Sunday, October 26, 2008

On Very, Very Unorthodox Science

An interesting story came out about a week ago that I thought I'd pass around, because there are some Deep Thoughts to be had by contemplating it.

And no, these aren't the Jack Handy Deep Thoughts. ("Even if they never find intelligent life there, I still think we should declare Jupiter to be an enemy planet.")

Here's the setup. It was about twenty years ago (has it been that long already?) that all our energy needs were solved by a couple of guys named Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. That is, our energy needs would have been solved if everyone else had been able to reproduce their stated results. As it was, after their jubilant announcement that they'd managed to start a fusion reaction with palladium electrodes in a jar of deuterated water, further independent research produced decidedly mixed results. That is, some researchers detected extra heat in their follow-up experiments, most others did not.

Eventually, the term Cold Fusion came to be synonymous with the term junk science. After a time, further research in the field was dropped by most outfits. For the sake of their careers, few researchers wanted to have their names associated with Cold Fusion. Interest was lost in most corners, and it just became a byword and a bad memory.

But... this obscures the fact that something happened in that jar of deuterated water, and we still don't really know what. Was it fusion, as Pons and Fleischmann alleged? Almost certainly not. It was most likely some as-yet unrecognized, unidentified chemical reaction. Some decent primary chemistry research could probably be done to figure it out. It might not earn a Nobel prize for its investigators, but that doesn't mean such research would be without merit.


...


Now out of the aftermath of Cold Fusion, there came an, um... unorthodox theoretician and experimentalist named Randell L. Mills. He proposed a theoretical framework for understanding what happened. According to Mills, it wasn't fusion at all--it was a new kind of chemistry entirely.

Mills wrote a 1000-page tome, entitled "The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics", that outlined his proposed theory. In a very small nutshell he proposed that pretty much everything that came after Maxwell's equations was wrong. For Mills' theory to be true, the work of such giants of 20th Century physics as Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Richard Feynman has to be wrong. I won't go into the details, other than to say that in Mills' theory, the electron that orbits a hydrogen nucleus can drop into much lower orbits than what is generally accepted as the "ground state", and that this process releases a whole lot of energy. Mills has dubbed hydrogen atoms in a lower-than-ground-state condition as hydrinos.

Pretty much every reputable physicist out there says that this theory is bunk, and that Mills is a crank. For one thing, if hydrogen could drop into lower states than the ground state, why haven't we seen this happen before now? Furthermore, they claim, Mills' tome is rife with errors; and that big parts of it--the parts that were the most lucid--were plagiarized.

For the record, I don't have enough physics knowledge to judge Mills' theory on my own. I find myself in the same boat as the other 99% of the population who didn't study quantum mechanics; I have to rely on the word of those people who have. And while it's true that Consensus Is Not Science (in the immortal words of Michael Crichton), a consensus among scientists should at least make us sit up and pay attention.


...


Nevertheless, Mills pushed ahead, and founded a company to help develop this theory and find marketable uses for it. If ordinary hydrogen atoms could be forced into less-than-ground-state conditions, they would release energy in the process. (Mills and co. calculated that this would be an order of magnitude more than a typical chemical reaction, and an order of magnitude less than a typical nuclear reaction.) If the reaction could be controlled and harnessed, a cheap and plentiful source of energy would become available (Warning: link is to a pdf file).

And his company, Blacklight Power, managed to scare up something like sixty million dollars of venture capital, and started up its R&D.

At this point, the conventional wisdom shifted: Mills is no longer just a harmless crank: Now that he's convincing people to pony up big bucks for this harebrained scheme of his, he's progressed to outright fraud!

And to be fair, this was not an unreasonable suspicion. After all, if someone comes to you and says:
We've got this new process that will make almost limitless inexpensive energy! All those stuffy old-school scientists like Bohr and Feynman shall be shown completely wrong, and when we unveil our invention to the world five years from now, everyone will have to rewrite their physics texts! All we need is for you to provide us a little financial help...
...most intelligent people would, quite rightly, offer to put them in touch with that ex-Nigerian Minister of Finance who's trying to figure out a safe place to put all that money.


...


But here's where the story starts to get a little unusual. It's one thing for a scammer to say, "it'll be ready in five years!" After all, the scam will generally be up well before five years, and the scammer will long since have vanished. It's quite another thing to say, "this thing will be ready for marketing by next year Q2, and we're looking for independent parties to verify our work."

