Does anyone here do materials analysis?

[Filip Sandor]

There is no reason for my local supermarket to care about US patent laws.

I don't see how you being a foreigner falsifies David's claims? And yes, I have considered that David Hudson might have been lying.

The testing I want to do on the material is really mostly so I can say "yes, the sample I have in my posession has been tested in a lab by professionals, so I know I have something unique" and have the papers to back it up. I trust David Hudson was not lying about the powder. Due to the extent of information her covered in his many lectures (many hours long) it seems unlikely to me that he was making it all up. Nearly all of his lectures are made up of technical data and information about his research. His character throughout the lectures is also consistent and distinct. After you listen to it for a while, you get a feel for what he feels and notice he has a very distinct character which doesn't suit the character of a con at all. Of course my opinion is subjective, but then you should really do your own research. If you would like the audio of Hudson's lectures I got no problems sharing it.

 

[KingMerv00]

I don't see how you being a foreigner falsifies David's claims? And yes, I have considered that David Hudson might have been lying.

The testing I want to do on the material is really mostly so I can say "yes, the sample I have in my posession has been tested in a lab by professionals, so I know I have something unique" and have the papers to back it up. I trust David Hudson was not lying about the powder. Due to the extent of information her covered in his many lectures (many hours long) it seems unlikely to me that he was making it all up. Nearly all of his lectures are made up of technical data and information about his research. His character throughout the lectures is also consistent and distinct. After you listen to it for a while, you get a feel for what he feels and notice he has a very distinct character which doesn't suit the character of a con at all. Of course my opinion is subjective, but then you should really do your own research. If you would like the audio of Hudson's lectures I got no problems sharing it.

If you pay to have it identified I recommend that you:

1) Don't tell the lab what you think it is.

2) Send them a 5 samples of white powder but claim they are all unkown. Only one is your mystery substance. The other four should be flour, sugar, etc. (only if the price is reasonable of course).

Then you can be sure there was no bias in the testing and that they didn't just make up the results.

3) Ask for spectroscopy. Bet you a million bucks it will work.

 

[geni]

I don't see how you being a foreigner falsifies David's claims? And yes, I have considered that David Hudson might have been lying.

Well you see it means that conspircoy thoeries rather fall apart.

The testing I want to do on the material is really mostly so I can say "yes, the sample I have in my posession has been tested in a lab by professionals, so I know I have something unique" and have the papers to back it up. I trust David Hudson was not lying about the powder.

Why?

Due to the extent of information her covered in his many lectures (many hours long) it seems unlikely to me that he was making it all up.

Why? It is a lot less effort to make stuff up about chemical bonding than talk about the real thing. Point groups, schrodinger equations, various bits of quantum physics with allowed and non allowed transitions, relitivity (it's a bit hard to explain why Hg is a liquid without that), Trust me makeing it up is a lot easyer.

Nearly all of his lectures are made up of technical data and information about his research.

Would this be the same information that appears on his website? Ok then.

M-state is a meanless term in orbital chemistry.

He goes on about orbitally rearranged monoatomic elements. Well lets have a look at what that could mean:

A theretical monoatmic gold atom in it's ground state has an electron arangement of [Xe] 4f¹⁴ 5d¹⁰ 6s¹
Now energy levels being what they are the stuff in the f orbital is going nowhere so we are onlu worried about the d and s orbitals:

5d¹⁰ 6s¹
As you can see this gives us 10 paired electrons in the d orbitals (because there are only 5 d orbitals) and 1 unparied electron in the s orbital. This is the ground state of gold. Any other state requires energy to get into and more energy in order to stay there.

So how could this be orbitally rearranged? Well the orbitals themselves are going nowhere since their existance is defined by the schrodinger equations. So how about moveing the electrons around? Well you can but that would involve pumping energy into the sytem energy which it would quickly lose (this is one of the key principles behind emission spectroscopy). Where can the electrons go? well I can shove that S electron into a P orbital but that doesn't change the number of unpaired electrons (which rather knocks out all that talk of high spin states). I could bost the f electrons into a g orbital (l+1) which would give us more unpaired electrons but the system would not be remotely stable and would dump the energy to return to the ground state.

His character throughout the lectures is also consistent and distinct. After you listen to it for a while, you get a feel for what he feels and notice he has a very distinct character which doesn't suit the character of a con at all.

How do you know that doesn't just make him a fairly good conman?

Of course my opinion is subjective, but then you should really do your own research. If you would like the audio of Hudson's lectures I got no problems sharing it.

I know quite a bit about electron orbitals. I have already come to my conclusion.

Of course I could try another aproach. the price of gold today is $492.62 per troy oz:
http://www.galmarley.com/

That is $15.84 a gram.

this site claims to be selling the stuff at what works out as 3$ a gram:

http://www.whitepowdergold.com/

Something doesn't ad up.

 

[geni]

If you pay to have it identified I recommend that you:

1) Don't tell the lab what you think it is.

