Hi, I’m Brett Holverstott, and this is Profane Science.
This podcast is about Randell Mills’s new theory of the physics of the atom, his discovery of the hydrino, and his efforts to develop a new hydrogen energy source.
Much of the content of this podcast is related to my book The End of Fire: Hydrino Energy and the Future of Physics. In the book, I make the case that Randell Mills’s new theory of the physics of the atom amounts to a scientific revolution in physics. Further, over three decades, he and his team have proven the existence of a new species of hydrogen, the hydrino, in a Nobel Prize worthy effort. And, that they are achingly close to engineering a new hydrogen energy source that will engender a second industrial revolution.
Like the title suggests, this topic is considered somewhat profane because it has not yet been widely accepted by the scientific community. Instead he has been on the receiving end of almost unbelievable scientific bias. Despite wide publication in the literature, a healthy amount of funding, and a number of reputable scientists who have put their reputation on the line, they just can’t seem to break through into the mainstream. He is taboo; it is profane to speak of.
The only line in my book that I care to quote is:
Truth reveals itself to the open mind.
If you are curious about and inspired by nature, this podcast is just for you. If you a skeptic, I encourage you to listen in—you might change your mind. I believe in observation and reason as a means to knowledge. I hope you do, too.
This episode is the first of a “reboot” of the series in which I will be covering topics in an orderly fashion instead of bouncing around. This also marks our first release on iTunes. You can also find us on Spotify, and Substack, where you can become a free or paid subscriber.
A little bit about me. I am an “intellectual advocate,” a philosopher and author who develops special expertise in a topic for years (sometimes decades) in order to write well about it, on topics that have significant impact for scientific or cultural change. At least, that’s how I make sense of my life.
Prior to starting Profane Science, I studied physics and chemistry for three years, worked with Randell Mills for several years, earned a BA in Philosophy with a thesis on the intellectual history of quantum theory. I wrote the first version of my book (then called Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy). Years later I revised this with a new edition, The End of Fire.
I am a professional architect, sculptor, art gallery owner, and art nonprofit planner. I am writing a new book worldwide resurgence in figurative realism in traditional painting and sculpture, called Everything is Beautiful. If you are interested in this topic, check out Profane Art, also on Substack.
That’s enough about me. Let’s get started.
The Quantum Century
This year - 2025 - marks the 100-year anniversary of the invention of quantum mechanics.
This is the theory of physics that governs the world of the very small such as particles and atoms. For those new to the topic, quantum theory came from the discovery that energy came in discrete units (called “quanta,”) that light was a particle, and that all subatomic particles exhibit wave-like behavior. But we will be talking most about the atom and the quantum theory of its structure.
From the discovery of the electron in 1897 to 1925, physicists sought a model for understanding the atom that was based on the physical laws known at the time, now known as the “classical” laws of nature. These laws, familiar on the scale of everyday life, include the laws of electricity and magnetism, mechanics, and thermodynamics. These offer a picture of a clear, clockwork universe. But physicists were unable to explain the behavior of the atom in classical terms.
In 1925, a revolution in thought occurred, and physicists invented “quantum mechanics.” It offered only a murky understanding of the atomic world, in which fundamental particles occupied atoms more akin to vibrations of a string. It didn’t speak the same language as classical laws and was the beginning of a rift that would divide the foundations of our knowledge.
Today, quantum mechanics is taught everywhere. It has been hailed repeatedly as “the greatest scientific theory of all time”. It has been labored over by thousands of physicists, who snarl at the thought of overturning it.
I believe quantum mechanics is a bad theory, for two reasons.
First, it has been experimental disconfirmed. In my next episode, we will explore two major experiments that disconfirm the quantum model.
Second, quantum mechanics is very poor at making good predictions about the world of the atom, and has been superseded by a far more successful and predictive theory. This new theory is not a new interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics—as has been attempted many times. Instead it is a classical theory of the electron as an extended particle.
It picks up where physicists left off in 1925.
The Problem with the Bohr Model
Prior to the turn of the century, theoreticians could only speculate on the nature of atoms, but in 1897, J. J. Thomson was able to isolate “cathode rays:” faint trails of illuminated, ionized gas, which could be bent by magnets. This bending allowed him to calculate the electric charge to mass ratio of the particles making up the cathode rays. Their mass was very small, so he rightfully concluded that these were subatomic particles. He called them “corpuscles,” though scientists preferred to call them “electrons.”
