Article about quasi-perpetual motion technology

200901061422

Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, claims to have invented a reactor that makes hydrogen atoms drop to an energy state below ground level, which causes them to release "100 times as much energy as you'd get by just burning the hydrogen." IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it's poppycock. Nevertheless, the company developing the technology has received $60 million in funding.

"This is scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state," says Wolfgang Ketterle, an MIT scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. "Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it's had time enough to find its ground state."

Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also a Nobel laureate, says that quantum mechanics is "consistent with just about everything we know about atomic physics, so the onus is firmly on anyone who wants to discard it to prove his case." He adds, "I don't see that [BlackLight] has got anywhere near doing this."

But turn to Randell Mills, the founder, chairman, chief executive, and president of BlackLight Power, and he'll tell you that this lower-energy hydrogen, which he calls hydrino, is very real indeed.

"We produce hydrino on demand," he tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that his team has isolated and characterized hydrino's properties using spectroscopy and has even created hydrino-rich materials it can provide for analysis.

BlackLight Power says it's developing a revolutionary energy source—and it won't let the laws of physics stand in its way