Thanks for posting that. I read the transcript, and it's a good piece.
I've never understood why anyone thought the "discovery" of 115 was some kind of vindication for Lazar and his BS. Anyone who has looked a periodic chart within, oh, I dunno, the last hundred years maybe, will know there are some vacant boxes for elements not yet known. So some guy who turns out to be full of shit about anything that can be checked makes wild claims about 115. Years later, the element is finally synthesized and found to be nothing like what he claimed. As the site owner put it, the mere existence of 115 says absolutely nothing about those claims. The actual properties of 115 tell us everything we need to know about those claims, if we are too dense to figure it out from everything else the guy said.
Several authors over the years have pointed out that all of Lazar's tapestry of nonsense seems to be based on speculation that was current in the informal literature on various topics in the late 80s. The whole silly mess is so bleeding obvious!
Clearly Lazar is a hoaxer, his fake credential claims are enough to prove that. And nobody with his pubic records of credit problems and bankruptcies would get an extremely sensitive security clearance.
But I'm also really tired of people making false statements about Moscovium, aka element 115. For example, from the transcript:
“But beyond that, with so far every point I’ve addressed contradicting his story other than the element’s mere existence, we have the stability problem. Ununpentium is near one predicted island of stability, between copernicium and flerovium, elements 112 and 114. But the known isotopes are not stable. And the predicted maximum stability of the most stable version, ununpentium-291, is only seconds.”
No that’s wrong. According to the macro-microscopic nuclear model used by the world’s leading superheavy elements research facility – the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia (which is how element 115 got the name Moscovium), the center of the island of stability is around the doubly magic nuclear number Z = 114 and N = 184, so the most stable isotope of element 115 is probably Moscovium-299, not 291.
And according to the research director of the JINR, Dr. Yuri Oganessian, who’s widely considered to be the world’s leading researcher on this subject, isotopes near the center of the island of stability could have half-lives on the order of thousands or even millions of years:
“It was natural to extend this approach to the region of nuclei with Z ≥ 104, where, according to the droplet model, nuclei may not exist. A formal calculation led to unexpected results. It turned out that in the deformed nucleus with mass 270 (Z = 108 and N = 162) a fission barrier occurs, which leads to an increase in its half-life to seconds (instead of 10-19 sec). But even higher stability appears in heavier (superheavy) nuclei with proton number Z = 114 and a large number of neutrons N = 184. Here the strong effect of new nuclear shells works, similarly to the shells Z = 82 and N = 126 in the «doubly magic» spherical nucleus 208Pb. Some new calculations indicate that on the map of nucleiheavyweights form a large enough area, called the «Island of Stability» of superheavy elements (see Fig.1). In the region where the liquid-drop model predicted that the nuclei should decay within 10-19 sec, now the half-lives of «long-lived» nuclei at the peak of the island of stability are expected to reach thousands and even millions of years! (see, for example, review [5]).”
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/337/1/012005/pdf
He also makes this absurd statement in that transcript:
“Beyond that, the only other parts of this to mention are everything he claims about using it for propulsion. Like, if you bombard it with protons it makes antimatter. Which makes no sense because he claimed that you had to input material, to get antimatter, which produces energy when it reacts with matter. Simple conservation of mass and energy means you get absolutely NOTHING out of this. You spend a proton, you get an anti-proton, you react with a proton, you get energy exactly equal to the mass-energy of the particles that went into it. Everything is conserved. You get nothing out of it.”
For some reason this guy thinks that you “get nothing out of it” if you’re not increasing the mass-energy content of the universe, i.e., violating the conservation of energy (and perhaps the conservation of baryon number along the way). That’s stupid. We’re talking about a portable energy source, not violating the laws of physics. So here’s the deal:
Sometimes nuclei spontaneously decay by emitting the antimatter equivalent of an electron – a positron. If you collide that positron with an electron, then all of their rest mass gets converted into energy, which you can use to do stuff. So if you could make 1 gram of antimatter through some nuclear decay process, and let it interact with 1 gram of matter, you would liberate 1.8 x 10^21 ergs of energy, or 1.8 x 10^14 joules; the equivalent of a 42.96 kiloton nuclear warhead going off (but in a controlled fashion of course, and I’m neglecting the energy lost to neutrino production for simplicity). That’s a larger yield than the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. And you got all that energy for the low-low price of two grams of fuel. We don’t know of a more efficient energy production method than this. Matter-antimatter annihilation is the most efficient energy source known to modern physics.
However, I don’t see how the metastable isotopes of Moscovium could be a useful source of antimatter, as Lazar claims. Lots of nuclei decay through positron emission, but very little of the mass of each nucleus goes into it, and the rest is just very energetic waste product, so it’s not an efficient concept. In fact you get more kinetic energy and high-energy photons from the by-products of ordinary nuclear decay processes, which is why we use radioisotope fuel cells to power long-term space probes like the Pioneer spacecraft.
In my view Lazar’s story was debunked decades ago. But people shouldn’t be making false scientific arguments just to keep beating a dead horse.