Thomson then began to design the atom. He imagined various three-dimensional arrangements of electrons in the atom, either fixed or moving in orbits around the center. He studied them in theory and found that if they orbit, they were less likely to be knocked out of position. If the electrons were confined to a plane, he also found a series of concentric rings naturally formed.
However, Thomson saw an early problem with his model. Each electron orbiting within the atom must follow a curved path, but according to the laws of electricity and magnetism (Maxwell’s equations) a charged particle accelerating along a curved path should be losing energy.
The process is called “radiation.” Not the nuclear kind, but electromagnetic radiation, or light. It was Maxwell, in fact, who discovered that light was an electromagnetic wave that could move through space. Radiation sheds energy, and this radiation drain should have caused the movement of the electrons in Thomson’s atom to slow down and, eventually, stop.
Thomson found, however, that the more electrons that were placed in each ring, the less radiation was emitted overall, because the radiation produced by one electron was being absorbed by the one right behind it. The radiation drain could be reduced substantially with each new electron added to the same orbit. If electrons were packed into an orbit to form an unbroken ring of charge, the radiation drain would theoretically drop to zero.
In the first decade of the 20th century, there were many other speculative models for the atom. Perhaps inspired by the idea of rings of current, Hantaro Nagaoka, a Japanese physicist who studied in Germany, speculated that rings of electrons orbited like the rings of Saturn, about a ball of positive charge
Niels Bohr continued the work of his predecessors. He proposed a new model for the atom that is now taught in grade school everywhere. In his “planetary” model, the electrons orbit the nucleus in circular orbits, much like planets orbit the Sun. But what about the radiation drain? It didn’t go away.
The electron, if in constant acceleration on a circular path, should radiate, losing energy and spiraling into the nucleus. Bohr knew that for the atom to exist, some electron orbits simply had to be stable, so Bohr proposed that there exists a stable “ground state” orbit in the atom. Above the ground state, there were more orbits, but these were unstable.
We know from experiments that atoms absorb and emit light in only certain frequencies. The spectrum of the hydrogen atom was captured in a simple formula by Rydberg. Bohr proposed that electrons may jump between orbits, but only between specific orbits determined by Rydberg’s equation. This is called “quantization.” The electron may make a “quantum jump” from one orbit to another, but it cannot be found somewhere in between.
With the totally unjustified notion that some orbits were stable and some were not, and that the electron could only occupy discrete orbits, the model correctly calculated the spectrum of light from hydrogen.
Bohr’s model probably represents how most of us think about atoms, but we rarely talk about the specific reasons why the model failed, even in college-level physics.
Early Extended Electron Models
In 1925, Bohr’s model was replaced in the minds of physicists by the quantum model proposed by Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger. This was a radical departure from thinking about the electron as a planet in the atom, or as any particle with a well-defined “classical” shape.
It modelled the electron as a cloud; like the fog around a street lamp. This is actually how Schrodinger first imagined it: as an electron smeared out over space. Orbits in this model became resonant frequencies of this cloud, and they would produce beautiful, symmetrical patterns that represented the higher unstable orbits. Soon after, physicists began to interpret this cloud as a mathematical probability for the location of a particle—but we will discuss this another time.
After the invention of quantum mechanics, only a trickle of lone voices, spread throughout the twentieth century, still spoke about the problem of radiation in the atom, the authors of papers often apologizing for bringing it up at all. It had become an indulgent theoretical exercise.
If the electron was a point moving in a circular orbit, it had to radiate. And yet, the electron couldn’t radiate in the ground state of the atom.
A point-like conception of a particle is easy to work with, but there are several problems with points. As a charged particle shrinks to a point, the charge density at the center spikes to infinity, and it will want to blow itself apart due to the repulsion felt by the particle’s charge. The electron also spins, which requires that there is some mass outside the center.
Aware of these issues, physicists turned away from point charges and began exploring the next best thing: spherical shells.
