Excess Heat

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...

I was a young engineer, working for FAA in Albuquerque on March 23, 1989.  A news item caught the interest of myself and co-workers.  Some scientists claimed to have discovered a new source of energy, which had been a focus of my interest since I was a boy.  It was also a prime interest of my father, an electrical engineering professor.  The news was of a press conference .   Two professors at the U of Utah, Fleischmann and Pons were telling the world about something that would unfortunately become labeled as "cold fusion".  This was the beginning of confusion that has persisted.  They really had no good reason to assume that it was a nuclear fusion reaction, and they were careful to admit that it was an hypothesis.  Their evidence was from an electrolytic apparatus.  The analysis was primarily from calorimetry, the measurement of heat, one of the first tools developed for chemistry.  In the modern era, this tool is credited to Lavo...