Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant Light Power is nonsense. They've been promising amazing products for nearly 10 years now. Here's a Wayback Machine capture of their home page from 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151122183613/https://brilliant...

BrilliantLight has developed a commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell™ catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into brilliant light which is converted to electricity using photovoltaic panels.

If they actually had this "commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy" they'd be selling the machines or selling the electricity by now.

View on HN

There have been a well documented series of engineering solutions to problems in the implementation that have taken time to solve. Melting electrodes due to too much power - solved by molten stream electrodes C 2016. Melting holes in the reaction chamber eventually resolved after many different things tried by quartz that is transparent to UV. Etc. Demonstrations are offered to qualified parties.

They're not rewriting physics. Whatever's going on over there, it's fake.

Though the main suncell page mostly just claims to be a solar concentrator? Like, okay, you can do that, but carefully aimed mirrors don't really save you any money over the same surface area of solar cells. Or twice the area of solar cells, looking at the efficiency claim on that page.

They have a new (since 1990s) classical model of atomic structure that is superior to the electron probability cloud model. It models the electron as a thin fluid shell that spins around the nucleus along all great circle paths. It allows calculations of molecular structure in closed form equations.

You misunderstand the suncell - the source of UV light is a hydrogen reaction when it bumps into a catalyst able to accept the right amount of energy that pushes the "ground state" electron into a lower energy orbit nearer to the nucleus releasing said energy. Solar concentrator photovoltaic cells are used to convert the intense UV light into electricity because they are cheaper per kW and much smaller.

Their lack of progress in producing power from their system suggests otherwise. Meanwhile the standard quantum mechanical model of matter goes on making correct, testable predictions. Including in fusion experiments.

Except for dark matter, dark energy, accelerating expansion of the universe, sun's coronal temperature, mature galaxies in the earliest times after the big bang...

If they had a real UV thingy that acts as proof for a new atomic model they would send samples to major labs and become famous.

The "Don't you want a Nobel prize?" argument is a very good way to detect pseudoscience.

See engineering challenges documented above and https://brilliantlightpower.com/plasma-video/ and their video archive also they have hydrinos isolated in a test tube and have performed many analytical experiments to measure properties that definitively prove exactly what it is and matches the theoretical predictions.

Videos they make aren't good evidence of anything. Just send samples of one or two pieces that show off these improved physics. It would change the world, make them famous, and let them get them rich off of patents. No need to wait until they have a full working product.

The only reason to hold back so much is that it's not real.

Videos are evidence of the many problems they have run into getting it to work reliably. One good reason to hold back would be intellectual property/stealth mode development. They have many patents but have had some patents rescinded after skeptics objections about "breaking known laws of physics" as if there is ever a final unimpeachable unimprovable laws of physics. Even so the theory is openly published and samples of hydrinos are available to qualified parties I understand.

> the many problems they have run into getting it to work reliably

That's the thing, they don't need to get the system working reliably, they just need one little part to show off.

> They have many patents but have had some patents rescinded after skeptics objections about "breaking known laws of physics"

There's a good way to get those patents not rescinded...

> available to qualified parties

The only reason to play this game is because it's fake.

Yes everyone, especially including all the believers, is waiting for the definitive demonstration that makes everyone stop and say whoa, WTF is going on. I envisage something like putting a suncell on top of a mountain and illuminating the whole county at night, but the FAA might not like that.

Well, solar concentrators can in (traditional physics-based) theory increase solar cell efficiency substantially: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3727/13/5/01... . Whether that's cost-effective is a different matter.

But that's not got anything to do with Brilliant Light's claims, which so far do not stand up to scrutiny.

They are using concentrator photovoltaics than can handle light 1000 times more intense than normal sunlight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrator_photovoltaics and the actual suncell lightsource in operation without photovoltaics video from Feb 2023 is at https://brilliantlightpower.com/commercial-suncell-initial-s...

It's interesting that skeptics are always vague and dismissive - I think very few have actually studied the theory - I'm not aware of any specific rebuttal other than the infamous Rathke paper that initially had a sign error in the main equation and had 5 other significant errors as stated by Mills. In any case all it was saying was logically equivalent to this apple cannot be an orange.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com