Email from Bob Bass to Randell Mills and Shelby Brewer, August 20, 2000.
From: Bass, Robert W (IDS)
Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2000 6:36 AM
To: 'Randell Mills'; 'Shelby Brewer'
Cc: 'Randall Ingermanson'; 'William A. Dembski'; 'Jim Lo'; 'James T. Lo';
'Rudolf Kalman'; 'Art B Rosenblum'; 'Erik Baard'; 'John Farrell'; 'Robert Park'
Subject: BLP Recovery from new USPTO setback
Dear Dr. Mills,
Even though in my August 6 letter I have pointed out about a dozen "fatal"
theoretical/mathematical flaws in your alleged "derivation" of hydrino theory,
and challenged you to demonstrate empirically a "stand-alone" device that can
generate energy from water with no moving parts before seeking a further round
of financing, my unsolicited advice was _not_ malicious as I hope you will agree
after pondering the following attempt to give you some help in recovering from
the blow of the US District Court decision of August 15 which, as Judge Sullivan
explicitly admits, will "delay" your IPO because you will now have to "exhaust
your remedies" internal to the PTO before again seeking external appellate
review.
The fact that in Friday's "What's New" e-column APS flack Bob Park is gloating
that you are now in "patent purgatory" leaves me wondering if Park is not
prolonging his own future sojourn in purgatory. After all, Jesus taught that
"whosoever sayeth to his brother 'Thou fool!' is in danger of hellfire," which
makes me wonder about looking for smoke near Park's feet [or should I say
hooves?].
You have my sympathy! What a bureaucratic nightmare! Around 1990 a friend of
mine sued a well-known large company for $1.2 Billion on the grounds that they
were grossing $900 Million per year selling a product that infringed his 1987
Patent (and he could prove that AFTER he had applied for a Patent, the chief
technical people of this company had attended a Lecture in which he had
disclosed his highly valuable/innovative discovery!). The large company stalled
for years but JUST before Trial by a Jury, they paid the PTO the required fee (I
think it was only $1,500) to _RE-EXAMINE_ the validity of his Patent. I learned
about this in 1994 by pure accident from a trade news-magazine, and contacted
the Examiner in order to send him a chapter of a book which I had published in
1986 (before the Patent had issued) describing my friend's invention as roughly
the greatest thing since sliced bread (specifying why it veritably reeked of the
statutorily-required "novelty, utility, & non-obviousness"). I then asked the
Examiner how long Re-Examination would take. He replied: "at most two months."
I asked, "how will I know the outcome?" He replied: "It will probably be all
over the Internet!" That was at least 6 or so years ago!!! The matter is still
not concluded!!! I recently again was accidentally reminded of this and asked
my friend for the status. He replied that things were looking good and he
expects his Patent to be OK in the near future. (I forgot to ask whether the
lawyers on both sides were still making presentations to the Examiner and to the
internal PTO Appeals Board, or whether, as one assumes, he had lost inside the
PTO and was now relying on proving his case to the satisfaction of the Court of
Appeals for the Fedreral Circuit [CAFC] which has Judges that are also qualified
Patent Attorneys as well as lawyers.)
My friend and I are both theists; however, I gather from Erik Baard's interview
with you in the Village Voice that you are an agnostic and therefore will
discount what my friend told me even before his decade- long struggle with the
PTO for justice began, and that is, to beware because often "Satan controls the
courts!". You can conclude the same from a study of Princeton [philosophy Ph.D.
&] theologian Gregory Boyd in his 1999 book "GOD AT WAR." My own theological
interpretation of the situation is that perhaps in your case the PTO and the
Courts are "on the side of the angels" because God wants you to realize that if
you CANNOT complete your public demonstration of a stand-alone (nearly) Free
Energy device without exhaustion of the $10 Million cash which you still have in
hand, then you do not DESERVE to ask the public to have sufficient confidence in
your claims to have Morgan Stanley go ahead with their planned $1 Billion IPO
for Blacklight Power. You are now going to have to have to fight a war on two
fronts: (1) to get the gyrotron-based device finished & make an incontrovertibly
unassailable public demonstration that is sufficient to convince even the APS
spokesman-propagandist-spoiler Bob Park; and (2) get the PTO to provide you with
the temporary monopoly to which fairly patentable subject matter gives you the
constitutionally-guaranteed right.
