“Breakthrough”

Many of you have told me to be on the lookout for developments that could bring fundamental and dramatic change to the world we live in. Of course, almost all such claims of this kind are entirely spurious. You deal with this kind of thing all the time, when some inventor calls the head office, and you have to respond.

I’ve been talking with a small company north of San Francisco whose business is to look for breakthroughs in energy and superconductivity. They say that 99% of what they see doesn’t bear up under scrutiny, but they keep an open mind, and they’ve found some remarkable things that can’t be easily debunked. Their approach is to proceed cautiously, and subject claims to increasingly detailed and careful study.

The specific topic at hand is Room Temperature Superconductors. Anyone in the field will tell you that claims for this appear on a regular basis, and that nothing has been demonstrated on a reproduceable basis. In fact, there is a long but little known history, dating back to a prediction by a reputable scientist in 1964 that superconductivity should be possible at room temperature or higher, and early tantalizing experimental results. There are even patents filed. There are also a number of articles in respected physics journals. Certain key papers were translated from Russian and were either never published in English, or appeared in a little read journals.

This company has two programs that appear to have real promise. One program involves polymers developed by a group of Russian scientists, and the other some unusual work in ceramics in India. The company has locked up an exclusive relationship with both, and is supporting further development and rigorous testing and evaluation.

They are in discussions about strategic alliances with some very large companies, and they may get a government contract to do a feasibility study for very small SMES units (even speculating on something as small as a D cell).

Needless to say, I am intrigued. One’s automatic response is to dismiss something like this, if only on the basis that if it were true, it’d be big news, and big companies would grab it. There are reasons, however, why that isn’t necessarily so, and I believe it deserves looking into.

They have a detailed business plan, complete with technical references, which they will send to you at my request. They are looking for $1.2 million in working capital to carry them through the next phases of the work, so that they don’t have to be subject to domination by their alliance partners-to-be. If the funding precedes definitive validation of the Indian work, the equity share would be 10%. If afterwards, 5 %. And perhaps some other kind of business arrangement could be negotiated.

Please let me know if you’re interested. EdB