And it's really quite remarkable for said independent parties to come back and say, um... yes, this reactor is producing more energy than we can account for through standard chemistry.

Last week, Blacklight Power announced that some of their claims had been independently verified:
Dr. Jansson's Rowan University team conducted 55 tests of the prototypes, including controls and calibrations, during a nine-month study. Test results indicated that energy generation was proportional to the total amount of solid fuel, and only one percent of the one million joules of the energy released could be accounted for by previously known chemistry. These results matched earlier tests conducted at BlackLight's Research and Development Center, in Cranbury New Jersey.
Now, whenever I hear anyone else announce that their results have been "independently verified", I immediately look to see whether the independent verification has been independently announced. After all, it's easy for anyone to claim that they've been independently verified by someone else. It's a lot harder to get that someone else to play along.

Well, the New York Times picked up the story. According to them:
We covered the company extensively back in May, when it started saying it had a prototype 50 kilowatt reactor.

At the time, Mills was reluctant to provide much proof, only saying that the process was being verified. Now an engineering team at Rowan University, also in New Jersey, has come forward with results from its own tests of the Blacklight process. Tests conducted in sealed chambers, and measured with a device called a calorimeter, show a heat reaction from a substance provided by Blacklight far beyond anything anticipated.
So: unless the Times has totally botched its reporting (hey! Could happen), it appears that the Rowan University team has "come forward with results from its own tests", and that their results are pretty close to the ones that Blacklight has predicted.

Now, are there parts of this story that sound fishy? You bet. For one thing, the Rowan U. team couldn't get the continuous energy production that would be needed in a commercial power source, and the Blacklight people are saying, "that's proprietary information." And there's the fact that the Blacklight people provided all the fuel for the Rowan U. tests, meaning that it wasn't completely independent. And this doesn't even start to touch on the sheer unlikelihood of a mere nickel-catalyzed chemical reaction forcing hydrogen atoms into a physical state that modern physics says doesn't exist.

And yet, even with all this, there's a pretty good point that's made by the writer of the Times article:

According to Mills, it’s likely a totally independent researcher will verify the whole process within a year. Meanwhile the company will start licensing out its energy process, and do work with hydrinos in various chemical applications.

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. Physicists will deny the hydrino theory, and they may be right; perhaps that’s why there was a distinct note of smugness in Mills’ voice as he said, “The controversy and academic debate won’t stop commercialization.”
Emphasis added.


...


What to make of all this?

My own gut feeling, for what it's worth, is that:
  • Mills is not a scammer, and Blacklight Power is not a scam. To be a scam, the guys orchestrating it would have to know it's wrong, and be doing it anyway. These guys aren't acting like it's a scam. Like the Times writer said, it would be odd for Blacklight to "place [itself] in an end game in which [it] would be definitively proven wrong within a year or two." These guys are true believers.
  • That said, I doubt that we're seeing the vindication of hydrino theory here. I suspect that we're seeing some previously undocumented chemical reaction, and that with proper research, an explanation for the anomalous power will be found within the framework of standard chemistry, without the need for rewriting the laws of physics.
  • But it think it's noteworthy that these guys found something new. That is, even if hydrino theory proves to be totally bunk and everyone involved with Blacklight loses their shirts, they have reproducibly found a new chemical reaction. Key word here is on the term "reproducible": one problem with the Cold Fusion people is that it couldn't be reliably reproduced. One team found anomalous heat, another did not, and it was totally unpredictable. But whatever the "Blacklight reactor" is doing, it appears to be able to do it reliably, every time. That means the process can be studied at length, and it should be studied--whatever is happening.
But there's another Deep Thought that comes to mind as I survey the scene:

How is it that the "cranks"--if that's what they are--have managed to come up on a new chemical reaction the more respectable researchers have heretofore overlooked?

Answer: they looked for it.

Here's the problem. There's always been a tension in the scientific community between the experimentalists and the theoreticians. The goal of the theoretician is to produce a logical framework, a set of "laws", that explains all the observations that the experimental guys come up with, and predicts things that later experiments can verify. The goal of the experimentalists, on the other hand, is to make new observations that stretch--or even break--the theories. After all, if you observe something that has already been predicted by an existing theory, you merely reinforce the theory; but if you observe something that no one could have predicted, that is where the great leaps of knowledge come about.

