Next Big Future: Blacklight Power follow up and other claims
GoatGuy
· 1 year ago
My good fellow goats... the problem with this "technology's credibility" is manifold. I always ask the same questions of technologies that are supposed to be fundamental breakers of "known science":
* Is the technology accompanied by a long list of 'obvious Wow!' resolutions to civilisation's hard or looming problems? * Is the device been shown only to a secret enclave of investors, but not the public for fear of letting the proverbial cat out of the bag? * Is there a dark conspiracy powered by legions of conventional scientists and assorted dunces that is but the only thing standing in the way of this invention's radical change of most-everything as we know it? * Are the names, "quantum", "nano", "radical", "known science", and especially "Tesla" conjured into the conversation points? * Is the chief scientist figured largely in other areas of research where his results are considered just as if not more controversial?
And Finally...
* Is this a business proposition whose only shortcoming is a lack of funding?
Passing all of these questions - while many pieces of bonafide science do - generally points to the object of discussion being at or near the Fraud Line. I detect this with JUST the captions of the ancillary studiously prepared (but likely abstruse) articles presented above:
OPTICAL POWER BALANCE ... 1000x (one THOUSAND times) more light at a given plasma power? Well, ain't that something: the glow-discharge inside a metal-halogen discharge lamp emits over 100 lumens per watt (1,000W car-sales lot bulbs), and is 15% efficient. Theoretical maximum efficiency is 683.002 lumens/watt. So ... this technology is going to produce 1,000 times that 100 lumens per watt, or 100,000 lumens per watt, and moreover over 150 times more light than is theoretically possible? GIVE ME A BREAK. Its not.
Let's try another: "100 times the H kinetic energy..." (referring to Balmer line broadening). Now this is harder. Balmer lines do broaden with increased kinetic energy ("temperature") of plasmas. Pretty well known. It seems to me though that the disingenuity is obvious as well as devious: Run the plasma tube at much lower pressure and much higher voltage, and voila. MUCH higher temperature of the plasma. Or, vice-versa ... much higher pressure (kilobars) and again higher voltage ... and the gas-discharge Balmer lines will be markedly widened. It is the classic result for LIGHTNING BOLTS, since their plasma channel measures 'microns' for the powerful and bright return-stroke.
OK, OK. Goat is a skeptic. Well, at least the 3rd one can hold water, no? "Energy balance 100x that of combustion of [diatomic hydrogen ...] power density greater than 10 watts per cubic centimeter"
What on earth is this referring to? There's no evidence of what energies were INPUT to the aforementioned reaction in order to produce the startling anomalous results. These results are, by themselves so patently absurd so as to call into credibility the READER for entertaining the time to review the article!
In any case ...
Its time to move on.
nextbigfuture
· 1 year ago
There is no lack of funding problem. They have gotten $50 million in funding. So believe, don't believe. Feel free. We can see next year if products are made, sold and work or not.
GoatGuy
· 1 year ago
NextBig[future]:
You see my good fellow, I really do WANT to believe. From the center of my scientific soul, I hope that there are cunningly accessible degenerate states of "hydronium" or "hydrino" or whate'er its discoverers have labelled it - that in their one-time creation release capturable, tangible, macroscopic amounts of energy which may in turn be captured as energy for the masses to use.
The problem is that I don't have what all scientists in the end need to have: a reasonably accessible procedure to reproduce the results, to verify the findings, to accept the tabular degrees of freedom that purportedly embody the technology.
People argue, "but there are things being done, discovered, disputed and set aside by Big Science that no common man may even dream of funding, building and reproducing. That is the nature of Big Science. How dare you demand that the Boffins of Blacklight come up with a tangible, reproducible, economically ponderable vision of their technology. Good God, man ... this is going to power civilization itself to the next phase. You sound like a woodchuck, and worse, with a damaged cudgel!"
Well, maybe so. But I think not.
I think that there is precious little "science" that can't at least from a discovery-of-the-equations-of-state perspective be done on the lab-bench. All of thermodynamics can be done in a thimble (so said Dr. Carnot), and the vast majority of "big science" that powers todays world-wide nuclear reactors ... also happened in test tubes.
I've given a "college effort" several times at making headway through the abstruse pseudo-science articles presented by Dr. Mills. I've put up on several other forums similar responses of, "well they got buckets, bags and barrels of money ... you think a bunch of dumb bastards would just bequeath money on them if they were selling snake oil?"