2) Send them a 5 samples of white powder but claim they are all unkown. Only one is your mystery substance. The other four should be flour, sugar, etc. (only if the price is reasonable of course).

Then you can be sure there was no bias in the testing and that they didn't just make up the results.

If he is going to a uni lab that shouldn't be required.

3) Ask for spectroscopy. Bet you a million bucks it will work.

There are material that wont show up on IR. KBr for example. Mass spec seems the safest course.

 

[Filip Sandor]

If he is going to a uni lab that shouldn't be required.

There are material that wont show up on IR. KBr for example. Mass spec seems the safest course.

I'm going for MS since it's the most reliable test I can carry out at this time. By the way, whatever the outcoume I'm not going to hide anything, I truly can't see any reason why I should. I think chances are pretty good there will be some foreign particles in there that might have made it in during processing, so I expect the MS analysis will pick up some things. The big question is, whether we can perform some simple chemistry tests to see if the apparent quantities (based on the mass of the entire sample) of whatever shows up on MS are actually there.

 

[Vitnir]

I discussed this with a collegue and learned that ICP-MS which was the tecnique I thought of first might not be the best. If this german lab used ICP-MS perhaps they could only detect atoms with a bit higher mass, atoms like C, O and Si isn't easily analysed and if the claims are bogus 98 % of this powder might well be composed of these element and account for that you can eat the stuff without dying suddenly.

 

[KingMerv00]

There are material that wont show up on IR. KBr for example. Mass spec seems the safest course.

I wasn't suggesting one type of spec. over another. I have never analyzed gold but surely it it is detectable at some wavelength.

Mass Spec. is certainly the best single test I can think of.

 

[Ziggurat]

There was still 98% of the sample there, which did not read in the spectroscopic analysis.

If this stuff is gold, then regardless of what's happening chemically, it must by definition still have gold nuclei. To determine this unambiguously, then, the best technique would not be standard spectroscopy, but neutron activation analysis. You irradiate the sample with neutrons, some of which get absorbed and turn the material radioactive. The radioactive isotopes will have characteristic decay modes which you can then observe. Because this is a purely nuclear technique, it doesn't matter what strangeness might or might not be going on: if it's really gold, it should show up as gold.

If you're going to ask me why doesn't anybody know about this, well, there can be many reasons. Fear of losing their job, not enough time or money to invest in promoting it to the scientific community... time, money, money, time, you get the idea.

I can tell you rather categorically that it cannot be from fear of losing their jobs. And I know this because it's been rather dramatically disproven already. The guys who discovered high temperature superconductors worked for IBM, and they were messing around with a project that they weren't even supposed to be working on, and could never have gotten permission for anyways. Their discovery was completely out of the blue, unexpected and unexplained (in fact, we STILL don't have a theory to explain it). But it was real, it was reproducible, and it was good science. They didn't lose their jobs, they became celebrities. If the science behind this stuff is real, then losing their jobs is the last thing anyone needs to worry about.

By the way, I should note this interesting point, any patents filed for Superconductivity in the US have to be approved by the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE - that might explain why your local supermarket doesn't have it!!

That's the first I've ever heard about the DOD being involved in patents, and I'm inclined to suspect it's an urban myth. But while I don't know much about patent law, I DO know a thing or two about superconductivity. And I can tell you quite categorically that you're wrong about why it isn't more widespread, and the main reason is that the required temperatures are still too low to be used in anything for consumers. Nobody wants to buy something that requires liquid nitrogen to keep it cold. The high-Tc materials are also all ceramics, which means that a) in pure form, they're brittle and hard to make wires from and b) they're actually very BAD conductors at higher temperatures. Those obstacles have nothing to do with patent law, they have to do with fundamental physical and material limits.

 

[LTC8K6]

Must be homeopathic gold...

I notice that the white powder platinum, which is made with 99.99% pure platinum is $150.00 an ounce.

 

[LTC8K6]

How to make the stuff:

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/ormus/ormus2.htm

 

[LTC8K6]

Apparently all you need is a pyramid and a gold coin...

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/pyramidgold.htm

 

[Ziggurat]

Apparently all you need is a pyramid and a gold coin...

http://www.subtleenergies.com/ormus/tw/pyramidgold.htm

I glanced at that page, and saw this little bit:

"Oh, by the way, the white and red powders are both supposed to be superconductors at room temperature, though I don't have a large enough sample yet to test. "

If it really was a superconductor, any size would be sufficient. Superconductors are perfect diamagnets, so all you'd have to do is sprinkle some above a permanent magnet and watch it levitate. Room-temperature superconductivity is trivial to test for, and the first person to demonstrate it (a rather easy and unambiguous test) would get fantanstically wealthy fantastically fast.

 

[Rof]

If it really was a superconductor, any size would be sufficient. Superconductors are perfect diamagnets, so all you'd have to do is sprinkle some above a permanent magnet and watch it levitate.

I thought the Meissner effect wasn't always found in superconductors (e.g. some of the high-Tc ones found in the 80's).

Though I wonder if they've ever bothered to stick an ohmmeter across a sample to test the ordinary kind of conductivity, given how much hand-waving "theory" and little actual evidence those pages show.

