Return to the Robert Bass TOC Page


As submitted to the INE for posting by Robert Bass.
Email from Bob Bass to Randell Mills and Shelby Brewer, August 20, 2000.

From:   Bass, Robert W (IDS)
Sent:   Sunday, August 20, 2000 6:36 AM
To:     'Randell Mills'; 'Shelby Brewer'
Cc:     'Randall Ingermanson'; 'William A. Dembski'; 'Jim Lo'; 'James T. Lo'; 
'Rudolf Kalman'; 'Art B Rosenblum'; 'Erik Baard'; 'John Farrell'; 'Robert Park'

Subject:  BLP Recovery from new USPTO setback

Dear Dr. Mills,

Even though in my August 6 letter I have pointed out about a dozen "fatal" 
theoretical/mathematical flaws in your alleged "derivation" of hydrino theory, 
and challenged you to demonstrate empirically a "stand-alone" device that can 
generate energy from water with no moving parts before seeking a further round 
of financing, my unsolicited advice was _not_ malicious as I hope you will agree 
after pondering the following attempt to give you some help in recovering from 
the blow of the US District Court decision of August 15 which, as Judge Sullivan 
explicitly admits, will "delay" your IPO because you will now have to "exhaust 
your remedies" internal to the PTO before again seeking external appellate 
review.

The fact that in Friday's "What's New" e-column APS flack Bob Park is gloating 
that you are now in "patent purgatory" leaves me wondering if Park is not 
prolonging his own future sojourn in purgatory. After all, Jesus taught that 
"whosoever sayeth to his brother 'Thou fool!' is in danger of hellfire," which 
makes me wonder about looking for smoke near Park's feet [or should I say 
hooves?].

You have my sympathy!  What a bureaucratic nightmare! Around 1990 a friend of 
mine sued a well-known large company for $1.2 Billion on the grounds that they 
were grossing $900 Million per year selling a product that infringed his 1987 
Patent (and he could prove that AFTER he had applied for a Patent, the chief 
technical people of this company had attended a Lecture in which he had 
disclosed his highly valuable/innovative discovery!). The large company stalled 
for years but JUST before Trial by a Jury, they paid the PTO the required fee (I 
think it was only $1,500) to _RE-EXAMINE_ the validity of his Patent.  I learned 
about this in 1994 by pure accident from a trade news-magazine, and contacted 
the Examiner in order to send him a chapter of a book which I had published in 
1986 (before the Patent had issued) describing my friend's invention as roughly 
the greatest thing since sliced bread (specifying why it veritably reeked of the 
statutorily-required "novelty, utility, & non-obviousness"). I then asked the 
Examiner how long Re-Examination would take. He replied: "at most two months."  
I asked, "how will I know the outcome?"  He replied: "It will probably be all 
over the Internet!"  That was at least 6 or so years ago!!!  The matter is still 
not concluded!!!  I recently again was accidentally reminded of this and asked 
my friend for the status. He replied that things were looking good and he 
expects his Patent to be OK in the near future. (I forgot to ask whether the 
lawyers on both sides were still making presentations to the Examiner and to the 
internal PTO Appeals Board, or whether, as one assumes, he had lost inside the 
PTO and was now relying on proving his case to the satisfaction of the Court of 
Appeals for the Fedreral Circuit [CAFC] which has Judges that are also qualified 
Patent Attorneys as well as lawyers.)

My friend and I are both theists; however, I gather from Erik Baard's interview 
with you in the Village Voice that you are an agnostic and therefore will 
discount what my friend told me even before his decade- long struggle with the 
PTO for justice began, and that is, to beware because often "Satan controls the 
courts!".  You can conclude the same from a study of Princeton [philosophy Ph.D. 
&] theologian Gregory Boyd in his 1999 book "GOD AT WAR."  My own theological 
interpretation of the situation is that perhaps in your case the PTO and the 
Courts are "on the side of the angels" because God wants you to realize that if 
you CANNOT complete your public demonstration of a stand-alone (nearly) Free 
Energy device without exhaustion of the $10 Million cash which you still have in 
hand, then you do not DESERVE to ask the public to have sufficient confidence in 
your claims to have Morgan Stanley go ahead with their planned $1 Billion IPO 
for Blacklight Power.  You are now going to have to have to fight a war on two 
fronts: (1) to get the gyrotron-based device finished & make an incontrovertibly 
unassailable public demonstration that is sufficient to convince even the APS 
spokesman-propagandist-spoiler Bob Park; and (2) get the PTO to provide you with 
the temporary monopoly to which fairly patentable subject matter gives you the 
constitutionally-guaranteed right.