And my reply remains the same: surely if the technology is actually, factually as simple as it is said to be, then it must be something that can be clearly outlined, that any one of us educated dunces can use to verify the findings. I mean, please: how hard should it be to create the hydrino, if there are over 68 "degenerae ionization states' for it.
pstudier
· 1 year ago
Randell L. Mills has been at this for years. There are a couple pages about hydrinos in Voodoo Science which is copyrighted 2001. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrino where there is some history and criticism of the concept.
glad777
· 1 year ago
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Nuff said
mvetsel
· 1 year ago
Goat,
True futurists and fans of science and technology are better served by your healthy skepticism and I wish people didn’t feel the need to circle the wagons around frauds like BLP. Six months ago, August was supposed to be the date when we would get the final word on whether or not this was real. Now we’ll have to wait until 2009.
Anyone who read the websites that I dug up from BLP in the web archive can see that a early BLP fan would have been on the edge of his seat for the better part of a decade. A couple more points for your checklist:
+ ultimate proof is always right around the corner + the story is basically unchanged year after year + highly technical documents presented to laymen that baffle knowledgeable experts + defamation lawsuits filed against skeptics
Someone like tradesports should create an outcome market to let people bet on claims that trade off people’s intense feeling of “if only this were true..”.
-Mercy
mvetsel
· 1 year ago
How much is BLP worth? Let's explore the Pascal's Wager approach to the technology that BLP (and most energy frauds) take in promising revolutionary new inventions.
Based on some very conservative calculations based on the BLP-provided unit costs, if those unit costs are accurate, BLP is worth a MINIMUM of $1.68 TRILLION just based on the saving from replacing the fossil fuel used in electricity generation in the U.S.
I'll detail my calculations, but the point of this estimate is that working BLP requires venture capitalists to be stupid and in fact very, very stupid.
Even if there is even a 10% chance of BLP functioning as advertised it should be worth $168 billion and if it's a 1 in 1000 long shot, then it's still worth $1.68 billion.
The $60 million of funding that BLP claims to have received implies a 1 in 28,000 chance of success at the level indicated on the unit cost charts.
Here are my calculations:
BLP power generation would replace all fossil fuel based power generation as fast as the new plants could be built. Currently, in the U.S. we produce 2880 billion kwh of electricity each year using coal, natural gas and petroleum products.
Conservatively using the 4.5 cents per kwh fuel cost of coal, that’s more than $130 billion of fuel savings each year. Using a 7% required rate of return, this cash flow stream is worth $1.85 trillion.
2880 billion kwh of electricity equates to 329 million kw of capacity which would cost, according to the BLP unit cost chart, $165 billion to construct. So BLP’s technology plus $165 billion of plant construction is worth $1.85 trillion. That means that if it functions as claimed, BLP’s technology is worth over $1.68 TRILLION dollars.
And that’s just the floor. All new electrical capacity would be BLP and nuclear power would be replaced with BLP as well. The US is less than 1/4 of the world’s electricity generation, so the value of BLP in the rest of the world would be trillions of dollars more.
The total fully capitalized COST of generating BLP electricity would be less than one cent per kwh. That would mean that hydrogen from electrolysis would cost the gasoline gallon equivalent of $1 which is economical even if the H2 is simply burned in a normal internal combustion engine without even bothering with a fuel cell. BLP produced H2 would replace gasoline and BLP produced electricity would replace natural gas heat.
Lest I start to sound like a believer, the scale of these claims mean that if there were anything at all to this technology, venture capitalists would be pouring billions of dollars into this venture rather than piddling along with a new release date every 6 months.
-Mercy
GoatGuy
· 1 year ago
Indeed - and thank you: the analysis is as you would admit, "off the back of a napkin", but you know, most really great technologies always "pass the napkin test" from before their inception through the research phases and finally even into production. They're just not "barely" anything. They make obvious sense.
Separately, I did take the time to read a fair amount of the 103 page paper found at the "various experimental results" hyperlink above. To quote you, "lest I start to sound like a believer" ... I too am impressed by the miasma of real science and technology words used to describe the series of tests performed in their apparently well-outfitted laboratory.
They're employing gas chromatography, X-ray techniques, gallium ion streams, calorimeters, vacuum pumps, compounds aplenty, and more. Here is the KEY fiinding in my reading: through a complex set of sample preparations, they believe they have masured samples of reactants that have generated in excess of 50 kilowatts of heat over the period of 40 minutes reaction-time, or some 250kJ of energy from a kilogram of reactants. However, their preparation techniques (including and not limited to the compounds, but their admixtures and addition of significant thermal pulses) could also easily be storing large amounts of thermal energy as allotropic crystaline systems and so on.
I'm still quite skeptical.
Oh, BTW: the best part is the first 2 pages - they're worth the read. Dr. Mills (or an associate) posits that Hydronium is Science's Missing Link between Cosmological Expansion and Dark Matter. I will say this with honesty: after I got up off the floor from laughing so hard, i was struck by the thought that should Dr. Mills' theory prove even slightly possible in the deep recesses of intergalactic space, well... then the dude is up for a Solid Gold Pen and a Nobel.