The trouble is that by 2008, the physics theoreticians have won the debate. Blacklight notwithstanding, there are no observations of physical phenomena out there that can't be explained by the prevailing theories of quantum mechanics. Experimentation today consists of making predictions from the theories (say, regarding quantum teleportation), and then building an experiment to verify that what you predicted from the theory actually happens. That, combined with the fact that cutting edge physics often requires larger and pricier machines, like ITER and the LHC, means that there aren't that many totally new and unexpected phenomena left to be discovered by tinkerers building experiments on the tabletop.

Aside from the cranks and the crackpots, it seems everyone else has given up looking for holes in the General Model of Quantum Mechanics--because people have been trying for so long to find holes in it, without success. And because the General Model is so successful, there's a tendency to cast anyone who does reject it as one of those cranks and crackpots.

So along comes a Randell Mills, who says, "I think the General Model is a load of hooey," and he comes up with an alternate theory and sets about trying to prove it. He starts running experiments that no one else would have thought to run, precisely because the General Model told them they wouldn't find anything. And when these experiments start returning values that no one (except the "crackpot") expected, what happens?

Well, what should happen is that the scientific community says, "Hmm. Wow. Huh. Could you do that again, dear chap?" And then, when he does, the scientific community should say, "All right, I want you to show me exactly what you just did, so I can do this myself." That being done, the scientific community should start trying to fit their results into some kind of theoretical framework.

Now, there may well be plenty of scientists out there who think like that; I hope there are. But just from perusing various online scientific fora, I tend to see a lot of arguments like the following:
  1. His theoretical paper is riddled with computational errors and has extensive passages lifted from other works.
  2. The fact that he's rejected the Bohr model of the atom--with its absolute rock-bottom ground state--makes him a crank, and his work should be ignored.
  3. The guy's a scammer, who's just trying to get gullible people to send him money. For the sake of the integrity of the Scientific Community, this guy should get no attention whatsoever.
  4. The "anomalous energy" is most likely just a design flaw in the experiment--nothing to get excited about.
  5. The "anomalous energy" most likely comes from some change in the physical structure of the nickel catalyst; nothing worth getting worked up over.
  6. There is so little money available for any research these days, that we have to pick and choose what we give it to. We shouldn't have to spend a dime investigating something that's so unlikely to pan out.
My response to all of the above: This guy produced a chemical reaction that he predicted and you didn't. That much has been verified. Now his theories may be total bunk--in fact, I suspect they are--but the fact remains, he found something that you didn't even suspect was there. I'm enough of a traditionalist to believe that in Science, it is experiment--not theory--that is king. His motive, and his funding source, are irrelevant. He found something. If you wish to call yourself a scientist, it's now up to you to investigate what happened--and I mean really investigate, not just wave it away with ad hominem--and put it in a theoretical framework. Even if it's a bad experiment design, someone needs to prove that it's a bad experiment design.


...


Anyway, that's enough for now. I will occasionally follow up on the somewhat controversial doings of Blacklight Power. I suspect that eventually their process will be found to be a new but otherwise unremarkable chemical reaction, and the whole company will fold within a year or two. I find the fact that no one else has yet found hydrinos to be pretty compelling.

Still, I wish the Blacklight team well. While my gut tells me that their physics is totally wrong, and I certainly wouldn't invest in the company (at least, not before they have viable products on the market and a stable long-term cash flow from operations), I don't think they're scammers.

And unlikely as it is, I'm just enough of a rebel at heart that I wouldn't mind seeing the entire edifice of 20th Century Physics turned on its head. :-)

3 comments:

SULEIMAN SAMI AZAR said...

Hello, my name is Solomon Azar- I HAVE FOUND THE ROAD TO SAFE CLEAN NUCLEAR FUSION- When this is found and understood- the energy crisis will end- I have been looking at this system since 2002 and it is perfect in every way. I finished my experiments April-2007. I have since that time tried to the best of my abilities to inform many people upon the net- there is no question I have done so in an unorthodox manner- but in time it will be found my road traveled to solve this energy crisis was unorthodoxed -all my motives are for the betterment of mankind- you have your way- I have mine- it will make complete sense when heard in public of my approach- have faith :)



