textfiles/bbs/KEELYNET/BIOLOGY/hudson3.asc

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|  File Name      : HUDSON3.ASC      |  Online Date     :  12/26/95          |
|  Contributed by : Bill Beaty       |  Dir Category    :  BIOLOGY           |
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Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1995 10:00:06 -0800 (PST)
From: William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com>
To: keelynet@ix.netcom.com
cc: freenrg-list@mail.eskimo.com

Subject: Hudson's monoatomic powder

I had some thoughts about the "disappearing powder" effect Hudson discovered
when working with monoatomic metal powder.  The effect might be entirely
conventional, and similar to the optics of almost-invisible Aerogels.

--- FORWARDED FROM PRIVATE EMAIL ---

> Your comment on "white? gold" is quite astute. The term, as used by Hudson,
> refers to a general group of transition elements primarily rhodium,
> iridium, palladium, ozmium, and platinum. Some of these turn out a
> silver grey and some turn out white, gold turns out as a white milky
> suspension in water.

Hmmm.  This about the milky suspension is disturbing, because when single
atoms of a substance are mixed with water, this is called DISSOLVING, and the
water may become colored, but it will remain totally transparent.  If the
water is milky, then there must be atomic clusters in there which are about as
large (or larger) than a wavelength of light.

Single atoms are about 100 times smaller than light wavelength, so the atomic
clusters must be huge.  If the gold was monoatomic, I would expect it to
totally vanish when mixed with water.  I wonder what the difference in health
effects are between a suspension of atomic clusters, and a solution of
dissolved (and therefore monoatomic) metal.

Have you heard of Patrick Flanagan's work with molecule-sized clusters of
MINERALS (not metals)?  He traced the long lifespans of a Russian (Yugoslav?)
village to the water they were using, and this glacier water contained
molecule-sized clusters of various mineral substances.

Flanagan figured out how to create this artificially, and is now selling it as
a lifespan-extension powder which is mixed with water in order to duplicate
the effects of the original, no longer available glacier water.  I think the
product is called "crystal water."  It never occurred to me that there was a
connection between this and Hudson's work.

> When you say nearly-mono, I'm curious how you would know. What test would
> you envision using?

To be truely monoatomic, the substance would vanish when mixed in water.

If it made the water distinctly milky, then it is clusters, not atoms.  Of
course it may be possible that the powder starts out as monoatomic, and it
gets compressed into chunks when it is forced into the water.

Hudson's original discovery about heating would be a good one.  The powder
vanishes when heated?  In hindsight this might be expected of a pile of
individual atoms!  The heat vibrations would smooth out the pile and let air
escape, and the pile would start to act like a transparent liquid.

But a very strange liquid, with huge gaps between the atoms.  And so, it would
optically look like an "aerogel," it would look like an ice cube does when
underwater, barely there at all.  It would be very slightly bluish.  If you
scooped a bit out of the "invisible" pile, it would cool and reappear on your
spoon.

> Was this black substance from personal experience?

>> From messing with copper electroplating, I noticed that if the current is
   turned up high the plated surface comes out rough, and if it is too high,
   it doesn't plate at all, it just produces fast-growing globs of black
   jelly.

   Years later while studying fractals/chaos, I figured out that this is
   explainable because electroplating is a class of crystal growth, and
   crystal growth is nonlinear and dominated by chaotic dynamics at higher
   growth rates.

   When a crystal grows slowly, the atoms have a chance to stick and break
   loose over and over, so any parts of the growing crystal will tend to be
   polished down by this process, so the crystal will grow flat facets.
   But if a crystal is made to grow fast, any atom that sticks to the solid
   surface will stay there for good.  This produces a fascinating effect: the
   growing flat surface becomes unstable, because any parts that stick out
   will collect more atoms than the flat surface, and so dendritic "trees" of
   material start growing like mad.

   This is how growing frost or snowflakes differ from growing ice cubes. This
   is also what causes the difference in shape between lightning and a glow-
   discharge.  The copper dendrites can be very small, maybe like rows of
   single atoms.  The branches of the trees tend to touch together, so the
   growing crystal acts like a mass of tangled brambles.

