Reddit reviews The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

My mistake. I shouldn't send anything prior to caffeination.

Mills had contracted with utility companies, back when it was BlackLightPower. The deals were real. My friend contacted a NM utility to check.

The deal was for production of a low energy density device, utilizing emissions from a vacuum tube. The utilities are very conservative. Their owners obviously know something about measuring power, which I do, as well. I'm an electrical engineer, and I have designed and built numerous calorimeters used in experiments, at the direction of Dr. Eugene Mallove, my employer, a former MIT professor, who departed MIT in protest over data fudging issues that their administration refused to address.

A low energy density requires that a very large device be built to produce something that would interest a utility. This would result in something much more than a mere retrofit to existing infrastructure, which would require a great deal of regulatory overhaul, as well. The cost would be very high. It was a business decision. It is hard to compete against entrenched energy technology that has been under intense development for many generations.

While Mills announced prematurely, it was with the support of a competent buyer who had done due diligence into the related phenomena. It was significant that it had gotten that far, by itself. The utilities did not work for Mills.

Utilities amortize their massive capital expenditures far into the future. If they went ahead with hydrino technology, they would still be paying for their obsolete equipment, which would mean raising rates to pay for the new technology, and it would be quite expensive. The directors might like that they were using a new technology, but raising rates so much to pay for it was a non-starter. A utility is not a laboratory.

The regulatory burden would be a nightmare, and would require many years at great expense, so that path was abandoned. While that is an instance of Mills promising something that he did not deliver, one must be circumspect.

There were other dead ends, but how many did Edison encounter?

People tend to assume that if such a great discovery is made, that widespread confirmations will soon follow. Heavier than air flight was accomplished by the Wrights, and they were almost totally ignored for years. Much like the promise of "free energy", such flight was the stuff of dreams for centuries, and people tended to believe that anyone claiming to have done it was dreaming. The Wrights took advantage of the lack of interest to develop their technology without much competition, and Mills has done the same, accumulating a very large intellectual property portfolio.

This is not just a totally new technology. It is a totally new branch of physics, one that comes straight out of the trunk built by Newton himself. A realistic comparison would be to some new technology based on a new physical discovery, and there are countless examples. The physical discoveries that caused people to realize that it would be possible to move heat from one area to another, and thus enable refrigeration, occurred generations prior to commercial device availability. In modern times, nuclear reactions were considered impossible, until they weren't. Once they were discovered, the prediction of small, safe for home use reactors, soon, was made (too cheap to meter!).

For the time between basic physics discovery to marketable successful product to be only a few decades, is extraordinary, particularly when swimming upstream against powerfully backed conventional theory.

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but the people predicting nuclear reactors were not basically wrong. They were making projections based on assumptions, which were wrong. Mills is not perfect, and he was basically right, but he assumed that the knowledge about hydrino reactions would create enough interest to be sufficient to overcome technical difficulties, and that was wrong. He accepted responsibility to overcome those difficulties himself.

Especially after the explosion of interest into the claims made by Fleischman and Pons, it was perfectly reasonable to expect that a credible scientist making claims would find sufficient interest to at least broadly establish existence of the phenomenon. Mills assumed that, and he was wrong.

It is disappointing to consider that we have a large number of very sophisticated laboratories in the world that could verify the measurements made that confirm anomalous energy of great value. Yet, there was only one such (to my knowledge) attempt made (NASA) to confirm calorimetry of a Mills nickel/light water electrolytic device. These are notoriously finicky devices, and the calorimetry is prone to undetected error at such low power density. Most scientists would simply disregard calorimetry data unless it is gobsmacking, because they know this. The NASA attempt was negative.

There was a scientist at Los Alamos National Lab who published a number of articles after his experiments showed strong confirmation of large anomalous energy and inverted ion populations in a gas mixture of hydrogen and a little helium. He still stands by his results, and conclusions, despite being castigated by management for straying off the reservation. He is not alone.

The power density of the arc phase reactor (SunCell) is so high that it vaporizes everything. That is the kind of problem we want. The power density hurdle was passed, in spades. Rocket engines have plasmas that run at similar temperatures, so there is a lot of applicable design technology available. Nonetheless, it is hard to build something with extreme heat adjacent to cold components. It CAN be done.

Mills is very much an optimist. Do not mistake his optimism for delusion. The people providing the $100,000,000+ spent so far by Mills conduct due diligence. Look at the board of directors and board of advisors.

The validity of Mills theory normally would be enough to create vast interest, but this is not what Kuhn would call normal science. Mills' theory shatters the rice bowls of many, many scientists. Nobody likes to learn that what they have dedicated their minds and lives to doing, has been a big waste of time. It is much easier to shoot the messenger than to return from Wonderland.

The supposed failure of classical physics was that the Bohr model, and other attempts, failed to account for observed features of the atom. Mills' orbitsphere model does account for every observed feature of the atom, and this is easily verified. It has been verified by a number of those who can understand the theory well enough.

This theoretical breakthough could be compared to a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which lingered since 1637. The importance of a classical physics solution to overcome the need for a new physics cannot be overstated. I do not know why proof of Mills' theory makes so few waves, while proof of Fermat's theory was impactful, despite relative obscurity and lack of utility. Of course, after Maxwell published his treatise, it was almost all crickets for decades.