However, if his pot remains cracked ... then I think he HAS to get a handle on his cabal of marketing stretch-spinners, and let them know in no uncertain terms that getting a few minutes of 50KW out of a kilogram of highly reactive lithium-hydride and hydroxide mixtures ... does NOT a 50KW generator make. Not close, not by a nose, not by a length. A league perhaps.
All Comments
* Is the technology accompanied by a long list of 'obvious Wow!' resolutions to civilisation's hard or looming problems?
* Is the device been shown only to a secret enclave of investors, but not the public for fear of letting the proverbial cat out of the bag?
* Is there a dark conspiracy powered by legions of conventional scientists and assorted dunces that is but the only thing standing in the way of this invention's radical change of most-everything as we know it?
* Are the names, "quantum", "nano", "radical", "known science", and especially "Tesla" conjured into the conversation points?
* Is the chief scientist figured largely in other areas of research where his results are considered just as if not more controversial?
And Finally...
* Is this a business proposition whose only shortcoming is a lack of funding?
Passing all of these questions - while many pieces of bonafide science do - generally points to the object of discussion being at or near the Fraud Line. I detect this with JUST the captions of the ancillary studiously prepared (but likely abstruse) articles presented above:
OPTICAL POWER BALANCE ... 1000x (one THOUSAND times) more light at a given plasma power? Well, ain't that something: the glow-discharge inside a metal-halogen discharge lamp emits over 100 lumens per watt (1,000W car-sales lot bulbs), and is 15% efficient. Theoretical maximum efficiency is 683.002 lumens/watt. So ... this technology is going to produce 1,000 times that 100 lumens per watt, or 100,000 lumens per watt, and moreover over 150 times more light than is theoretically possible? GIVE ME A BREAK. Its not.
Let's try another: "100 times the H kinetic energy..." (referring to Balmer line broadening). Now this is harder. Balmer lines do broaden with increased kinetic energy ("temperature") of plasmas. Pretty well known. It seems to me though that the disingenuity is obvious as well as devious: Run the plasma tube at much lower pressure and much higher voltage, and voila. MUCH higher temperature of the plasma. Or, vice-versa ... much higher pressure (kilobars) and again higher voltage ... and the gas-discharge Balmer lines will be markedly widened. It is the classic result for LIGHTNING BOLTS, since their plasma channel measures 'microns' for the powerful and bright return-stroke.
OK, OK. Goat is a skeptic. Well, at least the 3rd one can hold water, no? "Energy balance 100x that of combustion of [diatomic hydrogen ...] power density greater than 10 watts per cubic centimeter"
What on earth is this referring to? There's no evidence of what energies were INPUT to the aforementioned reaction in order to produce the startling anomalous results. These results are, by themselves so patently absurd so as to call into credibility the READER for entertaining the time to review the article!
In any case ...
Its time to move on.
So believe, don't believe. Feel free.
We can see next year if products are made, sold and work or not.
You see my good fellow, I really do WANT to believe. From the center of my scientific soul, I hope that there are cunningly accessible degenerate states of "hydronium" or "hydrino" or whate'er its discoverers have labelled it - that in their one-time creation release capturable, tangible, macroscopic amounts of energy which may in turn be captured as energy for the masses to use.
The problem is that I don't have what all scientists in the end need to have: a reasonably accessible procedure to reproduce the results, to verify the findings, to accept the tabular degrees of freedom that purportedly embody the technology.
People argue, "but there are things being done, discovered, disputed and set aside by Big Science that no common man may even dream of funding, building and reproducing. That is the nature of Big Science. How dare you demand that the Boffins of Blacklight come up with a tangible, reproducible, economically ponderable vision of their technology. Good God, man ... this is going to power civilization itself to the next phase. You sound like a woodchuck, and worse, with a damaged cudgel!"
Well, maybe so. But I think not.
I think that there is precious little "science" that can't at least from a discovery-of-the-equations-of-state perspective be done on the lab-bench. All of thermodynamics can be done in a thimble (so said Dr. Carnot), and the vast majority of "big science" that powers todays world-wide nuclear reactors ... also happened in test tubes.
I've given a "college effort" several times at making headway through the abstruse pseudo-science articles presented by Dr. Mills. I've put up on several other forums similar responses of, "well they got buckets, bags and barrels of money ... you think a bunch of dumb bastards would just bequeath money on them if they were selling snake oil?"
