BLP news

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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ladajo
Posts: 6258
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:18 pm
Location: North East Coast

Re: BLP news

Post by ladajo »

Maybe they are talking about Simon because they banned him for pro-drug spamming.

Like sometimes I think we should here.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by GIThruster »

AcesHigh wrote:
GIThruster wrote: They don't fit the pattern of a scammer. A scammer would never waste the time to write a 1,200 page book and them amend it constantly for more than a decade. No matter how wrong these people may be, they believe they're right. Unless you have evidence they don't believe in what they're doing, it is uncharitable to call them "scammers".
sorry GI, but I must ask if you have evidence that Dr Sonny White does not believe in what he is doing. Because basically, you called him a scammer here in this forum... people on NASA SpaceFlight Forums read that thread here at Talk Polywell and everybody is doubting the quality of this forum because of your very harsh allegations about Dr White...
I haven't called Sonny a scammer. I'm sure he believes the QVF conjecture stuff. He was completely sold on it before he went back to school and got his PhD in physics. Before that he was a very capable mechanical engineer. Trouble is he has these delusions of grandeur and always has. He is always presenting himself in a very self-promoting fashion, claiming he has the answers the world needs, even back in the days when he had no training to understand the things he pretended to.

My real objection to Sonny is not that he is gullible when it comes to his model, and that he's sloppy and undisciplined in the math he does, both of which are true. (Obviously, were he not sloppy I could not have corrected his math 7 years ago.) My real objection is he is dishonest. He takes self-promotion a couple steps too far. The incident where he took Paul's old data that he had objected to, and decided to pass it off as evidence in support of his model clearly demonstrates a lack of professional veracity that is incongruous with good science. Renaming it, and failing to tell people that it predated his model by years, presenting it in a way that deliberately caused people to think he had run those experiments in the Eagle lab when he hadn't, repeatedly using the term "prediction" despite corrections to the point that predictions ALWAYS come before the data, failing to note to people Paul's experiments lacked the very scientific controls he had years earlier complained about--these are not the acts of honesty and integrity we expect from the scientific community and from NASA. And personally, the whole "Praise Jesus!" exclamations he became known for at 100YSS, make me want to vomit. I happen to be a real Christian, and when people use Christ's name to sell their personal wares, especially when those wares are damaged goods, it really pisses me off.

The list goes on and on. As I've noted, there were multiple occasions back in the early days when Jim was first qualifying his ARC Lite balance, back around 2006-7; where Jim was getting screwy data and posted to his list that he didn't understand what he was seeing. Sonny claimed that data supported his model, and afterward Jim found he had a broken tension bearing. The one Tom put in was too small. Later on the same thing happened again. Jim was saying he did not understand the data, Sonny was saying it supported his conjectures, and Jim found he had an electrical short through the thruster and back through the balance arm itself. IIRC, this sort of thing happened 3 times. And the math error he had made where he confused a factor with a power in his equations, should have given obviously wrong predictions, yet he never skipped a beat in claiming his model was making predictions for the data Jim was seeing. He didn't actually "predict" any data. He just fit his model to the data after the data came out. And I did explain to him on several occasions in no uncertain terms that this is NOT how science is done. Predictions ALWAYS come before the data. When the data comes first, statements about it are postdictions and do not carry the same weight.

And there are other things. Fact is, he routinely ignores the places where the QVF and ZPF models are broken and fails to answer the critics, which is the hallmark of pathological science. He routinely misrepresents his lab evidence, and interprets it in silly ways. Standing up in front of an entire classroom of students out in AZ and telling them he had received a "non-null result" in the interferometry experiment is just crazy wrong! If it is possible to have a null result, then this is what he had! Why would you stand up and call it a "non-null" result? None of this stuff is the kind of behavior we need to expect from the scientific community, and it is certainly a blemish on NASA that they don't cope with it properly.

So those are my objections. I don't think Sonny is a scammer. He believes in what he's doing. Primarily the trouble is his ego has clouded his vision concerning how to do good science. He thus ends up lying to himself first, and then to everyone else. And this is why I have maintained and still do, that you cannot trust the data from Eagleworks. You need to see validation from other labs before you can believe what Sonny is telling people, because he is telling them what his ego dictates and it may, or may not be true.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Re: BLP news

Post by AcesHigh »

ok, that was a good enough explanation. Maybe I mistakenly understood you saying he was dishonest in the sense of a scammer, someone who is dishonest presenting false data as if it was true.

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Re: BLP news

Post by AcesHigh »

Betruger wrote:NSF will complain about this forum anyway because of the General subforum. And how much more lax TP is, overall.
nah, that´s not it. From everything I read, most of them don´t really read TalkPolywell, they just read those EM Drive threads after some links were posted there.

but I called the attention from some people there, for paying attention to the fact GI Thruster was too agressive in his words, or that he was a banned member of NSF, instead of the technical stuff he says.

