There’s One Thing That’s Perpetual
Credulous media will apparently never run out.
Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source
It’s difficult to pay attention to these claims, because scientific history is littered with ambitious, revolutionary theories that turned out to be groundless. But Blacklight is an interesting case. Its “hydrino” theory isn’t put forth by a single crackpot; instead, the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists who would presumably rebel if the idea was totally false.
No, not really. Creationism, for example, has a few credentialed scientists among its ranks. Pons and Fleischmann really thought they had fusion. Scientists in any field will cover a spectrum — there will always be some on the fringe. A lot of outlandish “theories” have the backing of somebody with a degree. That’s not the right metric for measurement.
As I noted in May, it would be odd, if Blacklight were a complete sham, for Mills to place himself in an end game in which he would be definitively proven wrong within just a year or two. So there does seem to be something deeper here.
As with the above, this isn’t the right way to look at it. There are numerous free-energy advocates out there, convinced they are right, with a working model just around the corner (or so they claim), or gee, it was working yesterday, right before I was going to show it off. Remember Steorn?
Proof here is a working model, producing energy. I’m not holding my breath.
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One of my students did a report on these guys – they are pretty much crazy.
With simple chemical free energy ideas like this you can fairly easily find flaws in it. “if water is fuel, why aren’t the oceans explosive?” “Are these hydrinos you make dangerous?”
It’s the zero point energy claims that cause the problems because the cosmologists are vague enough on several points that you can’t outright say that getting energy from space is impossible.
Hydrino Theory: just around the corner from free energy and overturning quantum mechanics since 1999!
To nick a phrase from Brad DeLong, “Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?”
“the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists”
Do they mean top notch physicists, or just unknown people with actual letters after their names? How many Nobel laureates have signed up for distributorships?
Keep in mind there are even one or two Nobel laureates who have fringe or crackpot leanings…
A former workmate, who seemed quite sensible at the time and probably is, bought into what seem to be crank energy company Steorn. This from an email he sent;
The worst thing about it is that their limited understanding of physics is detracting from the fact that they have developed a genuine method of extracting, albeit tiny quantities of energy from the earth’s magnetic field.
The core error they make is in the phrase “…and back to the same point”. What actually seems to happen is that the apparatus moves through the earth’s magnetic field as the planet rotates and so converts the flux through the loop into energy.
It seems from their site that they realise that the technology is not really useful and prefer to try the pyramid-selling-based-on-credulity model.
“What actually seems to happen is that the apparatus moves through the earth’s magnetic field as the planet rotates and so converts the flux through the loop into energy.”
Surely it ought to be possible, then, to do this with a far simpler mechanism?