And my reply remains the same: surely if the technology is actually, factually as simple as it is said to be, then it must be something that can be clearly outlined, that any one of us educated dunces can use to verify the findings. I mean, please: how hard should it be to create the hydrino, if there are over 68 "degenerae ionization states' for it.
2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Nuff said
True futurists and fans of science and technology are better served by your healthy skepticism and I wish people didn’t feel the need to circle the wagons around frauds like BLP. Six months ago, August was supposed to be the date when we would get the final word on whether or not this was real. Now we’ll have to wait until 2009.
Anyone who read the websites that I dug up from BLP in the web archive can see that a early BLP fan would have been on the edge of his seat for the better part of a decade. A couple more points for your checklist:
+ ultimate proof is always right around the corner
+ the story is basically unchanged year after year
+ highly technical documents presented to laymen that baffle knowledgeable experts
+ defamation lawsuits filed against skeptics
Someone like tradesports should create an outcome market to let people bet on claims that trade off people’s intense feeling of “if only this were true..”.
-Mercy
Based on some very conservative calculations based on the BLP-provided unit costs, if those unit costs are accurate, BLP is worth a MINIMUM of $1.68 TRILLION just based on the saving from replacing the fossil fuel used in electricity generation in the U.S.
I'll detail my calculations, but the point of this estimate is that working BLP requires venture capitalists to be stupid and in fact very, very stupid.
Even if there is even a 10% chance of BLP functioning as advertised it should be worth $168 billion and if it's a 1 in 1000 long shot, then it's still worth $1.68 billion.
The $60 million of funding that BLP claims to have received implies a 1 in 28,000 chance of success at the level indicated on the unit cost charts.
Here are my calculations:
BLP power generation would replace all fossil fuel based power generation as fast as the new plants could be built. Currently, in the U.S. we produce 2880 billion kwh of electricity each year using coal, natural gas and petroleum products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_...
Conservatively using the 4.5 cents per kwh fuel cost of coal, that’s more than $130 billion of fuel savings each year. Using a 7% required rate of return, this cash flow stream is worth $1.85 trillion.
2880 billion kwh of electricity equates to 329 million kw of capacity which would cost, according to the BLP unit cost chart, $165 billion to construct. So BLP’s technology plus $165 billion of plant construction is worth $1.85 trillion. That means that if it functions as claimed, BLP’s technology is worth over $1.68 TRILLION dollars.
And that’s just the floor. All new electrical capacity would be BLP and nuclear power would be replaced with BLP as well. The US is less than 1/4 of the world’s electricity generation, so the value of BLP in the rest of the world would be trillions of dollars more.
The total fully capitalized COST of generating BLP electricity would be less than one cent per kwh. That would mean that hydrogen from electrolysis would cost the gasoline gallon equivalent of $1 which is economical even if the H2 is simply burned in a normal internal combustion engine without even bothering with a fuel cell. BLP produced H2 would replace gasoline and BLP produced electricity would replace natural gas heat.
Lest I start to sound like a believer, the scale of these claims mean that if there were anything at all to this technology, venture capitalists would be pouring billions of dollars into this venture rather than piddling along with a new release date every 6 months.
-Mercy
Separately, I did take the time to read a fair amount of the 103 page paper found at the "various experimental results" hyperlink above. To quote you, "lest I start to sound like a believer" ... I too am impressed by the miasma of real science and technology words used to describe the series of tests performed in their apparently well-outfitted laboratory.
They're employing gas chromatography, X-ray techniques, gallium ion streams, calorimeters, vacuum pumps, compounds aplenty, and more. Here is the KEY fiinding in my reading: through a complex set of sample preparations, they believe they have masured samples of reactants that have generated in excess of 50 kilowatts of heat over the period of 40 minutes reaction-time, or some 250kJ of energy from a kilogram of reactants. However, their preparation techniques (including and not limited to the compounds, but their admixtures and addition of significant thermal pulses) could also easily be storing large amounts of thermal energy as allotropic crystaline systems and so on.
I'm still quite skeptical.
Oh, BTW: the best part is the first 2 pages - they're worth the read. Dr. Mills (or an associate) posits that Hydronium is Science's Missing Link between Cosmological Expansion and Dark Matter. I will say this with honesty: after I got up off the floor from laughing so hard, i was struck by the thought that should Dr. Mills' theory prove even slightly possible in the deep recesses of intergalactic space, well... then the dude is up for a Solid Gold Pen and a Nobel.
However, if his pot remains cracked ... then I think he HAS to get a handle on his cabal of marketing stretch-spinners, and let them know in no uncertain terms that getting a few minutes of 50KW out of a kilogram of highly reactive lithium-hydride and hydroxide mixtures ... does NOT a 50KW generator make. Not close, not by a nose, not by a length. A league perhaps.