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Dow Jones NewsWires (October 6, 1999) ~
"Researcher Claims Power Tech That Defies Quantum Theory"

By Erik Baard (NY) -- A researcher based in New Jersey is presenting to a gathering of chemists in Ontario, Calif., Wednesday the science that
he says will underpin a multi-billion dollar energy and materials company.

The catch is that his theory - that hydrogen atoms can be shrunk in a stable form - is an impossibility in the established understanding of quantum physics. Still, Dr. Randell Mills, a Harvard University-trained medical doctor who has done postgraduate studies in physics and chemistry, isn't going it alone. His start-up, BlackLight Power Inc. of Cranbury, New Jersey, has received support and advice from utilities Conectiv (CIV) and PacifiCorp (PPW) and from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. (MWD). Other major companies are waiting in the wings, Dr. Mills claimed.

"We have stayed supportive of this in the face of fairly significant scientists saying it can't be," a senior executive with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who asked that he not be identified, told Dow Jones Newswires. Pending further verification and commercial commitments, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter plans to usher BlackLight Power to an initial public offering within two years, the executive said. The investment bank will be an underwriter and hasn't put its own money into the start-up, the executive said, but another source close to the situation said Morgan Stanley Dean Witter had made an overture to that end.

Dr. Mills claimed the process of transforming hydrogen atoms into smaller "hydrinos" by chemical catalysis will provide "a virtually unlimited supply of energy" through distributed power turbines. The hydrinos themselves combine with other elements, he said, to make compounds that could be the basis for batteries to power cars 1,000 miles at highway speeds before recharging; a plastic that conducts electricity and shares magnetic qualities with iron; and super-strong coatings, among other things. There could be "potentially thousands, if not millions" of novel compounds, he said. He also said that compounds such as the ones BlackLight Power is creating account for the more than 90% of the mass of the universe that scientists say is so far unobservable.

Dr. Mills hasn't made acceptance easy for himself or his sponsors by claiming he has found the holy grail of a grand unified theory of classical quantum mechanics and that the effect of his work on humanity will be "bigger than fire." Indeed, Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford University, said in September "it's extremely unlikely that this is real, and I feel sorry for the funders, the people who are backing this." Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at City College of New York cited another time-honored law that might apply to BlackLight Power investors: "There's a sucker born every minute."

The American Chemical Society forum is the first open peer review of BlackLight Power's findings, while mainstream quantum mechanics, scientists point out, has evolved from decades of tests and analysis. BlackLight Power has sent its work out for numerous tests at independent laboratories over the past several years and has seen positive results, Dr. Mills said. Conectiv is "really on the optimistic side," albeit "cautiously" so, said David Blake, Conectiv vice president and BlackLight Power board member. "It's getting more and more difficult to argue with the results Dr. Mills is presenting and the validations he is starting to accrue," Blake said. Both Dr. Mills and Conectiv's Blake say "two major corporations" are currently testing crystals provided by the labs, but they declined to name them.

"These folks are spending their time and energy, and the money it takes to pay technical people, on this. You don't do that unless you've got some
inclination that you'd better look at this," Blake said. But are Conectiv and PacifiCorp making a "Hail Mary pass" in a once stolid industry thrown
into turmoil by deregulation? "Utilities...especially on the second tier, like Conectiv and PacifiCorp, are really looking for edges because they don't have the size and scope" of mega-utilities that are forming through mergers all around them, said Robert Rubin, a utilities analyst with Bear Sterns Cos. in New York. Shareholders will forgive managers for making a few odd bets because "the payoff could be huge," Rubin said. Still, "there's a difference between investing $2.5 million and $250 million".

"Randy has had no trouble raising the funds he needs," the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter executive said.

Dr. Mills confirmed that the company had $10 million, largely from the two utilities, and equipment and property bringing its capital up to about
$30 million. BlackLight Power will present about 10 compounds to the American Chemical Society and "five papers that give explicit details and
is absolutely reproducible," Dr. Mills said. "I have a unified field theory that's absolutely testable at every stage and on every item."

"Thank God we're getting our day in court," Dr. Mills said. Also speaking at the meeting about the reported hydrogen energy release, in the form of
visible and ultra-violet light, is Dr. Johannes Conrads, who retired last week as the director of the Institute for Low Temperature Plasma Physics
at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany.

The BlackLight Power research done at the institute was funded by the company, but "my research was completely independent," said Dr. Conrads,
who has studied plasma since 1959 and has worked for NASA and taught at Princeton University. Dr. Conrads has flown to the society's meeting in
California to report that he's seen "a few astonishing things" from the hydrino process, he said. "Something from the Mills cell is releasing
energy, and remarkably high energy, that is clear," Dr. Conrads said. Equally compelling is that energy in the Mills cell decays at a rate
independent of the removal of outside electricity, and the reaction works only with BlackLight Power's catalyst, he said. But Dr. Conrads stops
short of vindicating the hydrino theory.