Several people who have dealt with you in person have told me that you seem to
be more interested in overthrowing conventional QM than in developing a
commercial product. But those are two completely separate propositions. It
could be that either your energy discovery or/and your allegedly new materials
with inexplicable properties are both empirically genuine discoveries and yet
your attempted theoretical rationale is mistaken. Therefore as I fruitlessly
advised your former teacher Dr. John Farrell in 1996 or 1997 after seeing a
draft of your patent application, you would serve your investors' interests
better by ALSO making claims that are sheerly empirical, rather than based upon
your hypothesized hydrino-based novel chemistry (hereinafter "super chemistry")
-- because, as I pointed out then, if the publications in Fusion Technology of
my [then] Intellectual Property Law (IPL) clients Profs. Bush & Eagleton were
valid, then the "excess heat" in your admittedly epochal-discovery pertaining to
aqueous potassiium carbonate with nickel cathodes could be explained better by
Cold Nuclear Fusion (CNF) than by your own "superchemistry." There is published
scientific _EVIDENCE_ that CNF is correct, because not only B&E but also Notoya
in Japan (who replicated the B&E work) have claimed to have found and _measured_
the "nuclear ash" that "explains" the "excess heat" in variations on your light-
water discovery via Bush's type of CNF theory.
When I drafted the B&E patent, we took great pains to bend over backwards to
stipulate that YOU were the first discoverer of Excess Heat without use of heavy
water, but that B&E thought that some of your scientific statements (such as
that replacement of potassium by sodium would reduce the amount of heat, whereas
in their experiments and published results the exact opposite was both expected
and observed!) were empirically falsifiable and therefore they were entitled to
patents on what was demonstrably/patentably new from them. [Their Patent later
failed to issue on a stupid technicality that was my fault but for which they
have forgiven me.]
Dr. Farrell seemed open to my verbally expressed advice on the phone, and
accepted that I was trying to help you rather than "hurt a competitor," and
therefore I mailed him a copy of the B&E patent application with my advice as to
how you could best protect your investors by making _purely empirical_ claims so
that if your "super-chemistry" turned out to be mistaken you would still have
something. I was very disappointed that you told him to send it back to me
unopened, because (as God is my witness [despite Matthew 5:37 !!]), I had
absolutely NO motive whatsoever except the altruistic desire to help a fellow
inventor; your returning of our package ostentatiously marked "UNOPENED" struck
me then as either "arrogant" or "paranoid." So now further events (which I
foresaw and PREDICTED to Dr. Farrell in 1996) show plainly that my 1996 advice
to you was GOOD advice and that you are going to have to follow it or else end
up with nothing or, as I very explicitly warned Dr. Farrell in plain English,
end up being sued by your investors for culpable negligence or worse.
There is no harm in your trying to prosecute both kinds of claims but to
concentrate on the "super-chemistry" formulation of claims to the deliberate
EXCLUSION of strictly empirical [eschew explanation but state replicable facts]
claims is egocentric & childishly self-indulgent. Your investors did not hand
you $25 Million in order for you to spend a decade indulging your obvious
penchant for reflection on esoteric subjects (documented in your 800-page book,
which may intimidate non-theoreticians but strikes a well-trained mathematician
like me as mostly "padding" for the sake of "proof by intimidation" rather than
by actual logical deduction).
However, I am not writing merely in order to get the emotional satisfaction of
telling you (after you hung up on me when I raised a difficult question) "I TOLD
YOU SO" nearly a decade later. As someone who at age 70 has the unrequited
ambition to become a "knee-jerk Christian" I am asking myself WWJD (the famous
"what would Jesus do") as regards you.
