Text: Subject: New Physics breakthrough- BlackLight Power co. Date: Thu, 23 Dec 1999 Village Voice Published December 22 - 28,1999 http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9951/baard.shtml QUANTUM LEAP BY ERIK BAARD Dr. Randell Mills says he can change the face of physics. The Scientfic Establishment thinks he's nuts. Times are tough on Robert Mills Sr.'s 91-acre grain farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania. "This year is very, very bad," he confides. "I'm glad the kids got out." His eldest, Robert Jr., has a water well drilling business, his daughter Raeleen is a massage therapist. And his younger son, Randell, recently bought a 53,000-square-foot space satellite manufacturing plant near Princeton, New Jersey, from Lockheed Martin. He then stocked it with millions of dollars of high-tech gear. Here the younger Mills plans to overturn quantum theory as it's been understood for decades. Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained medical doctor who also studied biotechnology and electric engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he's found the Holy Grail of physics: a unified theory of everything. A central part of Mills's theory explains the basis of the traditional, and paradoxical, "duality" concept of the electron as both a particle and a wave with a model where electrons are charges that travel as two-dimensional disks and wrap around nuclei like fluctuating soap bubbles. He calls them "orbitspheres." Mills says that with this new understanding he's produced clean and limitless energy and an entirely new class of materials and plasma that will reshape every industry in the coming decade. Mills also claims breakthroughs inartificial intelligence, cosmology, medicine, and perhaps even a form of gravitational jujitsu. "I've made the electron real," the 42-year-old Mills says. "It's a revolution very fitting to the 21st century, in a chain of revolutions man has had with fire, steel, fossil fuels, and Maxwell's description of electromagnetism. This is grandiose stuff, and when I say it, it delivers a beating from critics. But on the other hand it's fun." Though the topics he broaches could be coming from a B-movie mad scientist, Mills's cadences are more often like those of a motivational speaker. He moves his six-foot-five frame with athletic ease and drives a BMW sports car. He and his wife, an investment banker, have two young sons and another child due in March. His company, BlackLight Power Inc., formed in 1991, expects to receive in January patents on the energy and chemicals, which Mills says derive from "shrinking" the hydrogen atom's orbitsphere. BlackLight Power, with a research staff of 25, will submit its findings to premier scholarly journals by that time, he adds. Despite howls from the scientific establishment that Mills is a relic of the "cold fusion" trend quashed a decade ago, BlackLight Power Inc. has raised more than $25 million from about 150 investors. While that's hardly a huge sum in this Internet-crazed era, it's coming from serious money and energy people. Prominent among them are multibillion-dollar electric utilities PacifiCorp, based in Oregon, and Conectiv, which serves Mid-Atlantic states. RS Funds, Eastbourne Capital Management, and executives retired from the top echelon of Morgan Stanley have also put in millions. With Mills holding on to controlling shares, BlackLight Power now is turning away private investors. "I'm impressed with how Randy's gone about this," a retired Morgan Stanley executive says, "with experiments to test the theory at every step. And the potential payoff is almost unimaginable." Conectiv senior vice president David Blake concurs: "We're past the scientific verification stage. The talk now is about commercial applications," perhaps within seven years, he says. Blake sits on the BlackLight Power board of directors. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. is considering a public offering of BlackLight Power stock in 2000. The investment bank says that the two chief needs that will trigger an IPO are a licensing agreement with a "household name company" and more substantial academic validation of its technologies. BlackLight Power is in discussions with DaimlerChrysler, and three major corporations are already examining materials it has produced, say Mills and company executives. In the next year, Mills promises, the revolution will be "hydrinoized." In one of BlackLight Power's cavernous laboratories sits the prototype energy-and chemical-producing cell that is the heart of Mills's ambitions. Mills explains that in this contraption, resembling a souped-up home furnace, water is electrically then catalytically broken down into atoms of oxygen and hydrogen. Potassium atoms are introduced as a gas into the very low-pressure hydrogen gas waiting inside the cell. Under specific conditions, the potassium acts as a catalyst to collapse hydrogen's electron orbit. The energy once used to maintain the higher orbit is released as ultra-violet light, Mills says. The heat from that process can build pressure to turn a turbine for a generator or an engine, BlackLight Power notes in a marketing plan. The smaller hydrogen atoms, called "hydrinos," remaining in the cell can then react with other elements placed there to form novel compounds with amazing properties, Mills claims. "This will change how most everyday things in the 21st century are made and used," he says. For example: EHydrinos combined with inorganic elements produce conductive, magnetic plastics that would revolutionize circuitry and aerospace engineering, and shrink and speed up semiconductors. EHydrinos combined with highly oxygenated matter would form the basis of batteries the size of a briefcase to drive your car 1000 miles at highway speeds on a single charge, without gasoline. EOne type of hydrino combined with an acid would produce incredibly powerful explosives or rocket propellants. EHydrino and metal compounds make for super-strong coatings, some of which could make ships rustproof, dramatically reducing crew complements. There are "millions and millions of possible combinations" in the commercial world, Mills says, revealing himself as a practical, earthy businessman. These qualities emerged in his teens when he made good money raising corn and hay on land he leased. He had no college plans, and skipped so many high school classes his diploma was in doubt. But when he sliced up his hand and arm in an accident falling into a glass door, the five hours of surgery rattled his sense of immortality. "At that point," Mills recalls, "I figured if I'm going to die eventually, I'd like to at least know why. I wanted to know how it works. All of it, from the human brain to the universe." He used profits from the farm to cover the tuition at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he graduated first in his class. After that he breezed through medical school at