and P. Ray, Extreme ultraviolet spectroscopy of helium–hydrogen. The abstract of the article is: "It is suggested that spectral lines, on which the fiction of fractional principal quantum numbers in the hydrogen atom is based, are nothing else but artefacts." Kunze stated that it was impossible to detect the novel lines below 30 nm reported by Mills and Ray because the equipment they used did not have the capability to detect them as per the manufacturer and as per "every book on vacuum-UV spectroscopy" and "therefore the observed lines must be artefacts". Kunze also stated that: "The enormous spectral widths of the novel lines point to artefacts, too."[34]

IEEE Spectrum

In 2009, IEEE Spectrum magazine criticized BLP, concluding that "Most experts don't believe such lower states exist, and they say the experiments don't present convincing evidence." It also pointed out that BLP has made similar claims before, announcing that it was on the brink of commercializing its revolutionary technology but failing to deliver.[8]

Opinions

Robert L. Park

Since 1999 Robert L. Park, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Maryland and a notable skeptic, has been particularly critical of BLP. In 2008 Park wrote:

"BlackLight Power (BLP), founded 17 years ago as HydroCatalysis, announced last week that the company had successfully tested a prototype power system that would generate 50 KW of thermal power. BLP anticipates delivery of the new power system in 12 to 18 months. The BLP process,[35] discovered by Randy Mills, is said to coax hydrogen atoms into a "state below the ground state", called the "hydrino." There is no independent scientific confirmation of the hydrino, and BLP has a patent problem. So they have nothing to sell but bull shit. The company is therefore dependent on investors with deep pockets and shallow brains." – Park[36]

Steven Chu

In 1999, Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1997, said "it's extremely unlikely that this is real, and I feel sorry for the funders, the people who are backing this".[7]

Phillip Anderson

In 1999, Princeton University's physics Nobel laureate Phillip Anderson said of it, "If you could fuck around with the hydrogen atom, you could fuck around with the energy process in the sun. You could fuck around with life itself." "Everything we know about everything would be a bunch of nonsense. That's why I'm so sure that it's a fraud."[6]

Wolfgang Ketterle

Wolfgang Ketterle, a professor of physics at MIT, said BLP's claims are "nonsense" and that "there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state".[8]

Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist based at City University of New York, adds that "the only law that this business with Mills is proving is that a fool and his money are easily parted."[6] and that "There's a sucker born every minute."[7]

Peter Zimmerman

While Peter Zimmerman was chief arms-control scientist at the State Department, he stated that his department and the Patent Office "have fought back with success" against "pseudoscientists" and he railed against, among other things, the inventors of "hydrinos."[37]

Legal threats to physicists

In 2000, a law firm engaged by BLP sent letters to four prominent physicists asking them to stop making what it called "defamatory comments". The physicists had been quoted in the Village Voice, Dow Jones Newswire and other publications as dismissing BLP's claims on the basis that they violated the laws of physics. In response, one of the physicists, Robert L. Park of the American Physical Society, said that if BLP sued, he was confident the scientific community would lend its support and that the court would side with the physicists.[38] Park later wrote that a number of the recipients of the letter, who had "responded honestly to questions from the media", had since fallen silent. Scientists, Park wrote, are easy to intimidate since they are not rich enough to risk costly legal actions.[20]

Patent issues

A 2000 patent based on its hydrino-related technology[39][40] was later withdrawn by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) due to contradictions with known physics laws and other concerns about the viability of the described processes, citing Park and others.[37]

A column by Robert L. Park[37][41] and an outside query by an unknown person[42] prompted Group Director Esther Kepplinger of the USPTO to review this new patent herself. Kepplinger said that her "main concern was the proposition that the applicant was claiming the electron going to a lower orbital in a fashion that I knew was contrary to the known laws of physics and chemistry", and that the patent appeared to involve cold fusion and perpetual motion.[41] Kepplinger contacted another Director, Robert Spar, who also expressed doubts on the patentability of the patent application. This caused the USPTO to withdraw from issue the patent application before it was granted and re-open it for review, and to withdraw four related applications, including one for a hydrino power plant.[37]

USPTO court case

BLP filed suit in the US District Court of Columbia, saying that withdrawal of the application after the company had paid the fee was contrary to law. In 2002, the District Court concluded that the USPTO was acting inside the limits of its authority in withdrawing a patent over whose validity it had doubts, and later that year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ratified this decision.[41][42][43][44] Applications were rejected by the UK patent office for similar reasons.[41][45][46][47][48] The European Patent Office (EPO) rejected a similar BLP patent application due to lack of clarity on how the process worked. Reexamination of this European patent is pending.[41] Park wrote:

