Brett Holverstott continues to reply via “unlinked” Medium posts, which are difficult for anyone (including me) to read. As a result, I am responding here.

Brett writes:

You may also find this blog post noteworthy, although it is already out of date.

This is an interesting Blog post which lists many experimental articles involving the hydrino state and related work. He concludes the post with:

I realize that there is often a high barrier for investigating new discoveries. And I realize that there are aspects of Mills’s proposal which, on first glance, smack of pseudoscience: new states of hydrogen, new energy technology, new theories. It sets off all the warning bells, and that is what makes the topic so interesting both from a scientific perspective and a psychological / sociological one. And I sympathize with the larger point of Sirola’s article, which is to say that I have very little patience for fringe science and pseudoscience.

But in this particular case, the claims of Mills, his team, and his collaborators, may be grounded in genuine experimental realities that will force us to learn something new about the hydrogen atom.

I think that this pretty much states the core of the issue. Mills is claiming to have found a state of matter (hydrogen to hydrino) which is incompatible with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has been an extremely powerful and robust tool in understanding the atomic scale world, especially when it comes to the behavior of electrons.

For example, does Mills view of electrons as classical entities account for the behavior of electrons in a tunneling transistor? Here an electron on one side of a thin insulator appears on the other side, which manifests as current flow in the transistor. The behavior of the electron in a tunneling transistor is not “classical”. The electron has a probability of being on both sides of the insulator and can appear on the other side of the insulator as a result.

A claim that quantum mechanics is either wrong or significantly incomplete in its area of application (e.g., quantum states of electrons) is difficult to accept. It does indeed smack of pseudoscience, even if it eventually turns out to be true.

Along with Mills’ extra ordinary claims about quantum states in hydrogen atoms is his claim that hydrinos are the key to one of the great physics and cosmology questions: the identity of dark matter. That hydrinos are, in fact, dark matter.

Another problem is that for almost twenty years Mills has been claiming that the hydrogen to hydrino transition can be used to build energy devices. In effect, energy from water. So far these devices have not shipped to end users.

I can only speculate as to why there has not been more scientific attention to Mills’ theories. My speculation is that refuting Mills’ theories and results would be time consuming and people generally have decided to spend their time elsewhere. These people might find the investment in time spent refuting theories that violate long held scientific theory (e.g., quantum mechanics) to be unsatisfying compared to other ways they could invest their time. This is only likely to change when they are presented with a result that they cannot easily deny. Apparently this has not happened yet.

It could be that decades in the future Mills will be viewed as a genius who did not get the recognition he deserved in his own time.

I would be happy to find that my skepticism about Mills’ theories is incorrect and that his energy producing devices become wide spread.

Every week I see the effects that humanity is having on the marine world. The coral reefs are dying around us. Escaping carbon based energy generation with such clean energy systems would be a huge step for humanity and the natural world. But I will believe that such energy systems exist when they are shipped to end users.