GIThruster
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Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by GIThruster »

Tons more BLP stuff since the last I looked:

http://www.blacklightpower.com/whats-new/

Still don't know what to make of BLP. The chemical data, and the astronomical data, really does seem to suggest he's onto something. I just find it so hard to believe all of QM is wrong.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

kurt9
Posts: 588
Joined: Mon Oct 15, 2007 4:14 pm
Location: Portland, Oregon, USA

Re: BLP news

Post by kurt9 »

I will believe Black Light Power has something when they bring a product to market, not anytime before.

JoeP
Posts: 523
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:10 am

Re: BLP news

Post by JoeP »

GIThruster wrote:Tons more BLP stuff since the last I looked:

http://www.blacklightpower.com/whats-new/

Still don't know what to make of BLP. The chemical data, and the astronomical data, really does seem to suggest he's onto something. I just find it so hard to believe all of QM is wrong.
Looks like recent posts about funding wins, a notice about a paper submitted to an energy journal, threats to sue people on Wikipedia, and an attempt to match a natural xray source to their supposed "hydrino transitions" as some kind of evidence of the identity of dark matter (reaching just a bit?), and old demo stuff from last year which someone might just do just as impressively with an arc welder, powdered metal, some solar cells, LED lights, and some metal rollers.

Looks like a "busy-work" kind of list to make it seem as if stuff is happening over at the BLP labs to me.

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by Skipjack »

There seems to be some movement on the BLP website:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/whats-new/

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by GIThruster »

It's interesting, but again this is not a net power in v power out analysis so I'm not sure what it is supposed to demonstrate. You can form a plasma with high current on nearly anything. The point then seems to be that there was no current at the time of the detonation, but one still has to wonder about the charge on the "gears" or whatever the pinching surfaces are called. I just don't see adequate analysis to make a real judgment of the utility of this experiment.

FAST "Spark Plasma Sintering" machines generate plasma from high currents as a matter of normal operation, but I'm not aware of anyone taking 17k photos/second of that process. It might have a time delay too. If so this would mean nothing.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by Skipjack »

I am skeptical of BLP, but I am surprised that they keep up their information flow, despite the fact that they got their last funding round filled (or so they claim anyway). I was expecting Mills to go dark again for a few years until his funding runs out again, like he did the last few times.
I dont know what to make of them. Everything tells me it is BS, but I am still interested and want to watch. It would be fantastic if it worked.
Elmar

GIThruster
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Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by GIThruster »

Certainly Mills and his crew believe what they are doing is real and their explanation is correct. He's not the charlatan many accuse him to be. And when you look at the chemical results, they are most impressive. I'm not saying I agree with his physics, nor that what he has works, but he is no charlatan. He is however fighting a terrible uphill battle for 30 years now, which is what we ought to expect, be he right or wrong. You don;'t just tell everyone in the world their physics is wrong and expect to win them over.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by Skipjack »

GIThruster wrote:Certainly Mills and his crew believe what they are doing is real and their explanation is correct.
I am not so sure. Call me cynical, but I have trouble believing anyone when it comes to large sums of money, even if they don't make outrageous claims and Mills claims are pretty far out there.
That said, there is still a giggle factor to it, when you think about "what if it is true", which keeps me watching their story. At least it is good entertainment ;)

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Re: BLP news

Post by Giorgio »

Skipjack wrote:
GIThruster wrote:Certainly Mills and his crew believe what they are doing is real and their explanation is correct.
I am not so sure. Call me cynical, but I have trouble believing anyone when it comes to large sums of money, even if they don't make outrageous claims and Mills claims are pretty far out there.
That said, there is still a giggle factor to it, when you think about "what if it is true", which keeps me watching their story. At least it is good entertainment ;)
They got so many influential people involved in their game that it's probably less costly for them to keep BLP alive than the image damage they would get if they actually admit that they have been tricked.
Nice business model and good entertainment as you said :mrgreen: .
A society of dogmas is a dead society.

JoeP
Posts: 523
Joined: Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:10 am

Re: BLP news

Post by JoeP »

Giorgio wrote:
Skipjack wrote:
GIThruster wrote:Certainly Mills and his crew believe what they are doing is real and their explanation is correct.
I am not so sure. Call me cynical, but I have trouble believing anyone when it comes to large sums of money, even if they don't make outrageous claims and Mills claims are pretty far out there.
That said, there is still a giggle factor to it, when you think about "what if it is true", which keeps me watching their story. At least it is good entertainment ;)
They got so many influential people involved in their game that it's probably less costly for them to keep BLP alive than the image damage they would get if they actually admit that they have been tricked.
Nice business model and good entertainment as you said :mrgreen: .
I'd give Rossi a higher chance (1% maybe?) of making a real product that does something useful...and that doesn't say much. Mills has been promising stuff for what...a couple decades or more?

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Re: BLP news

Post by Skipjack »

JoeP wrote: I'd give Rossi a higher chance (1% maybe?) of making a real product that does something useful...and that doesn't say much. Mills has been promising stuff for what...a couple decades or more?
Indeed and usually he would surface, grab some funds and then disappear again not to heard from for years. This time things are seemingly a bit different and he keeps showing stuff (and alleged progress), even though he (allegedly) has all the funding he can accept. This is rather curious.

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