"Unlike most schemes for free energy, the hydrino process of Randy Mills is not without ample theory.[49] Mills has written a 1000 page tome, entitled, "The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics", that takes the reader all the way from hydrinos to antigravity.[50] Fortunately, Aaron Barth [...] has taken upon himself to look through it, checking for accuracy. Barth is a post doctoral researcher at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and holds a PhD in Astronomy, 1998, from UC Berkeley. What he found initially were mathematical blunders and unjustified assumptions. To his surprise, however, portions of the book seemed well organized. These, it now turns out, were lifted verbatim from various texts. This has been the object of a great deal of discussion from Mills' Hydrino Study Group. "Mills seems not to understand what the fuss is all about." – Park[51]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Robert L. Park (April 26, 1991). "What's New Friday, 26 April 1991 Washington, DC". and Robert L. Park (October 31, 2008). "What's New Friday, October 31, 2008".
  2. 1 2 3 4 Jacqueline A. Newmyer (May 17, 2000). "Academics Question The Science Behind BlackLight Power, Inc.". Harvard Crimson. Retrieved February 10, 2009.
  3. ↑ Template:Cite webhttp://brilliantlightpower.com/facilities/
  4. ↑ Mills, Randell L. (August 2011). "The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, August 2011 ed." (DjVu). BlackLight Power. Retrieved 2016-01-18. (Self-published)
  5. ↑ "Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head". The Guardian. 4 Nov 2005.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Erik Baard (December 21, 1999). "Quantum Leap: Dr. Randell Mills says he can change the face of physics. The Scientific Establishment thinks he's nuts.". The Village Voice. Retrieved February 10, 2009.
  7. 1 2 3 Erik Baard (October 6, 1999). "Researcher Claims Power Tech That Defies Quantum Theory". Dow Jones NewsWires.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Erico Guizzo (January 2009). "Winners & Losers 2009—Loser, Power & Energy: Hot or not? Blacklight Power says it's developing a revolutionary energy source—and it won't let the laws of physics stand in its way". IEEE Spectrum 46 (1). p. 36. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2009.4734311.
  9. ↑ Gerard Wynn (September 3, 2000). "Sweet dreams are made of geoengineering". Reuters. Retrieved October 15, 2009.
  10. 1 2 Morrison, Chris (October 21, 2008). "Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source". The New York Times.
  11. ↑ Mina Kimes (July 29, 2008). "BlackLight's physics-defying promise: Cheap power from water". CNNMoney.com
  12. ↑ Chris Morrison (May 30, 2008). "Blacklight Power claims nearly-free energy from water – is this for real?". VentureBeat. US 7188033US 7689367
  13. 1 2 Erik Baard (January 22, 2008). "Quantum Leap".
  14. ↑ http://professional.venturewire.com/story.asp?sid=NIMHPJLMMQ (dead link)
  15. ↑ "Blacklight Power gets $50M; but is it profound, or utter nonsense?". VentureBeat.
  16. ↑ "SiliconBeat: Blacklight Power gets $50M; but is it profound, or utter nonsense?".
  17. ↑ "20 Middlesex companies receive part of $60 million state grant". NJ.com.
  18. 1 2 "BlackLight Power lands first license agreement for electricity from ... water?". VentureBeat.
  19. ↑ "Management".
  20. 1 2 Park RL (2008). "Fraud in Science". Social Research: An International Quarterly 75 (4): 1135–1150. Companies frequently designate a percentage of these funds for investment in high-risk, high-payoff startups. Most will fail, but it is a hedge against technological obsolescence. Mills had just what they were looking for—except the risk was infinite.
  21. ↑ E. Sheldon (September–October 2008). "An overview of almost 20 years' research on cold fusion". Contemporary Physics 49 (5): 375–378. Bibcode:2008ConPh..49..375S. doi:10.1080/00107510802465229. [Mill's paper], which involves a nowadays widely discredited 'hydrino' model that was proposed in 1991 to account for the excess heat observations in 'cold fusion' studies. (...) [the notion that there are electron orbital states that are less energetic than the ground state], is contrary to conventional quantum principles and unacceptable to me or to the general theoretical-physics community.
  22. ↑ Robert L. Park (2002). Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud (illustrated, reprint ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 133–135. ISBN 978-0-19-860443-3.
