Two American Inventors.

[stephendare]

These two guys are some of the more interesting theoreticians and inventors in their field.

My knowledge of them goes back to the late 90s, through my association with Erik Baard, who did some of the first articles on Kamen and Mills.

Dean Kamen is probably by far the more familiar of the two, having invented the seqway.


from his wikipedia page:

Inventions

Kamen is probably best-known to the public from the publicity surrounding the product that eventually became known as the Segway HT, an electric, self-balancing human transporter with a complex, computer-controlled gyroscopic stabilization and control system that keeps the device balanced on two horizontally-placed wheels and controlled by moving body weight. The machine's development was the object of much speculation and hype after segments of a book quoting Steve Jobs and other notable IT visionaries espousing its society-revolutionizing potential were leaked in January 2001.

Kamen has worked extensively on a project involving Stirling engine designs, attempting to create a machine that would generate power while serving as a water purification system. He hopes the project will help improve living standards in developing countries. [1] Kamen has a patent issued on his water purifier, U.S. Patent 7,340,879 , and other patents pending.

Kamen has also invented a compressed-air-powered device which would launch a human into the air in order to quickly launch SWAT teams or other emergency workers to the roofs of tall, inaccessible buildings.[2]

However, Kamen was already a successful and wealthy inventor, after inventing the AutoSyringe, a new type of mobile dialysis system for medical applications, the first insulin pump, and an all-terrain electric wheelchair known as the iBOT using many of the same gyroscopic balancing technologies that later made their way into the Segway.
FIRST

In 1989, Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), for high school students. In 2005, it held over 30 regional competitions and one international competition. In 2007, 37 competitions were held in places across the world such as Israel, Brazil, Canada, and the U.S.A.. Kamen remains the driving force behind the organization, providing over 1,000 high schools with the tools needed to learn valuable engineering skills. FIRST has gained a great deal of publicity from companies such as Bausch and Lomb, CNN, General Motors, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Boston Gears, Motorola, Delphi, Kodak, Johnson and Johnson, Xerox, and Harris, Underwriter's Laboratories, Microchip, as well as many Universities and colleges.

FIRST has many competitions, including the JFLL (Junior FIRST Lego League) and the FLL (FIRST Lego League) for younger students, and the FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) and the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) for high school aged students.

Awards

During his career Kamen has won numerous awards. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for his biomedical devices and for making engineering more popular among high school students. Dean Kamen was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000 by then President Clinton for inventions that have advanced medical care worldwide. In April 2002, Kamen was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize for inventors for his invention of the Segway and of an infusion pump for diabetics. In 2003 his "Project Slingshot," a cheap portable water purification system, was named a runner-up for "coolest invention of 2003" by Time magazine.[3]. In 2005 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of the AutoSyringe. In 2006 Kamen was awarded the Global Humanitarian Action Award by the United Nations. Kamen received an honorary "Doctor of Engineering " degree from Kettering University in 2001, as well as from the Wentworth Institute of Technology when he spoke at the college's centennial celebration in 2004, and another honorary doctorate from Bates College in 2007.[1]

Personal life

Kamen is currently single, claiming he's "married to his inventions." His primary residence is a hexagonal shed style mansion he has dubbed Westwind[1], located in Bedford, New Hampshire, just outside of the larger city of Manchester. The house has at least four different levels and is very eclectically conceived, with such things as hallways resembling mine shafts, 1960s novelty furniture, spiral staircases and secret passages, an observation tower, a fully-equipped machine shop, and a huge cast-iron steam engine which once belonged to Henry Ford built into the center atrium of the house (which is actually small in comparison), which Kamen has had converted into a Stirling engine-powered kinetic sculpture.

Also on the property there is a softball field regularly used by the local police force. Kamen owns two helicopters, which he regularly uses to commute to work, and has a hangar built into the house as well.

During 2007 at the FIRST Robotics competition held in Atlanta, Georgia, YouTube (which sponsors FIRST) co-founder Chad Hurley announced a competition for the teams to create a video in which they would describe what it takes to start a FIRST robotics team in an imaginative way. The prize for the winning team is a visit and guided tour of Dean Kamen's house and property. The competition is currently on-going and still taking submissions.

How cool would it be to have a jacksonville entry into the First Competition?

The second guy is Randell Mills, whose hydrino Theory threatens to unravel a hundred years of physics theory.