So here is some MORE altruistic advice. Before I can deliver it, I must admit
that in at least one sentence in my previous letter, I was quite mistaken, and
after reading the Court's August 15 decision (rendered a week after I sent you
my August 8 letter), "I stand corrected."
The problem came because I over-stated my moral indignation at the unfairness of
the Establishment in their treatment of you in order to show that I was NOT
criticising your book from _their_ viewpoint. My August 8 INTENT remains
unaltered, though, technically, it was flawed. I now recall 3 of my statements
to you then:
[1]. "But the fact that I _KNOW_ that the Establishment has not treated you
fairly nor given fair consideration to your new ideas does NOT, alone, prove
that your new ideas are valid." (I stand by that position still.)
[2]. "Somewhere I saw posted by your former teacher Dr. Farrell the exact
wording of the referees' reports which denied him his admittedly 'desperate'
attempts to publish your astrophysical evidence. I am unalterably certain that
those referees have done a wicked and evil thing and deserve obloquy!"
My adjectives "wicked & evil" are predicated upon the proposition that the 2nd
person of the Trinity is "the Way & the TRUTH & the Light" and therefore
suppression of truth is isomorphic to the crime of Deicide. (However, those
referees may have been so misled by the devil that in their conscious minds they
thought what they were doing was right; as Jesus said of those nailing him to
the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!")
[3]. "Also I am totally certain that the USPTO has engaged in criminal
wrongdoing in allowing outside influence to get one of your Patents yanked AFTER
the Examiner had approved its issuance and given you an issuance number!
Presumably 'overzealous prosecutor' Bob Park or someone of the same ilk is
behind this egregious crime at the PTO."
Regarding [3}, I stand corrected. After reading Judge Sullivan's decision
[attached] I must admit, contrary to my earlier emotional feelings on the
subject, that (1) there can be legitimate reasons for a disgruntled competitor
(e.g. victim of an unrighteous infringement lawsuit) to bring to the attention
of the PTO "prior art" that the Examiner had overlooked which would result in an
"eleventh hour" decision that the question of patentability needed to be
examined more carefully, and (2) the PTO has both the right & the DUTY to make
an 11th-hour delay in issuance of a Patent when a "serious" [non-frivolous]
allegation of "overlooked prior art" is brought to it at the 11th-hour.
While I still believe that it is possible to characterize Bob Park (as Charles
Platt did in the Washington Post) as behaving like an unethical "over-zealous
prosecutor", or (as you yourself did) as a "financial competitor" [which (as
lobbyist for the APS whose prestige will be damaged irreparably when the public
sees what wretchedly poor judgment they used in prematurely suppressing CNF
instead of studying it objectively) he is], it is not ethically right to
characterize someone else's motives unless the circumstantial evidence is so
strong that if presented in a court of law it would demonstrate _at least_ that
mere "preponderance of the evidence" required to prevail in a civil case. If the
APS and Park are misbehaving, it is because the devil has deceived them, and I
should expend my energy trying to enlighten them that we face a _common_ enemy
[aka Lucifer or the Adversary] instead of viewing them as MY enemies! (This I
take it is the view of Dr. Scott Chubb as Guest Editor of the forthcoming
double-issue of the Journal "Accountability in Research," vol. 8, no. 1/2, now
at the printer for appearance Sept. 1, which is totally devoted to the subject
of how CNF was mis-evaluated initially due to a failure of normal scientific
protocol.)
Prof. Irvin Kayton, from whom I took Patent Bar Review courses, teaches that
"there is no substitute for Issuance on the TECHNICAL Merits Alone" when it
comes to LATER winning infringement suits, so that one should RESIST the
temptation to force the Examiner's hand by citing the case-law regarding the
"long-sought, seldom- approached & never-attained" doctrines [now codified into
so-called Objective Indicia of Non-Obviousness] which may enable an
inexperienced patent practitioner to force the PTO to issue a weak patent that
will not stand up during the heat of enforcement litigation and is therefore not
worth having.