These have an intuitive appeal to physicists. They are easy to work with. Most principles of physics can be illustrated well with spheres or spherical shells; the Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky is said to have insulted a colleague thus: “He is a spherical bastard: a bastard any way you look at him.”
Almost all classical models of the electron that have received any attention—either before or after the advent of quantum theory—are spheres: spherical shells or solid spheres, oscillating or orbiting, as these are perhaps the only models that physicists have ever found remotely plausible.
The first physicists who worked on the spherical shell model were Max Abraham, Hendrik Lorentz, and Henri Poincaré, so it is sometimes referred to as the “ALP model.” Even Dirac, a quantum theoretician, wrote some papers exploring this model. They found a variety of weird behaviors - some models of the particle would spontaneously accelerate into a “runaway state” once a force is applied; others would respond to a force before it was applied, and still others would respond in the wrong direction. None of these would work.
There is also the problem of how a particle is held together, when it wants to blow up like a balloon, repelled by its own charge. ALP called this a “self-force,” Dirac felt it was a kind of elastic force. It was a big problem.
Acceleration Without Radiation
In 1933, British mathematician George Adolphus Schott published a paper which began by describing a simple case to demonstrate that it is possible for electric charge to accelerate without radiating energy.
We can imagine Schott’s case if we suspend a charged spherical shell on the end of a string. Wobble the string in a little circular orbit and set the sphere spinning as it sways. If the period of the wobble and the period of the spin are properly chosen, the sphere will not radiate. It will remain charged, forever, despite that it is accelerating in a small circular orbit.
Schott solved this experiment in theory. Excusing himself for “indulging in speculation,” and admitting that such things were “out of fashion” he suggested that his findings were relevant to atomic theory.
Schott continued thinking along these lines. In 1937, one of his studies showed that not only could he get the radiation to vanish, but the self-force as well, so that the electron needed no extra force to hold itself together. Schott passed away later that year. Ignoring this achievement, Dirac in his 1938 paper insisted that quantum mechanics was the only option, perpetuating a myth that persists to this day.
Ten years later, two professors at Princeton found a spherical shell model that could vibrate without radiating energy; that had no made up forces or self-force. The vibrating system also allowed quantized energy states, and the authors suggested it could explain the structure of another nuclear particle.
In 1963, George Goedecke, a young professor in the Physics Department at New Mexico State University, published a paper in which he derived a general and sufficient condition by which any extended charge distribution (anything not a point) may accelerate without radiating.
This would only be possible for charge spread over a surface or volume; it was not possible for point-like particles. Goedecke used his results to study charged spheres with various charge distributions, some of them spinning. He could even get the spin to come out close to that observed for the electron. He was obviously excited by his preliminary results, and speculated that one could hypothesize:
“a theory of nature in which all stable particles (or aggregates) are merely nonradiating charge-current distributions.”
In the years that followed, he would continue to publish on the topic and encouraged students to do the same. His insight into radiation diffused into the general consciousness of the field, but further investigation of electron models took years to show signs of life.
In 1986, Herman Haus, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, derived Goedecke’s condition in another way, explaining why point-particles radiated when accelerated. It offered a more natural and universal description of how light is emitted by matter.
He found that point particles radiate when they are accelerated because they have “Fourier components synchronous with waves traveling at the speed of light.” The implication is that systems that do not have these waves, do not radiate. (This is an if-and-only-if expression, also known as a biconditional.)
After almost a century of small steps, physicists had inched closer to a feasible model of the electron. The conditions of the problem were well formulated, and sufficient work had been done to suggest that a solution was possible. This research yielded a elegant formulation of the nature of radiationless systems. But everyone believed that quantum theory had turned the page on classical atomic physics, that is, until Randell Mills.
In 1985, Randell Mills was on loan to MIT, spending his final fourth year studying physics after completing the coursework for his Medical Degree at Harvard. His professor there was Herman Haus.
Mills was thinking about laser technology. A few years earlier, President Ronald Reagan had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, which solicited proposals for powerful lasers or other weapons that could potentially shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was colloquially dubbed “Star Wars.” Electrons, when accelerated to near light speed and passed through a magnetic structure, can emit laser light. Mills was interested in designing a free electron laser, and Haus handed him a copy of his paper on radiation.
