TBH, I'm often surprised at the ignorance of a particular field of science, from some scientists in a (reasonably) closely related field. I'm not sure if it might be due to having to concentrate so much of their careers on a particular field, that they can't see the wood for the trees.
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With the chaps mentioned in your post, I'm wondering how much of what Mills is claiming to be doing that they fully understand. The other alternative is that they do understand, and it is either a) legit, or b) it isn't, but they are in it for what they can make out of it.
b) is not a particularly appetising thought.
I suspect that answer to that is "actually very little". Mills has spent almost 30 years producing literally thousands of pages of scientific-sounding gobbledygook. Most people who have sat down and tried to parse out what he's actually saying have admitted that it make little or no sense to them. But of course, we all know at least one Cliff Claven type who insists he understands everything, no matter what.
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From my reading so far, the key Mills et al. claims are 1) the existence of "hydrinos", hydrogen atoms in fractional quantum states; and 2) the creation of hydrinos in a very particular kind of physical regime (I don't understand this much, but I think it involves some combination of electric fields, temperature, pressure, and the presence of one or more catalysts)*.
Per Mills+, 1) requires at least an extensive modification to textbook QM. From what I've read so far, essentially no one has published a paper supporting this. And I suspect that the tens of thousands of people who understand the relevant parts of QM well enough and who might read the relevant Mills+ papers (would) fairly quickly conclude(d) that it's yet one more piece of crackpot nonsense. I'd be very surprised if Prof Booker (UNC Asheville) reached a very different conclusion (Prof Ramanujachary? I don't know).
Re 2): I think the part of physics which, today, involves experiments in similar regimes is small and obscure; the number of people who have relevant experience is small. Not that it's particularly difficult understand, nor that the experiments themselves are particularly challenging or expensive, but there is certainly a significant learning curve. I suspect that most scientists in this small community would have been aware of Mills+ papers (or at least some of them); some did write papers about this topic, but apparently no one was able to reproduce Mills+ results, or they disagreed with his conclusions (I'll post links to some of these papers later). I doubt that either Prof Booker or Prof Ramanujachary has relevant experimental experience (but I'll be checking their published papers, just to be sure).
It might be interesting to look at some instances of "revolutionary" discoveries in the last hundred years or so, in physics and closely related fields; how was the reaction of the immediate (small) community of physicists different from that to Mills+, how was it similar? While no substitute for one's own due diligence (or "
done their homework like I have", as ms says in the OP), I think looking carefully at the responses of scientists who are familiar with the topic and who would have an enormous amount to gain if Mills+ claims panned out should be very instructive.
* "
reacting a very tiny amount of hydrogen with a silver catalyst and then exposing that reaction to an electrical discharge. When the hydrogen, silver and electrical discharge combine, the hydrogen atoms shrink, releasing a tremendous amount of energy in the process", as ms puts it in the OP