If you put two copper wires in a cup of copper chloride or copper sulphide (or
is it sulphate?) solution, then connect them to a power supply, the negative
terminal will collect metallic copper.

If you set the voltage too high you will see some black stuff form on the
negative wire.  If you set the voltage high enough, you can SEE this glob of
black stuff increasing in size!  It will grow and take over the whole cup!

If you pull that wire out of the solution, the black stuff remains behind. The
black stuff is pure copper, but composed of incredibly tiny tangled branches.
I don't know how close these branches are to monoatomic size.

Aha!  This reminds me of something.  Have you ever heard of "platinum black?"
This is something similar to the above effects with copper.  When platinum is
used as a catalyst, the surface area is important, so a rough platinum plate
works better than a polished one.  But it is possible to create dendritic
platinum through accelerated growth, and this surface is BLACK.

If you want to make a simple fuel cell, dip some extremely clean nickel metal
into platinum chloride.  It will become coated with dendritic platinum, and
will work far better as a catalytic electrode than would a solid platinum
plate.  Since this tiny-dendrite platinum is black, I wonder why Hudson's
monoatomic platinum isn't?

The copper and the platinum are black because the web of dendrites forms an
incredibly rough surface, and these metals are slightly absorbtive of light
(meaning they are not perfect 100% reflectors.)   Carbon is not inherently
black (look at diamonds!), it's only black when it takes an incredible fine
sponge-like form.

In platinum-black, light hits the tangled branches, it goes down between them
and bounces over and over, being absorbed a bit on each bounce.  Little light
returns.  Have you ever seen the science trick where you make a stack of old-
style razor blades, and the side of the stack with the sharp edges appears
black?  Even though the steel is silver, when the light gets down between the
blades it bounces back and forth so many times that it is totally absorbed.

Aha again!  I just remembered an incident where a friend accidentallly made
one of these fractal-network globs in air using Zinc, and the glob WASN'T
black.  I'm wrong about the black.  It's only black when the fractal branches
are spaced out the same or larger than the wavelength of light.

If the branches are smaller than lightwaves, then the substance will appear
transparent.  IT WILL APPEAR SKY BLUE!  The atmosphere is blue because
individual N2 molecules still scatter light a tiny bit, even though they are
much smaller than the lightwaves.

So, a mass of monoatomic material should look like a nearly-invisible icecube,
and if a bright beam of light is sent through it, from the side the material
should look slightly blue and not milky, and from the front, its silouette
against the light source should look slightly reddish.

I bet this happens when monoatomic metal powder is heated.  When cool,
Hudson's powder must fall together in non-uniform bunches, and start
scattering light like a normal powder.

I guess it works like this:

   Powdered metal is silver when the powder grains are far larger
   than the wavelength of visible light.  Example: aluminum powder.

   VERY finely powdered metal, where the grains may be approaching the
   size of lightwaves, is black like soot (and for the same reasons.)
   Example: platinum black, black-electroplated copper

   VERY, VERY, VERY finely powdered metal should be transparent and bluish
   (maybe only when heated?)  Example: Hudson's monoatomics, zinc aerogel.

On the zinc mentioned above. It is possible to create fractal network
structures which are much smaller than wavelengths of light, and these
networks are transparent.

Jello is such a network, it is a tangled branching web of gelatin protein-
balls lined up in rows.  When one of these networks is made in air instead of
under water, it is called an "aerogel."  A friend accidentally generated a
zinc aerogel when welding a galvanized electrical box.  The box had holes in
the back, and after welding, the box had these clumps of blue-white feathery
substance.

Now zinc is strange, it's evaporation temperature is very low, so if you heat
it with a welding torch it tends to generate clouds of zinc vapor rather than
simply melting.  What probably happened is that the welding was causing
superheated zinc vapor which blew into the holes in the box.

It cooled VERY rapidly and tried to form zinc-soot.  But instead of plating
out as solid zinc metal, it cooled so fast that it formed a fractal network.
And rather than forming a black-soot type substance, the cooling was so rapid
and the growth was so fast that the growing dendritic branches were smaller
than the wavelength of light.  And so the zinc-soot was feather-light, and
transparent rather than black!.