Since you are preparing for an IPO, Morgan Stanley will not be "exercising due
diligence" unless they require you to get a STRONG patent after prosecution on
the Technical Merits Alone; the quickie forced-issuance of a weak patent could
be viewed later by disgruntled, litigious investors as mere "window-dressing"
procured in order to swindle money from the public. But even a non-technically-
savvy Judge will be on your side in later litigation if he sees that the PTO had
originally issued the Patent based on Technical Merit Alone.
Therefore, both by strategic Kayton advice, and by the present exigencies of the
August 15 Sullivan decision, you now have NO CHOICE but to convince the Examiner
on the sole grounds of TECHNICAL MERIT that you have allowable claims.
If I were in your shoes, I would give up trying to intimidate the Examiner by
hundreds of pages of irrelevant equations. Make your EMPIRICALLY DEMONSTRATED
case like this:
"An invention or discovery is not negatived by the way in which it is made."
(It could have come to you in a dream.)
You had an IDEA (& later found empirical validating evidence) that in the famous
Rydberg equation for energy levels of hydrogen, E_n = E_1/n^2, (n = 1, 2, 3,
...), E1 = ground-state energy level, where the only chemically or
spectroscopically observed CHANGES of energy levels involve energy increments of
the type dE = (E_n) - (E_m), where m < n are both positive integers,
it could be valid to allow n to be the reciprocal of a positive integer.
To falsify your idea [Sir Karl Popper says a proposition is not "scientific"
unless in principle it can be falisfied empirically] you examined solar spectra
and found many dE examples (such as in your Table 1, page xv) which were
hitherto inexplicable, but can be "explained" within experimental error by your
new "discovery." Since you tried hard to falsify your idea, but were unable to
do so, you continued to regard it as a viable scientific hypothesis.
To force this down the Examiner's throat, whether he wants to swallow or not,
you NEED (but have so far failed to exhibit) a SCIENTIFICALLY competent
calculation of the "odds against chance" that Table 1 could be correct and yet
your idea be false (the null hypothesis that you want to show is very unlikely).
I have just enough competence in statistics to be able to read and follow such a
calculation, but not enought skill (or time!) to do it myself right now.
However, I have several acquaintances who in books or book-length manuals or
issued patents have showed that they have the off-the- top-of-the-head expertise
to make such an evaluation. I'm sending them copies in case you want to consult
them.
I have been interested in them because their calculations pertain to religion,
but even if that is not of interest to you, if you evaluated their work I'm sure
that you would concede that they have sufficient expertise to compute the
"confidence level" of refutation of the null hypothesis provided by your Table
1. Here are my 4 nominees:
#1. Dr. Randall Ingermanson, a theoretical physicist who has debunked the
"bible code" fallacy and has on his website downloadable Appendices to his book
"Who Wrote the Bible Code?" that are FREE to the public and constitute a manual
for the use of his FREE but sophisticated numerical-probability & statistics &
entropy software.
#2. Dr. William Dembski, who has several doctorates (both in mathematics,
philosophy, & theology), and published a popular book "Intelligent Design: The
Bridge Between Science & Theology," to explain to laymen the technical contents
of his Cambridge University Press monograph, "The Design Inference," which is
based upon his technical expertise in both probability, mathematical logic,
computer science, stochastic processes, etc.
#3. Dr. James Lo, who has 5 issued Patents on subjects deeply involved with
probability & statistics (namely Neural Networks, a subject on which he won a
society's prize for Best Paper of the Year) and is a tenured Professor in the
Dept. of Mathematics & Statistics at U of Md (Baltimore County), or UMBC.
#4. Dr. Rudolf Kalman (retired from U of FL and ETH in Zurich), a member of
both the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering,
who has made discoveries (not patented!) that were instrumental in winning the
cold war and are universally used in all military and commercial transportation
systems & spacecraft & satellites ("the Kalman Filter") and on which the
government has spent more than $3 Billion, and who has written books and papers
exhibiting profound knowledge of stochastic processes and evaluation of apparent
"correlation" or "causality" as opposed to "chance" in two parallel time-series.