Haus’s paper would become a bridge from the past to the future of physics, from the macroscopic to the microscopic world.
Mills’s Model of the Orbitsphere
Mills understood the importance of radiation to the nature of the atom. Like prior theoreticians, he was drawn to the idea that the electron was a spherical shell instead of a point. But Mills imagined something never considered before.
Mills centered the electron shell on the proton. This made more sense than an electron orbiting like a planet because the electric field of the proton would be perfectly masked by the electric field of the electron shell around it. As a result, the atom would be neutral, which of course the hydrogen atom is.
Mills told me, to my surprise, that he was not aware of the ALP model or Goedecke’s work at the time. But times were different; digging up old papers from the scientific literature was not an internet search away. Instead, he continued where Bohr left off.
In the planetary model of the atom, the orbit of the electron was balanced by two forces: the electron’s attraction to the nucleus due to its charge, and its inertia, the outward (centrifugal) force, which kept the electron from falling into the nucleus.
Mills knew the electron couldn’t be a point because a point would radiate as it orbited along a curved path. But just as J. J. Thomson had discovered, the electron could exist in a ring without radiating.
Mills spread the point out to create a ring of flowing charge, then twisted the ring to spread it out over a sphere. The forces on the electron were virtually the same as that for Bohr’s model. But instead of a planet, the electron would resemble a kind of soap bubble. On the surface of the bubble, electrical current (moving charge) flowed along each ring. The rings overlapped and intersected one another everywhere, like a ball of yarn with infinitely divisible threads that formed a continuous membrane.
Mills called it the “orbitsphere.”
Since the electron shell was centered on the proton, it was tightly bound to the atom—there was no need for an extra self-force. Since the shell was made up of only rings of constantly flowing current, Haus’s solution confirmed that it would be stable.
A spherical shell also offered an intuitive explanation for why the electron absorbed and emitted light. When the electron is bound to the atom, the space between the electron shell and the much smaller proton shell at the center (which cannot be a point either) creates a “resonant cavity” that may capture discrete frequencies of light.
When the resonant cavity captures a particle of light (a “photon,”) it weakens the electric field of the proton, allowing the electron shell to get bigger. This enlarges the cavity, giving it a new resonant frequency, creating what we call an “excited state.” The new configuration of the electric field in an excited state violates Haus’s condition, making the electron unstable, and causing it to quickly and fall back to the initial “ground state.”
This is amazing. Mills’s orbitsphere was a historic new model of the atom.
Since the sphere was made up of individual rings of flowing charge that overlap one another on the shell, it solved another important problem. The mass of the electron flowing around a ring creates angular momentum, which we call “spin.”
In the 1920’s Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach performed the first experiment that showed bound electrons had spin. A beam of neutral silver atoms was passed through a magnetic field, causing it to split into two beams, deflected up or down. The spin orientations of the atoms started out random, but they were being forced into alignment (parallel or antiparallel) with the magnetic field.
When this beam was passed through another magnetic field with a 90-degree orientation, the beam split again. When passed through a third magnetic field with the same orientation as the first one, the beam split again, showing that at each stage, the spin orientations of the silver atoms were being randomized.
This behavior is not what we would expect from a rigid spinning particle, like a spherical shell. First, a shell spinning along one axis wouldn’t give the right amount of spin; and second, it wouldn’t randomize itself the way the experiments by Stern and Gerlach revealed.
The Stern-Gerlach experiments can be better understood if the particle has spin along more than one axis. Mills’s orbitsphere does this; it has a complex pattern of motion on the surface that explains the atom’s behavior.
When the electron is not attached to a nucleus, it is a free particle. Since it does not have a positively-charged nucleus at the center, if it remained a sphere in free space, it would begin to repel itself and blow up like a balloon.
Mills needed a new model. He found a simple and elegant solution: a spinning disk of charge with an increasing density toward the center.
A ring of charge produces a force that, in the plane of the ring, points into the center. The disk, made up of rings packed tight like the lines on a vinyl record, would produce a magnetic force that holds the entire particle together - purely with electromagnetism. It was another brilliant move.
The Multiple Electron Problem Resolved
What about atoms with multiple electrons?