 

[Ziggurat]

I thought the Meissner effect wasn't always found in superconductors (e.g. some of the high-Tc ones found in the 80's).

No, they still have it - in fact, by definition you can't have superconductivity without it. Something with zero resistance but no Meissner effect would be called a perfect conductor (or an ideal conductor), not a superconductor. There are no known materials like that, though.

What you may be thinking of is the fact that the high-Tc superconductors are all type-II (there are conventional type-II superconductors as well), which means that in a large magnetic field, instead of expelling it quite completely, they form vortices which allows the magnetic field to pierce the material in a few spots (the center of the vortices are no longer superconducting). This can produce some interesting behavior, but you'll still get diamagnetic repulsion. Type-I superconductors don't form vortices. If the magnetic field is high enough, both type I and type II superconductors will revert to their normal, non-superconducting state.

Here's a neat little page with some info about what can happen with vortices (which can also be formed by cooling a type-II superconductor in a weak magnetic field):

http://www.fys.uio.no/super/levitation/

 

[geni]

I wasn't suggesting one type of spec. over another. I have never analyzed gold but surely it it is detectable at some wavelength.

Mass Spec. is certainly the best single test I can think of.

I seem to recall that metal metal bonding results in bands of electron orbitals with the result that wouldn't so much get peaks as a mess.

 

[geni]

so any volenteers to write the skepticwiki aricle on monoatomic gold?

 

[Soapy Sam]

Filip- Pardon if I repeat others'comments. I have not read the second page of this thread as it seemed to be getting rather wooly about half way down the first.
All equipment to do the following can be found in your nearest high school. Go sweet talk a chemistry teacher.
1. Platinum group metals are neither light nor fluffy.
2. They do not dissolve in water, at least not in your lifetime.
3. They have known specific gravities.
You need no mass spectrometer.
1. Get a battery , a flashlight bulb and a bit of wire. Pile up your powder and see if it conducts electricity. That rules out about 90% of white , powdery covalent compounds right there. It would almost certainly be metallic.
2. Your electric heater would not melt any platinate element.Not even close. A Good propane blowlamp can. They cost about $10.
Splash out another $10 on a really good high range thermocouple and measure the melting point.
3. Weigh a sample. You need an accurate balance, so either find a science teacher as advised, or a trustworthy cocaine dealer.
Now fill a teacup with water to the brim. Add a drop of liquid detergent and stir. Put the teacup on a saucer. Top up with water to the brim. Drop your weighed sample in. The more the better. Water will spuill into the saucer. You have to collect this and measure it very precisely.
You now know how much water a given weight of material displaces.

You may now run down the street wrapped in a bath towel.

When you get back, you will know the density and melting point. This is enough to identify most materials.

 

[Filip Sandor]

Filip- Pardon if I repeat others'comments. I have not read the second page of this thread as it seemed to be getting rather wooly about half way down the first.

Actually it was white and fluffy from the start.. I think it looks much heavier on the pictures I posted because of the chuncks but in fact those chunks blow around really easily like a light ping-pong ball like object (except it isn't round).

All equipment to do the following can be found in your nearest high school. Go sweet talk a chemistry teacher.

The way the teachers are here in BC I don't think they have the time or willingness to help, but a good idea none-theless which I might even try. I attempted to contact a physics teacher at UBC to get some info on who to talk to there about mass spectrosopy, but no reply now for two days. If I have time tomorrow maybe I will go up in person.

1. Platinum group metals are neither light nor fluffy.

This stuff is fluffy.

2. They do not dissolve in water, at least not in your lifetime.

This stuff doesn't dissolve, but if forms a suspension.

3. They have known specific gravities.
You need no mass spectrometer.

I'm working on it.

1. Get a battery , a flashlight bulb and a bit of wire. Pile up your powder and see if it conducts electricity. That rules out about 90% of white , powdery covalent compounds right there. It would almost certainly be metallic.

Apparently you can't just stick a battery to it, you have to do some resonance tuning of the voltage you're pumping into or something like that.. I don't remember now.

2. Your electric heater would not melt any platinate element.Not even close. A Good propane blowlamp can. They cost about $10.
Splash out another $10 on a really good high range thermocouple and measure the melting point.

I haven't tried this yet, good idea.

3. Weigh a sample. You need an accurate balance, so either find a science teacher as advised, or a trustworthy cocaine dealer.
Now fill a teacup with water to the brim. Add a drop of liquid detergent and stir. Put the teacup on a saucer. Top up with water to the brim. Drop your weighed sample in. The more the better. Water will spuill into the saucer. You have to collect this and measure it very precisely.
You now know how much water a given weight of material displaces.

This would be tough because the material forms a very fine suspension in water upon mixing and there is not enough of it to make such an experiment economical, I would need to add a good deal of the powder to get an accurate reading since I can't possibly fill the water 'perfectly' to the brim, some powder will be required to break the surface tension. It's too light.

Thanks for the suggestions though!