I have performed an experiment never done before in science- I used a Tesla coil for its use in high voltage high frequency and apply its discharge plasma not upon the dielectric of free air- but to the dielectric of water itself- specifically I used ultrapure reagent grade water from manufacture NERL-this is to establish the high degree of insulation needed for plasma (you cannot have contaminants for conductivity)- I doped my water with heavy water from the manufacturer UNITED NUCLEAR-(however- a full concentration of heavy water is desired)- I built my 1 million volt Tesla coil entire tunable- every aspect of it- as it must be done to TUNE THE OUTPUT DISCHARGE OF THE TESLA COIL to the water itself- once the arc is stable- the voltage may be increased- I have written in my pdf file in my website of noblefuse.com that a prerequisite of 750 kv is needed as an electric field gradient about the charged particles used in fusion( in this case the hydrogen bound in the water molecule) because of voltage drops as expected as in all electrical systems upon the load (load here is the water)- a much higher voltage is needed in order to distribute the voltage gradient upon entire arc plasma length between electrodes in water- THUS- THE HIGH THE VOLTAGE- THE BETTER- within my website you will find a link to youtube showing my primitive experiment- BUT MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT THIS- THIS IS THE FIRST TIME EVER DONE BEFORE - I propose nuclear fusion of water/heavy water- my little experiment IS THE ROAD TO NUCLEAR FUSION- we must universally connect the dots- put two and two together- and conclude this- MY EXPERIMENT MUST BE REPEATED ON A LARGER SCALE- my system is a direct replacement of nuclear power plants particularly of the pressurized water reactor which uses heavy water already - a vessel already built for gamma radiation and other high energy flux which will emit with the plasma arc-




Power reactor in which the heat is dissipated from the core using highly pressurized water (about 160 bar) to achieve a high temperature and avoid boiling within the core. The cooling water transfers its heat to the secondary system in a steam generator. Example: Grohnde Nuclear Power Plant in Germany with an electrical output of 1,430 MW.



Replace the rod assemblies and use electrodes to conduct the Lightning bolt! High Voltage High frequency will create the magnetic pinch to slam the isotopes of hydrogen together which is bound in water- helium and oxygen are the outgassed products recaptured by expansion tanks-it is absolutely perfect!




_ I HAVE FOUND THE TRUE PURPOSE OF THE TESLA COIL- the answer was always in the lightning bolt- understanding of gamma bursts from lightning discharges have only been recently vindicated from satellite in late 90s---

CA 94305 United States
Said, R ( ) , STAR Lab, Electrical Engineering, 350 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305 United States
Smith, D M ( ) , Physics Department and Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 United States
Lopez, L I ( ) , Astronomy Department and Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 United States

The observation of brief (<1 ms) bursts of intense γ-rays, the so-called Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs), by the BATSE γ-ray experiment was one of the most unexpected discoveries by the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory.


Let me try to give another analogy to make the point. think about striking a match, if all conditions are proper , one knows that to strike a match, you must go a minimum speed- you cannot strike the match too slowly- this is understood as more speed is more friction and thus more activation energy necessary to create combustion of the match material. the same applies to this fusion system, first, imagine my system as inside a pressurized water reactor used in fission plants- the moderator is already heavy water- we shall use it as the fuel. I have said the plasma arc looks exactly like our friend the electric lightning bolt- but I talk about in my pdf file- that the so called lightning bolt must be understood in regards to high voltage and frequency- just like the minimum speed needed for the match- so it is with the combination on high voltage and frequency to not only resonate with the dielectric molecule of heavy water- but more so- to create a minimum velocity upon charged particles in the fuel water. this velocity is also exhibiting itself as a magnetic field-think of the cathode ray scope- in a snap shot instant in time for analysis, look at when the maximum energy is being applied on a per strike basis of the input cycle- or shall we say the highest amplitude of the ac signal. if for example- an input energy of one megawatt was injected into the strike of the arc- a magnetic pinch shall be directed upon the charged particles in transit of the discharge- in a thermodynamic extraction process such as this - we need at least 5 times more energy out of the system to recoup our initial energy input- and a surplus for commercial energy supply- thus- via fusion of hydrogen to helium- with each strike- a minimum voltage and frequency SHALL give the minimum activation energy required for magnetic pinching and fusion of the isotopes of hydrogen. to increase the q of the reaction in this system- a magnetic toroid may be used around the plasma arc for increased efficiency= such as used in tokamak devices. I hope this analogy helps those who question this system- THANK YOU--