Be warned that zinc vapor is poisonous, so if you try this experiment, you do
so at your own risk.

Oh dear, you seem to have set me off.  Hope your mailbox doesn't reject large
messages.

On Hudson's powders.  I'm skeptical about health effects because the power of
belief can work miracles, and anything advertised as a miracle cure will
REALLY BE a miracle cure, but the cure will be in the mind, not in the
substance itself.  Conventional medicine pooh-poohs this and calls it Placebo
Effect.  Yet the placebo effect unleashes all the power hidden in the mind.

If modern science CARED about the placebo effect, it would be harnessed into
solving all the world's problems, and not just the medical ones.  Anyway, if
this is the situation, how can Hudson have ever sorted out the effects of his
powder from the powerful effects of unfettered belief?

You can't just give the monoatomic-platinum water to someone and see what
happens, because the effects will be strongly biased, if not entirely created,
by the person's mind.  You have to do double-blind testing.

Are you already aware of how this goes?  Make two batches, one with monoatomic
powder, one with something else.  Give the two batches to someone else who
doesn't know which is which.  Have this person give samples to people (in
bottles with number codes, so YOU know which is which, even if no one else
does,) and this person won't know which ones are real, so he/she can't
accidentally give away the secret to the end users.  THEN see what effects the
users report.

I've been thinking about the chemistry of Hudson's powders.  From a
conventional standpoint, the biochemistry is not normal.  To get metals into
water, you usually dissolve a metal salt.  But a metal salt (say platinum
chloride) contains positively-charged metal ions.  When the salt dissolves,
each metal atom goes off into the water monoatomically.

However, because it has a positive static charge, it attracts a shell of water
atoms around itself which all point their oxygen atoms towards the metal atom.
And outside of this shell is another shell of oriented water atoms, and
outside of this one another.  In electro-chemistry this is called the
HELMHOLTZ LAYER after its discoverer, and is commonly harnessed in those one-
farad "supercapacitors."

So, a charged metal atom in water is not just a metal atom, it is a charged
object surrounded by polarized shells of water atoms.

Metals do not dissolve in water, at least at nowhere near the rate that metal
salts do.  If you put a piece of platinum into water, it won't dissolve away
in a few minutes.  But the few atoms of platinum that DO get into the water
will not be charged.  They will be neutral atoms, and they will not become
surrounded by multiple shells of polarized water molecules.

Now suppose that the human body requires UNCHARGED metal atoms in some parts
of its chemistry.  Suppose the shells of polarized water around a charged atom
will interfere with some chemical process in the cells, so the cells can't
easily use the charged atoms.  If this is the case, then it doesn't matter how
much of a certain metal is dissolved in your body fluids, if all the atoms
each carry a positive charge, then these atoms cannot be used by the possible
chemical process.

However, if there are metal deposits in a stream, then metal clusters and
atoms will be in the water, and drinking the water will give your body the
possibly-needed uncharged metal atoms.  If someone figured out a way to CREATE
monoatomic metal-filled water, then that water would act as a nutrient.  But
only if uncharged-metal-requiring chemical reactions do exist.

Hudson's powders are a bit scarey, because anything new tends to be seen as
having health applications.  Alternative medicine long ago was promoting baths
in radium-containing springs, and selling radioactive medicine, not knowing
that there were dangers involved.

At what point do Hudson's powders become poisonous?  How much of the
population has some kind of allergy to it, but won't find out until it's too
late?  What if the powder has immediate health benefits, but longtime use is
harmful?  (Lots of substances are like this.  Think about conventional drugs!)

And finally, if monoatomic metals mostly involve the harnessing of the
"placebo effect" and the convincing of people to unleash their mental powers,
then it's far better to give them a substance that's familiar and longtime
known to be totally safe.  Fooling yourself and others into fixing their own
problems is a valid route to the solution of problems, as long as the
"fooling" doesn't itself involve something dangerous, like unexpected slow
poisoning effects, or armed FDA swat teams holding your family at gunpoint! ;)

.....................uuuu / oo \ uuuu........,.............................
William Beaty  voice:206-781-3320   bbs:206-789-0775    cserv:71241,3623
EE/Programmer/Science exhibit designer        http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/
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