Despite alot of effort, his work has not been devalidated, and may hold some of the most promising potential in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randell_Mills

Mills' Claims

Atomic Physics

Mills claims that the electron is an extended particle which in free space is a flat disk of spinning charge. The magnitude of charge is highest in the center, and falls to zero at the edge. Mills claims that the charge distribution holds itself together by achieving a force balance between the magnetic forces that act inwards, and outward centrifugal forces. The virial_theorem of classical physics says this is not possible, and observations of electrons likewise invalidate the idea of a non-spherically-symmetric charge distribution.

Mills goes on to claim that since the charge distribution is continuous, it may be treated as a surface charge, and therefore the field lines due to the charge distribution are normal to the surface. In mainstream classical physics, only a surface charge that is free to move under the influence of any tangential electric field will reach an equilibrium where only the normal component of the electric field remains.[7].

According to Mills, when an electron is captured by a proton to form a hydrogen atom, it deforms into a spherical shell, called the 'orbitsphere'. Mills claims this sphere may act as a 'dynamic resonator cavity', able to absorb or emit discrete frequencies of radiation, giving rise to quantization and the basis for the excited states.

In Mills' model, excited states of the electron are charge density distributions of high and low charge density. These distributions exist on the surface of the orbitsphere, but reflect the spherical_harmonics of quantum orbitals.[8]

In quantum mechanics, the energy states of the hydrogen atom are solutions of the wave equation, and different energy states correspond to different electronic orbitals or distribution functions of the electron's position relative to the proton, which have been observed and are nonspherical (except for the s-orbitals).

Hydrinos

According to Mills, a specific chemical process he calls "The BlackLight Process" allows the bound electron to fall to an energy state below that of currently accepted quantum theory, at 1/integer that of the ground state radius. These below-ground hydrogen atoms are called 'hydrinos'. The mechanism consists of an energy transfer between a hydrogen atom and a catalyst that is capable of absorbing a certain amount of energy. The total energy Mills claims is released for hydrino transitions is large compared to the chemical burning of hydrogen but less than nuclear reactions. Allegedly, limitations on confinement and terrestrial conditions have prevented the achievement of hydrino states below 1/30, which would correspond to an energy release of approximately 15 KeV per hydrogen atom. No-one outside Mills' group has been verified to have, or even claimed to have, produced 'hydrinos', nor have they been observed to occur naturally.

Collective Phenomena, High-Energy Physics, and Cosmology

Superconductivity

According to Mills, superconductivity is due to the extended nature of the electron, and in a superconductive lattice, the electrons forms "ribbons" of charge/current. This in contradiction to validated models of superconductivity, such as BCS theory, based on the Cooper pairing of electrons.
Dark matter

According to Mills, hydrinos are the bulk of dark matter. He claims that they do not emit light, unless they are being formed or ionized. Over 90% of the visible universe consists of ordinary hydrogen, and according to this hypothesis the remaining matter in the universe (90% of the total mass of the universe) is hydrogen in stable states below that of the typical ground state. However, dark matter is also collisionless, meaning that dark matter particles do not interact by any means other than gravity or that such interactions are very rare [9]. This contradicts the properties of hydrinos as claimed by Mills, who claims to have produced 'molecular hydrinos' and other chemical compounds containing hydrinos and normal matter.

The accelerating expansion of the universe

Starting in the 1995 version of his book, Mills claimed that the universe is accelerating as it expands[[4]]. According to Mills, the universe expands and contracts sinusoidally over billions of years, due to a posited equivalence of matter and spacetime[10]. The universe has been found to be expanding. Mills' model, however, does not agree with other observational evidence, nor does it explain various open questions in the topic of cosmic inflation.

The reigning cosmology has grave problems, and can now explain at best only 5% of the matter and energy in the Universe [and that 5% is achieved by rounding up]. Even much of the baryonic matter (ordinary matter made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons) predicted by the standard cosmological model (the SCM) is missing, half or more of it: see the “Perspective” article by Nicastro, Mathur, and Elvis, “Missing Baryons and the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium,” in Science 319 (January 4, 2008), pp. 55-57).

obviously pretty intense stuff.  If Mills is right, then clean, nearly free energy and antigravitation are the result.

Hes probably the least popular man in physics right now.

Any robotics people in the house?