Here is a thought experiment for electromagnetic fusion with Einstein in mind



Pretend you are water-you are an oxygen atom- you are stable- you are noble- 8 protons-8 neutrons-and 8 electrons- there are only 5 magic shell nuclear elements of the periodic table- oxygen is one of them- it is very stable-



Therefore- you are stable and noble- you have no need for fusion- yet it could happen- but the probability of another element such as hydrogen and its isotopes would be made to fuse together in some kind of fashion mankind tries will occur way before oxygen does- - ok-so now you are this noble one and you have outstretched in your hands a hydrogen atom and or its isotope deuteron and you hold it out to mankind as a gift-



Man understands the gift of fusion for many years and is desperately trying to do such-



I propose electromagnetic fusion- I propose the BENNET pinch used in poloidal currents used in plasmas of tokomaks- but much further-



Here we go – the thought experiment- you are this oxygen atom with two hydrogen’s and you stand amongst your friends similar in nature. You are placed in a large vessel filled of your kind-now imagine that two walls opposing in this vessel are the plates of a capacitor- who cares what is applied to the capacitor plates (electrodes of system)-for all you know as a noble oxygen and the hydrogen you have in your hands is nothing more than the electric field upon the plates-



You are composed of charged particles- thus you will interact with the applied electric field of the plates-this is common electronics and electric knowledge-



However, I speak of dielectric breakdown- I speak of the lightning bolt- let us now assume we have made the capacitor plates oscillate at 1 million volts peak to peak as way of a tesla coil



Think of the electric field- everything will be controlled by this field- a dielectric breakdown will occur- and all discharge current will begin to flow and oscillate as a function of the applied voltage-



Now- you are in the heart of a lightning bolt- you who are noble as a oxygen probably lost all your valence electrons due to the magnitude of such a high electric field- every charged particle in transit of the discharge current is surely ionized and talks of being a complete water molecule should be erased- the state of this plasma current is nothing more than ionized hydrogen and oxygen and a complete sea of electrons-



Let us think first of the electrons- 1896 times smaller than protons- no question it will oscillate much faster as a function to the applied voltage- remember the cathode ray scope- basic physics also will say this charged particle will also have a magnetic field about itself because of the electric field that has driven it-thus- this oscillating electron current will have an intrinsic magnetic field

Let us now think of the protons- oxygen has 8 and surrounded by 8 neutrons and is far less likely for reaction than isotopes of hydrogen for fusion- this should merely be understood by refereeing to atomic tables of elements and known theory- but this hydrogen is a singly bound proton with mass one- unless we speak of a deuteron- it will also be controlled exactly the same way as the electron is affected by the external applied voltage- however- it is opposite to the electrons motion-and much slower by its mass – however-its magnetic field will add to that of the electrons- this is standard knowledge of magnetic field generation of charged particles by way of electric fields-



Thus, in this thought experiment- within this state of dielectric breakdown- I like to say the lightning bolt- can you now see the oscillation of the charged particles by such a large magnitude of the applied voltage plates- can you now see the probability at a certain moment in time- particularly when the applied ac signal is greatest- that all magnetic fields of charged particles in transit can have the power to be magnetically pinched-



Magnetics have push and pull- it is well known that high frequency causes a constriction upon electrical currents- whether in copper lines and forcing such to the surface- or in plasma and made use to constrict it - high frequency is known to constrict the currents- thus- do you see the forces I am referring to as this dielectric breakdown has occurred upon the most perfect fuel of the heavens- water- this oxygen atom holds the hydrogen for us- we shall apply a high voltage (high is relative- I have stated 750kv in the vicinity of the hydrogen for fusion- I come to this by way of understanding the beta decay of a free neutron- if it can disintegrate- it can come together- made into a deuteron- then made into helium)-



Thus –we make helium and oxygen is then unbound and must also be recaptured- this is easy in expansion tanks- the byproducts are helium and oxygen-truly noble-



To increase the q of this system- a simple toroidal magnet as used in tokamaks for plasma control may be used for additional pinching-