Harvard University, while simultaneously taking science courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The son of a farmer, and a farmer himself, turned out to be an academic superstar. "It's the American story," says Dr. Robert Park of the American Physical Society. "But he's still wrong." Park has concluded that the hydrino theory is wrong in his upcoming book, Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud. Park is not alone is being rankled by hydrinos. The hydrogen atom is the simplest, most common, and most tested element. It's nearly universally agreed that a free-floating hydrogen atom is in what's called "the ground state"‹you can't bring its electron closer into its nucleus. Telling physicists that they've got that wrong is like telling mothers across America that they've misunderstood apple pie. It's that fundamental. "If you could fuck around with the hydrogen atom, you could fuck around with the energy process in the sun. You could fuck around with life itself," claims Dr. Phillip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics at Princeton University. "Everything we know about everything would be a bunch of nonsense. That's why I'm so sure that it's a fraud." Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist based at City University of New York, adds that "the only law that this business with Mills is proving is that a fool and his money are easily parted." Kaku is a cofounder of "string"-field theory, which posits that all matter and energy are actually manifestations of vibrations occurring in 11 dimensions. String-field theory, considered radical when it was introduced, is now pretty much the only game in town for mainstream physicists seeking a grand unified theory. BlackLight Power boosters scoff that they've seen no practical application of quantum theory since the atomic bomb and nuclear power, and say they have little time for theorists who call Mills a charlatan while teaching that the fundamental mechanics of cause and effect are subverted at the subatomic level. Mills's camp responds: Fraud? Let's talk about fraud. Quantumists have us living in myriad dimensions filled with "probability waves" and unobservable "virtual particles" that flit in and out of existence, and they say we may one day slip through wormholes in space to visit other universes or go back in time. Kaku insists that such seemingly far-out visions direct us toward truths we can't yet see, whereas Mills, Kaku contends, is promoting something already shown to be impossible. "I'll have demonstrated an entirely new form of energy production by the end of 2000," Mills responds. "If Dr. Kaku has escaped our universe through a wormhole by then, I'll send my first $1000 in profits to his new address." And there's the nub, Mills's critics also charge. They're talking the scientific method, and he's already spending his profits. "The history of science in America since money became so easily available to people making outrageous claims has gotten very complicated," says Dr. Robert Cava, a materials science expert at Princeton. "Scientists are constantly in competition and constantly under extreme scrutiny. Don't think it's a picnic. So when someone comes along and makes a big splash without going through the rigors of peer review, it makes us think that the guy has no business doing it." Dr. Richard Wilson, a research professor of physics at Harvard who says he's still skeptical of Mills's theory after a visit to BlackLight Power's labs, says the culture clash between scientists and captains of industry is natural. "In my experience in science," Wilson says, "no one's more gullible than the wildcatter in the oil industry. But they're both gullible and successful. Sometimes they happen to be right. They take chances. That's their game, but that's not what scientists usually do." The booming stock market of the 1990s has loosed a torrent of cash in all industries, but wallets have been especially fat in the U.S. utility industry in the last couple of years since that $215 billion business began deregulating. States have pushed electric companies to sell power plants to new competitors at open auctions. The result: In addition to coal, they have cash to burn. A chunk of that money has been earmarked for new energy alternatives to fossil fuels, reflecting mounting concerns about global warming that have coalesced with long-standing unease with North American, European, and East Asian dependency on unstable regions for oil supplies. In the political climate of the U.S. at least, nuclear power isn't an option. Of course popular "green," or environmentally sensitive, energy sources like solar, wind, and small-scale hydroelectric power don't require revisions to science textbooks. Mills says BlackLight Power is moving first on the energy and materials front, even though he's more credentialed in medicine, mostly because there are fewer regulatory hassles. Out back behind Mills's laboratories is what is essentially a 150-ton thermos that he says will be the core of his first power plant. Lockheed Martin used it to test satellite components for the cold vacuum of space. But shielding on its one-inch-thick skin could also hold in heat produced by banks of Mills's cells placed inside. Old power plants could be retrofitted with BlackLight Power reactors, which would produce no emissions or hazardous waste, Mills says. Conectiv has the right to license the BlackLight power process to make electricity, David Blake says. Another board member is Shelby Brewer, former chairman and CEO of ABB Combustion Engineering, a leading maker of power plants and nuclear fuel. Brewer has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT, and was a top nuclear official in the Department of Energy during the Reagan administration. "I think he has something here worth taking forward commercially," says Brewer, who now has his own energy company. But even those who say they've gotten positive results from testing Mills's energy cells stop short of endorsing his theory. Dr. Johannes Conrads, former director of the Institute for Low Temperature Plasma Physics at Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany, told a gathering of the American Chemical Society in October that he was able to produce "remarkably high energy" from a Mills cell. But Conrads said he thought the energy could be coming from an effect within dense regions of plasma produced through the BlackLight Power process. Dr. John A. Spitznagel, chief scientist for Siemens Westinghouse Power Corp.'s science and technology center in Pittsburgh, says that several years ago he too was intrigued by energy he was getting from a Mills cell, but that it wasn't enough to pursue at that time. But he remains "in a sort of monitoring mode" should Mills return with further verifications and the more refined approach that BlackLight Power claims to have developed.

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