If you tried to hire them all to work on the problem of evaluating the
"confidence level against the null hypothesis" of your Table 1, but required
them to promise NON-COLLUSION before they started work [assuming that any of
them could find the time in their very busy lives!!], and if they all got an
answer of the same order of magnitude, then you could FORCE the Examiner by what
is called "Affidavit Practice" to admit that this is Objective Evidence that he
is not allowed AS A MATTER OF BLACK-LETTER _LAW_ to overlook. This would be
winning on the Technical Merits alone rather than an ephemeral victory based
upon salesmanship.
The childish talk at the PTO about "perpetual motion" and "cold fusion" (as if
it were known to be an illusion, which is utterly disproved by the evidence in
Beaudette's book) makes me want to vomit.
However, I think that I have to become more cautious about expressing emotional
evaluations of the PTO, because I have inadvertently killed my best friend by so
doing! Lest you suspect this as another exaggeration, listen: A few months ago,
Stan Gleeson, aged 48, phoned me and said, "Bob, I can't make heads nor tails of
this Office Action [which the PTO had illegally sent to the Inventor instead of
me, the filing Agent], and neither can my own father, who is a lawyer, so I am
going to FAX it to you so you can tell me what it means." After reading the FAX,
I told him, "They are requiring you to split your patent into up to 92 X 91 =
8,372 separate patents and to prosecute them all simultaneously! When I read
that PTO Office Action, I wanted to vomit and thought, 'I wish I were dead!'"
Two days later Stan dropped dead of apoplexy. And then I learned that the IPL
had _changed_ since I had passed the Patent Bar Exam in 1978 and that under
their _current_ practices the Examiner had been well within his rights to
intitate such a Restriction requirement! [Expletive deleted!]
According to theologian Greg Boyd, in the "warfare theology" book cited above,
the human condition is that we are all caught in an invisible cosmic war between
good angels & rebellious ("fallen") angels [demons], in which there are real
casualties. If that Weltanschauung be correct, then you are doomed to further
frustration unless you can get your own Guardian Angel to fight on _your_ behalf
-- which requires you to first "get right with God." My personal OPINION is
that what this would require is:
(a) eschew temptation to short-cuts;
(b) prove sincerity by answering my dozen theoretical questions or admitting
that you were bluffing;
(c) show the Examiner the factual evidential basis for viability of your central
hypothesis by Affidavit Practice using "low likelihood of chance" as outlined
above.
(The great mathematician Armand Borel says that if an event is less likely than
the reciprocal of 10^50 then it is "physically impossible" and the Examiner
cannot possibly refute Borel -- though to err on the side of convservatism,
Dembski presents an argument that 1/10^150 is "physically impossible" (and shows
that in this sense the increase of information in the anatomical progression of
life alleged by neo-Darwinists is physically impossible [unless abiotically
infused from some exogenous source], where by 'information' in the context of
the DNA code he means "complex specified information [CSI]" as in his technical
book); (d) resign yourself to postponing your IPO until you really DESERVE an
IPO, not by "salesmanship" and "bluffing" but by exhibiting a device that even
APS lobbyist Bob Park must concede is "reality."
A _strong_ patent, issued on the Technical Merits Alone, should be the fruit of
reality rather than salesmanship, as would then an IPO be the REWARD for
achievement, not the substitute for, nor the means of postponement of, the
genuine day of reckoning. Forget your advice, on the last page of your book,
that "we are all living on borrowed time: Make the most of it!" You have had a
decade of making the most of it as shown by the numerous esoteric subjects
mentioned in your book. Now face reality!
Sincerely,
Bob Bass
===================================
Dr. Robert W. Bass
Engineer III
Identification Systems Department
BAE SYSTEMS
44414 Pecan Court
California, MD 20619
Phone: (301) 863-0687
FAX: (301) 863-0755
e-mail: robert.w.bass@baesystems.com
Return to the Robert Bass TOC Page
www.padrak.com/ine/BASS_2.html
Aug. 28, 2000.