People who are following this list are already acquainted with my views on hydrinos -- I do not believe they are plausible. This is despite the fact that some smart people here take them seriously. Nonetheless, because they upset so many assumptions, I have enjoyed thinking about them in the context of a thought experiment -- what if they did exist?
Here are some thoughts on, questions about and possible implications for this what-if scenario: - If hydrinos are what we currently observe as dark matter, then dark matter has electromagnetic properties and is subject to potentials and to magnetic fields (this is due to the uneven charge distribution over the orbitsphere that serves as a replacement for the spin quantum number). This would no doubt influence their travel in the vicinity of an object with a magnetic field such as the sun. Presumably their path would be altered somehow. - If hydrinos are what we currently observe as dark matter, I doubt they would pass through something like the earth unhindered, in contrast to what we currently believe about dark matter. Instead they would be stopped by matter, and the more shrunken ones would result in all kinds of fusion events as they are drawn to the center of gravity. - My understanding is that hydrinos have an orbitsphere that replaces the currently-understood atomic orbitals. Either this is the case for all electron orbitals, or there is a discontinuity to be explained, where orbitspheres are occupied at redundant levels and normal atomic orbitals are occupied at non-redundant levels. Suppose for a moment that in our brave new world all electron orbitals are orbitspheres. This has implications for solid state physics, for the different orbitals have implications for the electron charge density in solids. I believe d orbitals, for example [1], are taken into account in explaining the characteristics of semiconductors, conductors and superconductors. If we replace d orbitals with orbitspheres, do we need to set such work aside and start from scratch? - Why does the transfer of energy from the donor (monatomic hydrogen) to the acceptor (a Mills catalyst) occur in only one direction? One would expect some kind of equilibrium to be struck, where a shrunken hydrino becomes a little less shrunken part of the time. If so, why not a lot of the time? What causes the hydrinos ever to progress beyond one or two redundant levels? - If the shrinking of hydrinos is a one-way road, you have the remarkable situation where fusion, following one path (e.g., in a magnetic confinement fusino reactor) requires a great energy input in order to overcome the Coulomb barrier. Following another path, according to a modified version of Mills's theory, the shrunken hydrinos would be susceptible to fusion on their own once they progress beyond a certain point, because they become more and more like pseudo-neutrons. In this latter case you get energy out of the hydrinos before the fusion occurs, which would seem to favor the process thermodynamically. (This one courtesy of Axil, if I have understood him.) - What happens when a hydrino enters into a covalent bond with another atom, as in the case of H2O? What does it mean for an electron at a redundant level to partially orbit another atom? Or are no covalent bonds allowed? - If the orbitsphere applies to non-redundant levels, how do you explain the complex filling of orbitals that is seen in the periodic table? Orbitspheres just overlap one another, so there doesn't seem to be a lot of levels to pull here to derive the properties of the periodic table. - The spin quantum number describes what we believe to be a binary property -- up or down. The replacement for this quantum number for hydrinos is a variable distribution of charge across the orbitsphere. What keeps this distribution fixed, so that we can have the equivalent of a spin-up or spin-down state for the valence electron in some cases? Or are we to understand that this property is no longer binary and can change over time? Just some fun thoughts. Hopefully I did not get too many details wrong. Eric [1] http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/images/dorbitals.gif