Post by Gandalf » Sat Apr 17, 2010 4:48 am

If you want the full text with figures, here it is:I cannot speak for the validity of Dr. Prins' claims. However, I can claim to know a bit about the corruption and graft that runs rampant in the peer-reviewed journal publishing business, especially in regards to superconductivity.Way back in the olden days before the internet, there was this guy that went by the name of Paul Chu down in Texas. He came across a very interesting perovskite that exhibited Tc above 77K. He had been around the block and knew that such a monumental claim in a publication would be a graft-magnet. When he submitted his draft for publication, the claim was made that YbBaCuO produced the desired results. He even processed a batch to be sure it didn't do anything terribly interesting.Not at all to Chu's surprise, some other journal with some relevance to the subject printed an article with his exact claim, but made by someone else, two weeks before Chu's original article was to be published.Then, right at the deadline for submitting minor typographical corrections (3 days I think), he 'corrected' his submission to YBaCuO. Hey, what's an extra 'b' ? Yttrium, Ytterbium, no big difference.The journal(s) had egg on their face, the corrupt 'scientist' was discredited, and hilarity ensued.And some people wonder why Perelman told the academic world to take their corrupt money and go pound sand.Anyway, I fried my 2-stage rotary vane pump doing rude things to molecular sieves, and my wife won't let me take the engagement ring I gave her a few decades ago into my 'lab', so I won't be trying to duplicate Prins' work. However, I'm not so sure this paper offers anything useful from a material science perspective that could be applied to the construction of a cheaper, better, stronger field for a polywell in the short term. My take on it is that he's just claiming the current model for 'superconductivity' is more like 'dogma' and needs a bit of a re-think. And corruption pisses him off. I'm up with that, and think his work warrants further investigation. A Dutch guy named Verlinde says some interesting things along the same lines regarding gravity and the standard model.Cheerio,Gandalf