After hydrogen, the next heavier atom is helium. It has two protons in the nucleus, so a positive charge of 2, and two electrons in orbit. Although two point-like electrons would repel one another, the inner electron, totally surrounding the nucleus, shields one of the nuclear charges, so the outer electron does not repel the inner electron, rather it perceives it to be positively charged. Further, the electrons attract one another due to a spin-pairing force.
With a simple equation (with only three forces) Mills calculated the energies of the electrons in helium and it was perfect.
Mills also later solved the excited states of helium—a complex problem that took quantum theorists nearly a century to do with mathematical jerrymandering—and Mills’s results are frighteningly accurate, matching experiments to within the range of experimental uncertainty, and using only a few equations, with only the physical constants of nature, with no adjustable parameters.
Nature wants us to know the answers to its mysteries. The structure of atoms is incredibly simple. With electrons nested as concentric shells instead of points, the forces among them simplify to a single equation.
Solutions also flow naturally from a good theory. It reveals old theories to be what they often are: cumbersome, inflated, and ineffective. This is certainly the case for quantum mechanics, which has never been able to cleanly solve the interactions between two electrons.
The next atom in the periodic table is lithium, with three protons in the nucleus, and three electrons. This has two electrons paired comfortably in an inner shell, with the third electron in a new shell, at a larger radius. Each grouping of electrons in a shell becomes what chemists call an “atomic orbital” at a distinct energy.
The next atom, beryllium, adds an electron to lithium’s outer shell. The atom after that, boron, forms yet another shell, although it is not like the others: it has regions of high and low charge density on the surface, forming symmetrical patterns. In the series of elements from boron to neon, the six electrons form three pairs of oppositely oriented patterns. Electrons form these atomic orbitals to enable them to pack more electrons into a single shell so that more negatively charged stuff is closer to the positively charged stuff in the nucleus. This basic fact drives all atomic and molecular structure.
Mathematically, the equations describing these patterns are called “spherical harmonic” functions. Quantum theoreticians know that these patterns exist but model them as spatial lobes of probability density that are a helpful guide to understanding chemical reactivity. These theoreticians attach positive and negative symbols to these lobes - despite that “negative probability” is not a thing, nor can the electron be positively charged.
While this all makes no sense, the mathematical functions correspond to Mills’s theory, in which these patterns are found to be high and low charge density. There are no areas on the electron shell where the density is zero, or negative.
In the early 1990’s, Mills raced ahead to solve the structure of the first twenty elements. He calculated the energies necessary to strip off every electron from every one of these atoms (calcium has twenty). His hundreds of solutions were all spot on.
The only limit implicit in the accuracy of Mills’s solutions is the error due to our experimental measurements of the physical constants of nature. This means that the more accurately we measure the fundamental constants, the better our predictions will be. What’s more, with larger atoms, the inner shell electrons are moving at a significant fraction of light speed, and if you take relativistic corrections into account, the solutions get even more accurate. This is all what we would expect from a good theory. Schrödinger himself expected a good theory of the atom to be compatible with Relativity. He knew the Schrödinger equation was not, and he was never happy with it.
When I was working with Mills, I visualized and arranged the atoms into the first-ever periodic table showing the true size and structure of the atoms. I looked it over. The behavior and characteristics of atoms became self-evident because the binding energy of each electron is a function of size.
Mills had validated my expectation that nature is, at its root, simple and knowable; an incredible, beautiful geometric order on all scales, what Einstein once called the “perfect structure.”
At what point does a model convince us that it is physically true of the world? Is it the simplicity? The predictive ability? How many numbers must we match from experimental observations? Mills results are so good, for so many experimental numbers, that it was statistically indicative of truth. There could not exist a more rigorous test for a theory than that met by Mills’s model.
And yet, Mills’s model is virtually unknown. How many people must believe a theory for it to be true? Looking down at Mills’s periodic table, these questions floated in my consciousness. But it seemed to me that the universe had answered for me. Truth is independent of our metrics; it cares not whether a man or a civilization accepts it; truth demonstrates itself to the open mind.
Thoughts and questions? Join the conversation!
For further reading, this topic is covered in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: Hydrino Energy and the Future of Physics by Brett Holverstott.
Share this post