  23. ↑ William J. Broad (April 26, 1991). "2 Teams Put New Life in 'Cold' Fusion Theory". The New York Times.
  24. ↑ Storms, Edmund (2007). Science of low energy nuclear reaction: a comprehensive compilation of evidence and explanations. Singapore: World Scientific. p. 184. ISBN 981-270-620-8.
  25. ↑ Niedra, Janis M.; Myers, Ira T.; Fralick, Gustave C.; Baldwin, Richard S. (February 1996). "Replication of the apparent excess heat effect in light water-potassium carbonate-nickel-electrolytic cell" (PDF). OSTI 236808.
  26. 1 2 Erik Baard (January 21, 2008). "Eureka?".
  27. ↑ Šišović, N. M.; Majstorović, G. Lj.; Konjević, N. (January 4, 2005). "Excessive hydrogen and deuterium Balmer lines broadening in a hollow cathode glow discharges". European Physical Journal D 32 (3): 347–354. Bibcode:2005EPJD...32..347S. doi:10.1140/epjd/e2004-00192-1.
  28. 1 2 Rathke A (2005). "A critical analysis of the hydrino model". New Journal of Physics 7 (127). doi:10.1088/1367-2630/7/1/127.
  29. ↑ Phelps, A.V. (October 2, 2005). "Comment on 'Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in resonant transfer plasmas'". Journal of Applied Physics. doi:10.1063/1.2010616.
  30. ↑ Phillips, Jonathan (October 2, 2005). "Response to "Comment on 'Water bath calorimetric study of excess heat generation in resonant transfer plasmas'". Journal of Applied Physics. doi:10.1063/1.2010617.
  31. ↑ Dombey, Norman (August 8, 2006). "The hydrino and other unlikely states". Physics Letters A 360: 62. arXiv:physics/0608095. Bibcode:2006PhLA..360...62D. doi:10.1016/j.physleta.2006.07.069.
  32. ↑ de Castro, Antonio S. (April 4, 2007). "Orthogonality criterion for banishing hydrino states from standard quantum mechanics". Physics Letters A 369 (5–6): 380. arXiv:0704.0631. Bibcode:2007PhLA..369..380D. doi:10.1016/j.physleta.2007.05.006.
  33. ↑ "Ruhr-Universität Bochum information page on Hans-Joachim Kunze". Ruhr-Universität. Retrieved 2011-02-20.
  34. ↑ Kunze, H-J (2008). "On the spectroscopic measurements used to support the postulate of states with fractional principal quantum numbers in hydrogen". J Phys D: Appl. Phys 41 (10): 108001. Bibcode:2008JPhD...41j8001K. doi:10.1088/0022-3727/41/10/108001.
  35. ↑ "What's New by Bob Park - Friday, April 26, 1991".
  36. ↑ Park, Bob (June 6, 2008). "Hydrinos: How long can a really dumb idea survive?". What's New?. University of Maryland. Retrieved 2010-12-04.
  37. 1 2 3 4 Erik Baard (April 25, 2000). "The Empire Strikes Back. Alternative-Energy Scientist Fights to Save Patent". Village Voice
  38. ↑ Reichhardt T (2000). "New form of hydrogen power provokes scepticism". Nature 404 (6775): 218. doi:10.1038/35005254. A law firm representing the energy company BlackLight Power, Inc. of Cranbury, New Jersey, sent letters earlier this month to Nobel laureate Philip Anderson of Princeton University, Michio Kaku of the City University of New York, Paul Grant of the non-profit energy agency EPRI and Robert L. Park, of the American Physical Society ... (subscription required)
  39. ↑ US 6024935 "Lower-energy hydrogen methods and structures"
  40. ↑ US 6024935, 6,024,935, Lower-energy hydrogen methods and structures, February 15, 2000. Retrieved February 11, 2011
  41. 1 2 3 4 5 Rimmer, Matthew (2011). "Patenting free energy: the BlackLight litigation and the hydrogen economy". Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 6 (6): 374. doi:10.1093/jiplp/jpr010
  42. 1 2 Patent nonsense: court denies BlackLight Power appeal, What's New, Robert Park, September 6, 2002
  43. ↑ United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. "Blacklight Power, Inc. v. James E. Rogan".
  44. ↑ Brendan Coffey (May 15, 2000). "Follow-Through. Weird Science". Forbes.
  45. ↑ UK-IPO decisions "O/114/08". and "O/076/08".
  46. ↑ Blacklight Power Inc v Comptroller-General of Patents [2008] EWHC 2763 (Patents) (18 November 2008)
  47. ↑ Gale R Peterson, Derrick A Pizarro, Practising Law Institute (2003). 2003 Federal Circuit Yearbook: Patent Law Developments in the Federal Circuit. Practising Law Institute. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-87224-443-6.
  48. ↑ "UK-IPO decision O/170/09".
  49. ↑ "What's New by Bob Park - Friday, January 8, 1999".
  50. ↑ "What's New by Bob Park - Friday, May 9, 1997".
  51. ↑ Park, Bob (October 27, 2000). "Blackout: Where do ideas like these come from?". University of Maryland. Retrieved 2009-03-02.

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