Several people who have dealt with you in person have told me that you seem to 
be more interested in overthrowing conventional QM than in developing a 
commercial product.  But those are two completely separate propositions.  It 
could be that either your energy discovery or/and your allegedly new materials 
with inexplicable properties are both empirically genuine discoveries and yet 
your attempted theoretical rationale is mistaken.  Therefore as I fruitlessly 
advised your former teacher Dr. John Farrell in 1996 or 1997 after seeing a 
draft of your patent application, you would serve your investors' interests 
better by ALSO making claims that are sheerly empirical, rather than based upon 
your hypothesized hydrino-based novel chemistry (hereinafter "super chemistry") 
--  because, as I pointed out then, if the publications in Fusion Technology of 
my [then] Intellectual Property Law (IPL) clients Profs. Bush & Eagleton were 
valid, then the "excess heat" in your admittedly epochal-discovery pertaining to 
aqueous potassiium carbonate with nickel cathodes could be explained better by 
Cold Nuclear Fusion (CNF) than by your own "superchemistry."  There is published 
scientific _EVIDENCE_ that CNF is correct, because not only B&E but also Notoya 
in Japan (who replicated the B&E work) have claimed to have found and _measured_ 
the "nuclear ash" that "explains" the "excess heat" in variations on your light-
water discovery via Bush's type of CNF theory.

When I drafted the B&E patent, we took great pains to bend over backwards to 
stipulate that YOU were the first discoverer of Excess Heat without use of heavy 
water, but that B&E thought that some of your scientific statements (such as 
that replacement of potassium by sodium would reduce the amount of heat, whereas 
in their experiments and published results the exact opposite was both expected 
and observed!) were empirically falsifiable and therefore they were entitled to 
patents on what was demonstrably/patentably new from them.  [Their Patent later 
failed to issue on a stupid technicality that was my fault but for which they 
have forgiven me.]

Dr. Farrell seemed open to my verbally expressed advice on the phone, and 
accepted that I was trying to help you rather than "hurt a competitor," and 
therefore I mailed him a copy of the B&E patent application with my advice as to 
how you could best protect your investors by making _purely empirical_ claims so 
that if your "super-chemistry" turned out to be mistaken you would still have 
something.  I was very disappointed that you told him to send it back to me 
unopened, because (as God is my witness [despite Matthew 5:37 !!]), I had 
absolutely NO motive whatsoever except the altruistic desire to help a fellow 
inventor; your returning of our package ostentatiously marked "UNOPENED" struck 
me then as either "arrogant" or "paranoid."  So now further events (which I 
foresaw and PREDICTED to Dr. Farrell in 1996) show plainly that my 1996 advice 
to you was GOOD advice and that you are going to have to follow it or else end 
up with nothing or, as I very explicitly warned Dr. Farrell in plain English, 
end up being sued by your investors for culpable negligence or worse.

There is no harm in your trying to prosecute both kinds of claims but to 
concentrate on the "super-chemistry" formulation of claims to the deliberate 
EXCLUSION of strictly empirical [eschew explanation but state replicable facts] 
claims is egocentric & childishly self-indulgent. Your investors did not hand 
you $25 Million in order for you to spend a decade indulging your obvious 
penchant for reflection on esoteric subjects (documented in your 800-page book, 
which may intimidate non-theoreticians but strikes a well-trained mathematician 
like me as mostly "padding" for the sake of "proof by intimidation" rather than 
by actual logical deduction).

However, I am not writing merely in order to get the emotional satisfaction of 
telling you (after you hung up on me when I raised a difficult question) "I TOLD 
YOU SO" nearly a decade later. As someone who at age 70 has the unrequited 
ambition to become a "knee-jerk Christian" I am asking myself WWJD (the famous 
"what would Jesus do") as regards you.

So here is some MORE altruistic advice.  Before I can deliver it, I must admit 
that in at least one sentence in my previous letter, I was quite mistaken, and 
after reading the Court's August 15 decision (rendered a week after I sent you 
my August 8 letter), "I stand corrected."

The problem came because I over-stated my moral indignation at the unfairness of 
the Establishment in their treatment of you in order to show that I was NOT 
criticising your book from _their_ viewpoint. My August 8 INTENT remains 
unaltered, though, technically, it was flawed.  I now recall 3 of my statements 
to you then:

[1]. "But the fact that I _KNOW_ that the Establishment has not treated you 
fairly nor given fair consideration to your new ideas does NOT, alone, prove 
that your new ideas are valid." (I stand by that position still.)

[2]. "Somewhere I saw posted by your former teacher Dr. Farrell the exact 
wording of the referees' reports which denied him his admittedly 'desperate' 
attempts to publish your astrophysical evidence.  I am unalterably certain that 
those referees have done a wicked and evil thing and deserve obloquy!"

My adjectives "wicked & evil" are predicated upon the proposition that the 2nd 
person of the Trinity is "the Way & the TRUTH & the Light" and therefore 
suppression of truth is isomorphic to the crime of Deicide. (However, those 
referees may have been so misled by the devil that in their conscious minds they 
thought what they were doing was right; as Jesus said of those nailing him to 
the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!")

[3]. "Also I am totally certain that the USPTO has engaged in criminal 
wrongdoing in allowing outside influence to get one of your Patents yanked AFTER 
the Examiner had approved its issuance and given you an issuance number!  
Presumably 'overzealous prosecutor' Bob Park or someone of the same ilk is 
behind this egregious crime at the PTO."

Regarding [3}, I stand corrected.  After reading Judge Sullivan's decision 
[attached] I must admit, contrary to my earlier emotional feelings on the 
subject, that (1) there can be legitimate reasons for a disgruntled competitor 
(e.g. victim of an unrighteous infringement lawsuit) to bring to the attention 
of the PTO "prior art" that the Examiner had overlooked which would result in an 
"eleventh hour" decision that the question of patentability needed to be 
examined more carefully, and (2) the PTO has both the right & the DUTY to make 
an 11th-hour delay in issuance of a Patent when a "serious" [non-frivolous] 
allegation of "overlooked prior art" is brought to it at the 11th-hour.

While I still believe that it is possible to characterize Bob Park (as Charles 
Platt did in the Washington Post) as behaving like an unethical "over-zealous 
prosecutor", or (as you yourself did) as a "financial competitor" [which (as 
lobbyist for the APS whose prestige will be damaged irreparably when the public 
sees what wretchedly poor judgment they used in prematurely suppressing CNF 
instead of studying it objectively) he is], it is not ethically right to 
characterize someone else's motives unless the circumstantial evidence is so 
strong that if presented in a court of law it would demonstrate _at least_ that 
mere "preponderance of the evidence" required to prevail in a civil case. If the 
APS and Park are misbehaving, it is because the devil has deceived them, and I 
should expend my energy trying to enlighten them that we face a _common_ enemy 
[aka Lucifer or the Adversary] instead of viewing them as MY enemies! (This I 
take it is the view of Dr. Scott Chubb as Guest Editor of the forthcoming 
double-issue of the Journal "Accountability in Research," vol. 8, no. 1/2, now 
at the printer for appearance Sept. 1, which is totally devoted to the subject 
of how CNF was mis-evaluated initially due to a failure of normal scientific 
protocol.)

Prof. Irvin Kayton, from whom I took Patent Bar Review courses, teaches that 
"there is no substitute for Issuance on the TECHNICAL Merits Alone" when it 
comes to LATER winning infringement suits, so that one should RESIST the 
temptation to force the Examiner's hand by citing the case-law regarding the 
"long-sought, seldom- approached & never-attained" doctrines [now codified into 
so-called Objective Indicia of Non-Obviousness] which may enable an 
inexperienced patent practitioner to force the PTO to issue a weak patent that 
will not stand up during the heat of enforcement litigation and is therefore not 
worth having.

Since you are preparing for an IPO, Morgan Stanley will not be "exercising due 
diligence" unless they require you to get a STRONG patent after prosecution on 
the Technical Merits Alone; the quickie forced-issuance of a weak patent could 
be viewed later by disgruntled, litigious investors as mere "window-dressing" 
procured in order to swindle money from the public.  But even a non-technically-
savvy Judge will be on your side in later litigation if he sees that the PTO had 
originally issued the Patent based on Technical Merit Alone.

Therefore, both by strategic Kayton advice, and by the present exigencies of the 
August 15 Sullivan decision, you now have NO CHOICE but to convince the Examiner 
on the sole grounds of TECHNICAL MERIT that you have allowable claims.

If I were in your shoes, I would give up trying to intimidate the Examiner by 
hundreds of pages of irrelevant equations. Make your EMPIRICALLY DEMONSTRATED 
case like this:

"An invention or discovery is not negatived by the way in which it is made."  
(It could have come to you in a dream.)

You had an IDEA (& later found empirical validating evidence) that in the famous 
Rydberg equation for energy levels of hydrogen, E_n = E_1/n^2, (n = 1, 2, 3, 
...), E1 = ground-state energy level, where the only chemically or 
spectroscopically observed CHANGES of energy levels involve energy increments of 
the type dE = (E_n) - (E_m), where m 

Return to the Robert Bass TOC Page


www.padrak.com/ine/BASS_2.html
Aug. 28, 2000.