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Re: renewable energy / quantum mechanics refutation

Steve Johnson wrote:
Sorry if this is not entirely related to the subject
matter of the list.

This most definitely IS entirely related to the subject matter of the list. The way I define subject matter for this list, now that it's mine, is: Anything Robert Rosen would have been interested in, which covers a whole lot of ground. My reasoning is that it is probably only because of his wide ranging interests that he was able to see the patterns that he saw. Given my last post, I think the case is pretty compelling that sometimes a similarity in a field as far removed as legal terminology can offer insights into cloudy issues in science, via researching the legal notion of "proximate cause".

I believe I have described before, on the list, how it was the year my father spent at Robert Hutchins' think tank (The Center For the Study of Democratic Institutions), where they were talking about social/societal problems, economic problems, political problems, and human involvement with the natural world, that led to my father's big breakthrough with Anticipatory Systems theory. In the book of the same name, he said that living organisms exhibit behaviors which are not just reactive in nature but are anticipatory. The only way he could account for such behavior was to surmise that living systems must be governed by an anticipatory mode of system control (which he said is "model-based" in that it possesses encoded information as part of its overall organization and this information acts as a set of models governing behavior of the system). This is one of the most striking differences between living and non-living complex systems.

It was the recognition of certain entailment patterns which repeat in both biological systems and in social/economic/political/etc. systems which made him realize that these areas of concentration yield models of each other. More than that: the models we create of social systems give us "an insider view" of the system, whereas biological models give us "an outsider view"-- and both are necessary... but it is sort of impossible for us to imagine social problems in an outsider view mode because we cannot ever be anything but what we are (human) and therefore we are always seeing and experiencing social systems from inside. Similarly, we are always seeing biological systems from outside-- including our own physiology. So the fact that they are analogous to one another affords us a glimpse of behaviors (and thereby; entailments) that may well be at work in the other realm of systems and can explain many otherwise inexplicable behaviors. In my father's opinion, this kind of insight is critically useful in both directions-- not only for his interests in better understanding biological systems, but for any interest in better understanding systems in social/economic/political/etc realms. In other words, he showed Hutchins how biological models can help us learn about (and therefore, hopefully, solve) the kinds of problems the Center was most concerned with.

Cross-pollination of ideas. That's what I'm after. So don't feel like you have to apologize for posting subject matter that's not directly about the ideas with my father's name on them. OK? The whole point is to try and take his ideas further, and illuminate his ideas at the same time. I see my own role in that effort being one of showing some of the connections, the applications, the territory he traveled, how he came to his conclusions, etc.-- as we discuss whatever we end up discussing here. But it's not a rigid format and I'm open to additional requests or suggestions. The way I see it; this is your list too. Make it useful.

SJ wrote:
This guy has a patented process that claims to produce
energy from cold water by turning hydrogen into
"hydrinos" a state prohibited by standard QM. He's
been riduculed on and off since about 1991 but now
seems to have many highly reputed mainstream
scientists that support at least his experimental data
if not his explanation of it. In more extravagant claims he says his "classical QM"
disproves the Big Bang theory. The reason I decided
to post this to the list is I recall Judith
mentioning that Rosen always regarded Big Bang theory
kind of simplistic with its linear causality and
direct analogies to bubbles. (Sorry Judith, if I'm
misquoting or misremembering)

I finally managed to get over to the website and read the article at the link you posted. (Sorry for being tardy: new puppy in the house!) You remembered right-- my father viewed the whole Big Bang theory as a view of causality that has the distinct human beginning/middle/end trajectory that all human stories seem to have. He had already concluded that this is what it looks like when we take a slice of time out of context, and pretend that it's "all there is" (just as a piece of a circle can be defined as an "arc") Thus, he had adopted/developed a view that was more cyclical, more "folding in on itself" type of idea, which says that the Big Bang (if there was such an event) was entailed by whatever was already going on, and even if it retracts again as BB theory suggests, that's not "the end" either. If change is the only constant, which we should expect in a universe where time is co-organized with space, then it stands to reason that nothing will ever stay the same forever even though some things change faster than others. His view was that it is not the fact that "things are changing" or the little details like rate of change, direction of change, etc. which are of the most interest. His interest was always in finding the patterns and learning about the entailments by studying the patterns.