"None of my experiments so far is falsifying Randy's theory, but unfortunately none of my experiments is verifying it, either," Dr. Conrads said. Dr. Conrads said he's taking his time to examine Dr. Mills' theory because "this is not for sensation. I am an old professor in physics." Dr. Conrad, who emphasized his lack of credentials as a materials scientist, said he has sought Dr. Mill's permission to invite peers at DaimlerChrysler AG (DCX) to examine the hydrino crystals. Dr. Conrads parts with Dr. Mills somewhat by standing with traditional quantum mechanics as it applies to the ground state that the Mills theory claims to breach. But Dr. Conrads says he could see Dr. Mills work as a chemical approach to the new science of non-ideal plasmas. This unusual plasma is composed of charged particles at low temperatures and as densely packed as a solid, he said. Indications are that in such an environment, conventional quantum rules might not apply, he said. With more sensitive equipment, however, he expects to find stronger evidence for "fractional" hydrogen, he said.

"Everyone was telling us that heat was too nebulous," Dr. Mills said. To put his work on more solid ground, he manufactured hydrino-based crystals
in mass, he said. "The hydride ion cracked the nut, right there, that did it," he said. BlackLight Power's laboratory cabinets are stacked with vials of crystals of varied colors and forms. Other scientists have been supportive. On the BlackLight Power board sits Dr. Shelby Brewer, a nuclear engineer and physicist who is also the former chief executive of ABB Combustion Engineering and an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Energy from 1981 to 1984. Dr. Melvin H. Miles, an electro-chemist researching batteries at the U.S. Navy facility in China Lake, Calif., said the BlackLight crystals put Dr. Mills "way ahead of cold fusion in that he has a tangible product to show people."

"Randy Mills impressed me that he may also be brilliant. He talks off the top of his head in a way that other scientists can't. But that doesn't mean he's right. I think his results are right, but doesn't mean his theory is right," Miles said.

Hydrogen result causes controversy
5 August 2005

When is the ground state of a hydrogen atom not the ground state? When it is a "hydrino" state, according to Randy Mills and co-workers at BlackLight Power, a company based in Cranbury, New Jersey. In a series of papers Mills and co-workers have argued that the results of a variety of experiments on hydrogen plasmas can only be explained by the existence of a new state in which the electron has less energy than the n=1 ground state. Mills argues that the hydrino state could be used as a new source of energy -- a claim that has led to a predictably negative response from other researchers -- and may even have some connection to the problem of "dark" matter. Now two theoretical physicists in Europe have joined the debate, with one opposing the hydrino hypothesis and the other supporting it.

Hydrogen is the simplest of all the atoms, containing just an electron and a proton. It normally takes 13.6 eV of energy to separate the electron and proton when the atom is in the ground state. Similarly, if an electron and proton combine to form a hydrogen atom in the ground state, 13.6 eV of energy is released in the process. However, if there is a new energy state below the ground state it could be possible to release even more energy.

The ground state of hydrogen is stable in the sense that it cannot emit photons. However, Mills argues that it can undergo a non-radiative transition to a lower state with the help of a catalyst, releasing the additional energy in the process. "In layman's terms, a catalytic process causes the latent energy stored in the hydrogen atom to be released by allowing the electron that is otherwise in a stable orbit to move closer to the nucleus to generate power as heat, light and the formation of a plasma," Mills told PhysicsWeb. Similar non-radiative transitions occur in fluorescent lights and in the formation of chemical bonds in cases where the excess energy is carried away by a third particle.

Mills, who has a medical degree from Harvard, started working on the electronic structure of hydrogen in the late 1980s and has published more than 60 papers on the hydrino state since then. "This research represents a new primary energy source and a new field of hydrogen chemistry," he says. "It may also explain or lead to explanations to many important scientific questions such as the identity of dark matter and a physical rather than mathematical theory of atomic physics."

Earlier this year, however, Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency published a paper in which he argued that the theory for the hydrino state put forward by Mills was "the result of a mathematical mistake" (New J. Phys. 7 127).

Now another theorist has joined the debate with a different point of view. Jan Naudts of the University of Antwerp in Belgium argues that the Klein-Gordon equation of relativistic quantum mechanics does indeed permit the existence of a low-lying hydrino state, although he stops short of claiming that hydrino states really exist (physics/0507193). "In physics the experiment decides," says Naudts. "Either the hydrino exists, in which case we have to accept a small correction to the textbooks on quantum mechanics, or it does not exist, in which case we have to find better arguments to explain why it does not exist." Naudts says that results of Mills and co-workers have recently been confirmed by a group at the Technical University of Eindhoven. "Nothing is decided yet, but I think it is time to fill the holes in our theoretical understanding of the hydrogen atom."

However, Rathke remains sceptical, claiming that the solution found by Naudts "is known in the literature and had previously been discarded as unphysical." He also says that Naudts has found evidence for just one new state, whereas Mills claims to have found 137, and that the binding energy calculated by Naudts does not correspond to any of these states.

Mills, not surprisingly, welcomes the results of Naudts: "It is a very good sign that he has initiated the work in the quantum physics community to reconcile quantum theory with the enormous amount of data that confirms the existence of new states of hydrogen."

About the author
Peter Rodgers is Editor of Physics World, Belle Dumé is science writer at PhysicsWeb