Excess Heat

I am an engineer.  Engines run on heat.  Sources of energy in any form are of basic interest to scientists and engineers.  Cold fusion experiments were supposed to be producing heat in quantities that exceeded what would be caused by the power used to drive them.  This was ridiculed as perpetual motion, but if a reaction of a type that was formerly unknown is occurring, it is not perpetual motion.  It is a discovery. My life during and since high school was in the shadow of the awareness that civilization consumes an extreme and steadily increasing amount of energy and that we live on a finite planet with an expanding population.  If we do not find a different way to power civilization, we may prove Malthus correct and discover a real need to reduce population by a large amount, or drastically decrease energy consumption per capita and that is potentially a very dismal prospect.  Even if we can get all the energy we need to live comfortably, the enviro...

Socrates was an epistemic nihilist, a fancy way to describe him claiming (repeatedly) to only know for certain that he knew nothing.  This is like me insisting during the years of discussion of Randell Mills, which included him in the online conversation, that I was skeptical about his claims and theory.  One day, Randell asked me what it was I was skeptical about.  I had no reply.  I felt rather stupid to have believed that I could just call myself a skeptic and not be responsible for thinking about concluding something with the information I was processing.  Was it all fraud?  I took that as a very real possibility for a long time, because fraud is a big part of fringe science.  I did not realize that understanding what Mills was theorizing was not fringe science. I thought I could never understand it, just as I was resigned to ever understanding the standard model of quantum mechanics, SQM.  What he was doing was attempting to help science reco...

Life is not a popularity contest for Randell Mills.  Yet, he is quite sociable and it seems that everyone who has had the chance to know him thinks highly of him.  He's not normal in the sense of being anywhere near average intelligence and I expect that made social interactions challenging many times.  His very intense desire to understand the world around him was evident at an early age and his high school chemistry teacher considered him to be of genius intellect.  His professor of physical chemistry, which is the subject that bridges the gap between chemistry and quantum mechanics, at Franklin and Marshall college, Dr. John Farrell , was deeply impressed with his student.  In a most extraordinary turn of events, the professor gradually became the student of the former student.  I know of no other example of a student convincing the professor that the understanding of the subject about which the professor is a recognized expert is mostly wrong.  Fer...