Randell Mills, the guy who discovered the existence/creation of "hydrinos," sounds like an interesting guy. He's an MD, apparently. at Harvard, with an engineering degree from MIT as well. Fascinating that he's gotten involved in renewable energy research and development. I also think the man who went to either debunk or prove Mills' claims is rather interesting; Rick Maas. He comes across as extremely credible, in my view.

I think they're doing all the right things as far as investigation goes and the truth will eventually come out in the wash, you know? I suspect they have a very good chance of being correct in their description of the results they've produced. The fact that it pisses quantum physicists off is stupid. Any quantum physicist worth my respect would be one who was fascinated by these results and would chase down the entailments to learn what's going on. If it proves that most of QM is "wrong" then that's information they need to know. Rather than be threatened by it, any real scientist would be hot on the trail of figuring out where it's wrong, why it's wrong, how it's wrong, etc. I'm sure there must be some quantum folks who are doing just that. The press just always goes for the dissent/ferment/anger/blood-and-guts so that's what gets reported.

I had to laugh at some of the phrasing in the story, though. For example:
This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.

ALLOWED?!!! Orbits defined by whom??? And "scientific heresy"?!! Unbelievable. The last phrase puts science in the role of The Church! I've often thought that analogy holds, myself. If so, then heresy isn't much of a crime, frankly. As I believe I'm mentioned before, Terry Jones from Monty Python has pointed out, "heresy" isn't the same thing as "blasphemy"... ("The Church accused us of blasphemy when we put out "Life of Brian"... but we weren't saying anything against GOD or making fun of God, we were making fun of The Church. So, we weren't blasphemous, we were only heretical! ) That view of science is not science as Robert Rosen defined the word, and I like his definition better: Science is simply the human investigation into how the universe, and everything in it, works. It's a different sort of investigation than the religious or purely philosophical ones. In his view, science is based on learning the entailments, not in speculation and not in grabbing the first set of entailments that seem to commute and then generating rules, laws, definitions, rituals, traditions, societies, egos.... One either IS "a scientist" or else it's just a job, a means to a different end. This is one reason why my father didn't really like being called "Dr. Rosen"-- he didn't want to be confused with the type who rely entirely on their credentials. He considered himself a scientist long before he got out of high school, never mind graduate school. It was something inherent in how he perceived the world/how he reacted to what he perceived.

Incidentally, the mention of "cold fusion" is interesting. I don't think the cold fusion experiments were "a debacle"-- I think they were actually producing behaviors that revealed entailments we don't know about, but they had expectations in their minds over what it meant. When it turned out that it wasn't what they expected it to be, they threw the whole thing away as a failure. I want to know what those entailments are, that we only glimpsed the evidence of... Just because we stopped looking at them doesn't mean they're gone. Quite the contrary!

Judith



Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Nov 5, 2005, at 9:49 AM, Steve Johnson wrote:

Sorry if this is not entirely related to the subject
matter of the list.

This guy has a patented process that claims to produce
energy from cold water by turning hydrogen into
"hydrinos" a state prohibited by standard QM. He's
been riduculed on and off since about 1991 but now
seems to have many highly reputed mainstream
scientists that support at least his experimental data
if not his explanation of it.

In addition he has $25 million in backing from
houshold name companies and has a plant in New Jersey
that expects to produce and market a commercial heater
in 4 years.

In more extravagant claims he says his "classical QM"
disproves the Big Bang theory. The reason I decided
to post this to the list is I recall Judith
mentioning that Rosen always regarded Big Bang theory
kind of simplistic with its linear causality and
direct analogies to bubbles. (Sorry Judith, if I'm
misquoting or misremembering)

Has anyone heard of this guy? What do you make of his
claims. Is this another cold fustion debacle in the
making or a revolution?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,2763,1627425,00.html


http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/blacklight_power_000522.html











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