I hope this helps- however- you must always think of the applied electric field and its magnetic inducement upon the charged particles- we will stably run the Tesla coil upon the dielectric of water itself (more appropriately heavy water) and turn up the voltage for greater acceleration speeds and thus magnetic fields- we can control pressure in this vessel- we can control electrode spacing and so much more-

that is my thought experiment for you to understand it is my intention to use all input energy by way of oscillating a very large electric field which will induce the proper magnetic flux density in units of Tesla for a pinching- not established hot fusion whereby all energy input is chaotic and the probability of fusion comes by way of statistics from a gas equation- no- high voltage and high frequency in an orderly manner by the construction of a man made lightning bolt with controllable parameters inside an existing pressurized nuclear reactor- everything is off the shelf- the world will run on steam power again globally-from trains-factories-ships-and all power plants- I offer the Watt steam engine again- not with two sticks to make fire and boil the water- but electromagnetic fusion with two electrodes to induce fusion of hydrogen isotopes to boil water and make steam- it is absolutely perfect.



To the CEO's of nuclear power plants-or pressurized coal fired- you have spare reactors in the back yards of your plants- take a 1 million volt tesla coil and do what I have said- you will measure its fusion reactions and you will conclude this - I have found the road to safe clean energy.

I speak plain science- please connect the dots and let us end this energy crisis for a world that desperately needs energy- May the light of God shine upon all our actions for the betterment of mankind



Solomon Sami Azar

January 13-2008



update-after 17 months on this net- it seems evident people do not care until the machine breaks, right before our eyes our economy collapses as inflation and energy costs have been eating at our economy for some time now- maybe even global war with russia and iran will you finally care to investigate the deeds of a human being that has sacrificed his life over a dangerous experiment for all of us. Time will tell.



September 13- 2008

Neil said...

Hello, my name is Neil Fxxxxxxx and I come to you now to say BEWARE! The road to Blacklight Power is the road to madness. In fact I may be suffering the world's first case of blog induced bipolar disorder solely due to my obsession with BLP. I have read the Blacklight publications and press releases, the critiques, and many, many sneering or defensive web logs. There are so many claims, equivocations, vaguenesses, and evasions that whisper HOAX, and yet, and yet - there's the occasional successful replication, the stellar board of directors, the large staff, the dearth of appeals for funding. I am pulled this way, I am pulled that way, they are TEARING ME APART. Tread softly if you choose to follow the BLP road!

But seriously, may I make a couple of comments? First, Dr. Jansson has a long-standing relationship with Dr. Mills and BLP. In no way am I casting aspersions. I have no reason to believe that Dr. Jansson's work was other than perfectly professional and conscientious. But there is such a thing as cofirmation bias. And although Rowan University is a fine school, it isn't Princeton. I hope that we soon hear of many even more demonstrably independent tests confirming BLP's results.

BLP has announced that there are no more major engineering problems that prevent them from developing a commercially viable closed loop pilot power plant. Demonstration of THAT will probably be what it takes to overthrow physics.

Cheers,

PS. Mr. Azar. I wish you well in your researches. As the wise man said, "It is experiment--not theory--that is king."

Timothy Power said...

Neil,

Thanks for the kind words and your estimation of my level of wisdom. Although it does need to be said, as the daddy of three young kids with a fourth on the way, I have long since embarked on the road to madness. AND I've seen perpetual motion first-hand. ;-)


Solomon,

Thanks for dropping by! Though I have to say, I don't really think I'm your target audience.

There's a popular saying in the scientific community: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Some of the finest scientific minds ever have put their talents into creating controlled fusion reactions, with precious little to show for it. Although there are some tabletop devices that can create fusion reactions--Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusors, for example--nothing yet has come close to reaching break-even, even after fifty years of trying. In this environment, anyone who claims to have done it is met with extreme skepticism; there have already been way too many people who have cried wolf.

For the record, while I'm no physicist, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a powerful electrical discharge through deionized heavy water could produce some fusion events. The big question, as I mentioned above, is whether it produces more fusion energy than what went into making that big discharge--and whether this energy can be harvested and utilized to keep the reaction going. With the exception of thermonuclear bombs, no fusion device has yet passed this test, from the Fusors, to the Tokamaks, to the Polywell, to the Z-pinch devices, to the laser confinement facilities.

If you think you're onto something, you need to find some university physics professor and drag him to a live demonstration, then ask him to critique it for you and give suggestions. It might also help to write up a paper for a scholarly journal--being very careful to avoid claims of what you think the technology can do or discussions of philosophy or policy, and just keeping it to: "This is what I did. This is how I did it. These were the observed results. This was how I measured those results." I think you'd make more headway if you did it that way.

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors.