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Brilliant Light Power is a company that claims, on their web-site, to have:

developed a new commercially competitive, non-polluting, plasma-based primary source of massive power from the conversion of hydrogen atoms of water molecules to dark matter, the previously unidentified matter that makes up most of the mass of the universe. The SunCell® that was invented to harness the new power source catalytically converts hydrogen directly into dark matter form called Hydrino® releasing brilliant high-energy light which is down-converted in energy to facilitate the production of electricity using commercially-available concentrator photovoltaic cells.

Their Wikipedia page says:

Brilliant Light Power, Inc. (BLP), formerly BlackLight Power, Inc. of Cranbury, New Jersey is a company founded by Randell L. Mills, who claims to have discovered a new energy source. The purported energy source is based on Mills' assertion that the electron in a hydrogen atom can drop below the lowest energy state known as the ground state.

Have Brilliant Light Power demonstrated a new energy source?

Oddthinking
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Marina Ala
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    Doesnt the linked wikipedia article - or more exactly its linked citations - answer this for you? – Jamiec Apr 28 '17 at 08:04
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    I'm sincerely impressed that they appear to have been able to keep this company going since 1991 (founding of [Brilliant Light Power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Light_Power)), with [this presentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lvGLMIbtoQ) just two months ago. – Nat Apr 28 '17 at 18:20
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    Nobody knows what dark matter is. Anybody who claims to be making it is automatically dubious. – GordonM May 02 '17 at 09:35

1 Answers1

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No, the claims are completely untrue. The science of why is a little complicated.

The opinions of the users of Physics.SE are that it is:

improbable to the point of being gibberish.

The opinions of the users of Quora are:

The obvious problem with Mills theory is Hydrinos don't exist. It's 99.99999% chances to be a scam. [...] What we are looking at with BLP is nothing more than a elaborate scam involving a fancy light bulb.

MarkCC at the Good Math, Bad Math blog goes into a bit more detail:

What makes hydrinos interesting as a piece of crankery is that there's a lot more depth to it than to most crap. Dr. Mills hasn't just handwaved that these hydrino things exist - he's got a very elaborate detailed theory - with a lot of non-trivial math - to back it up. Alas, the math is garbage, but it's garbage-ness isn't obvious. To see the problems, we'll need to get deeper into math than we usually do.

Randell Mill's idea operates on a claim that a Hydrino exists, where the electron is in a lower ground state than the ground state. That's not related to Cold Fusion.

No Hydrino has ever been observed by anyone else. He's never shown it to anyone else. He's claimed that he's done it and written research papers on it but nobody's ever seen it. If he could show a new lower energy state of hydrogen to somebody, he might win the Nobel prize and he'd certainly be the talk of the town. His fundraising would be thousands of times easier and he'd be instantly recognized if he showed it to some credible scientists. It's worth asking why he won't do that.

The ground state of an electron is the lowest state it can be in. A state lower than the ground state, if it was possible, would likely have been observed by somebody else by now. The odds are extremely high that what Randell Mills proposes is impossible because despite more studies of hydrogen's quantum state than I can count, the hydrino lower than ground state has never been observed.

I think, some of the links above explain it better. But that's my explanation.

userLTK
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    Having links to sources in your answers is good but just in case the link gets lost could you write the key points from those claims in your answer? – Lio Elbammalf Apr 28 '17 at 11:39
  • Please do not generically dismiss an argument - you may be right, however we require answers to be specifically based on evidence. – Sklivvz Apr 28 '17 at 12:04
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    @Sklivvz You made the answer worse. Skeptisism should include being skeptical of grandiose promises. That's all I said. It was hardly controversial. – userLTK Apr 28 '17 at 12:04
  • https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13/faq-when-is-it-appropriate-to-be-a-dick-on-skeptics – Sklivvz Apr 28 '17 at 12:17
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    @Sklivvz It was still better before you "fixed" it. – userLTK Apr 28 '17 at 12:28
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    @Sklivvz - The edited portion has nothing to do with the meta links. The excised passage was not mocking or attacking anyone, merely stating skepticism at "too good to be true" claims, and the greater amount of work that goes into examining them than what is required to make such a claim. A more restrained moderator's hand might be in order. – PoloHoleSet Apr 28 '17 at 14:05
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    Note: I edited this again, before seeing @PoloHoleSet's comment. I felt Sklivvz had not gone far enough to remove personal speculation. I also expanded the links that were there, revealing most of them were unreferenced opinions of Internet randoms. – Oddthinking Apr 28 '17 at 14:07
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    The added paragraphs are not referenced. Either remove them or provide evidence. Also *let's totally avoid poor arguments* like conflating absence of evidence with evidence of absence. – Sklivvz Apr 28 '17 at 15:55
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    It's worth noting that the existence of a hydrino wouldn't be sufficient; it'd also have to be stable, or else the hydrogen'd just hop back up to its ground state, consuming the released energy in the process. – Nat Apr 28 '17 at 18:25
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    @Sklivvz Lio asked me to explain the key points. Mills claims to have a made use of a previously undiscovered state of hydrogen. That he's never presented the evidence to the scientific community is fundamental, not trivial. That should be mentioned, not avoided. – userLTK Apr 28 '17 at 19:43
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    @Nat I worry about going too much into the science, but to answer your comment, lower energy states tend to be stable. That's the nature of entropy. If you read more into Mills claims, he says the lower state hydrino then proceeds to become dark matter which is stable, so the stability isn't the issue. That he claims something is possible that has never been observed or shown any indication of being possible and that goes against the standard model, which has been tested as accurate more times than I can count, however, is a problem. – userLTK Apr 28 '17 at 19:59
  • On the other hand, the question is not "is the physics bogus?" but "has he found an energy source?". Whether a theoretical physical model is "true" or "false", whatever that means, is not what this site is about at all, so let's keep this strictly on topic. If you want to dismiss something based on the standard model, you can do so on [physics.se]. If you want to dismiss a claimed effect here, you need to present believable evidence produced by someone who tried to measure it. – Sklivvz Apr 28 '17 at 20:04
  • @Sklivvz Guessing that I may have to ask this in a Meta question, but if it's short enough for a comment, could you help me to understand the distinction between "believable evidence produced by someone who tried to measure it" and scientific models? This is, at what point do the conclusions of researchers go from the first category to the second? – Nat Apr 28 '17 at 20:12
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    @Nat scientific models are validated and disproven by empirical evidence. If someone claims to have evidence in contrast with a model, we need to verify the evidence, not dismiss it through the model - it's not scientifically correct. – Sklivvz Apr 28 '17 at 20:44
  • @Nat Dealing with quantum states of a particle the size of a hydrogen atom. Verification requires hundreds of observations and consistent behavior that can be observed and hopefully modeled. Without modeling in quantum physics, our understanding of quantum states of matter would be far more laborious and clumsy. The models in this case are a short-cut and a convenience that fits observations that can be tested repeatedly. On Mills' Hydrino, there are some puzzling and inconsistent results in cold fusion experiments that remain unexplained in part cause they're difficult to repeat. – userLTK Apr 28 '17 at 21:46