A Harvard-trained medical doctor is banking that his widely derided theory could supplant Big Bang theory, find the recipe for the cosmos' interstellar gases, and fuel cars without pollution.

Randell Mills, 42, blipped onto science debunkers' radar screens in 1991 when he claimed to unleash energy by "shrinking" the hydrogen atom's electron orbit to form what he calls a "hydrino."

Although mainstream physicists, including Nobel laureates, rankle at the mention of hydrinos, Mills has gathered $25 million dollars from investors for his startup, BlackLight Power Inc.

The company moved into its new digs last year -- a 53,000-square-foot (4,900-square-meter) space satellite manufacturing plant in New Jersey, bought from Lockheed Martin.

Aerial view of BlackLight Power's office and laboratory complex.

"Something real is generating energy there," said Dan Mears, president of Technology Insights, an energy technology consulting group in San Diego that investigated BlackLight for a year in 1996 on behalf of Oregon electric utility PacifiCorp.

"We were convinced there was excess energy being produced by what he was then calling 'hydrocatalysis,'" Mears said. So convinced that the team leader left to work for BlackLight for a year before moving on to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, he added.

PacifiCorp signed on, and was followed by the Mid-Atlantic utility Conectiv.

Now Morgan Stanley Dean Witter wants to usher BlackLight to an initial public offering.

After two hydrino presentations at American Chemical Society meetings in California in recent months, interest among some scientists and engineers is growing too.

NASA space station engineer Luke Setzer privately formed a study circle on egroups.com to debate and explore the hydrino theory. The list has grown to 70 members since it started in March.

Setzer first became intrigued by an aspect of Mills' theory that stated electrons might be made to respond negatively to gravity by warping their general relativistic curvature. The possibilities for propulsion caught Setzer's eye.

"I mean, come on," he said. "There's got to be a better way to get off of the Earth than rockets. The rocket lifting the shuttle is much bigger then the shuttle itself."

"Human colonization of space is going to require radical breakthroughs in access to space. Mills' technologies show some promise to deliver that," Setzer said. "Furthermore, Mills offers rational explanations for anomalous observations."

Mills cautions, however, that even if his theory is right, he doesn't know how much lift the phenomenon would provide. Its applications might remain microscopic, in signal processing, for example.

Wild ideas in science are a bit like mutations in genes: most are useless, some are harmful, and infinitesimally few are advantageous.

With such stacked odds, debunking is usually an easy job, so Mills' tenacity befuddles his harshest critics.

"I guess I am surprised it's lasted this long," said Robert Park, a spokesman for the American Physical Society and professor at the University of Maryland. Park targets Mills, among others, in his new Oxford University Press book release, Voodoo Science, the Road from Foolishness to Fraud.

Whatever road Mills is on, he's convinced the rest of us will be along for the ride.

"Hydrino chemistry may be essential to mankind's understanding of the universe and future technological growth," he said. "My commitment to this endeavor is as enduring and timeless as the matter upon which it is based."

Still, Mills has his supporters along with detractors. John Farrell, a chemist who was department chair at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania when Mills was a student, said he finds Mills' deterministic model of the atom more useful than the probabilistic paradigm of current quantum theory.

Farrell became convinced of its rectitude when soft X-rays and extreme-ultraviolet, or "black-light," emissions Mills' theory predicted for transitions to lower hydrino states "perfectly matched" five spectral lines detected in the dark areas between stars, known as interstellar media. That data was gathered by University of California at Berkeley astrophysicists Simon Labov and Stuart Boyer a decade ago from a probe carried by a "sounding rocket" to the edge of the atmosphere.

"The probability of that happening was just enormously small unless Randy was right," Farrell said. The transitions also correspond to unexplained spectral lines produced by the sun's corona, he said.

Similar spectral lines from BlackLight cells were confirmed by Johannes Conrads, the recently retired director of the Institute for Low Temperature Plasma Physics, a national laboratory in Germany. Additionally, hydrogen plasmas created by the BlackLight process require "astonishingly" little energy to initiate and decay far more slowly than they normally should when input power is cut, Conrads said.

Conrads said he hasn't embraced the hydrino theory, but "the more you have from this pattern, the higher the probability you've found something. It's not trivial and I have not seen things like this before."

Hydrinos also play a central role in Mills' alternative theory to the Big Bang, which he dismisses as "an academic fiction."

He instead characterizes the universe as endlessly oscillating between matter and energy over thousand-billion-year cycles, with finite set points. At only 13 billion or so years into the current cycle, "We're just at the beginning. The universe doesn't get much smaller than this," he said.

The conversion of matter into energy is the engine of space-time expansion, he posits.

Albert Einstein and others have shown that a mass creates a dimple in space-time. As that mass burns itself out, throwing off energy, that dimple formed by gravity is smoothed, causing the universe to expand, Mills explained.

"Matter, energy and space-time are conserved. They're interchangeable," Mills said.

Hydrino chemical reactions are one way matter is converted into energy, and may account for up to half of the sun's energy production, according to the Mills theory. But atom for atom, nuclear processes are far more potent than hydrino transitions, he said.

Mills' theory correctly predicted in the early 1990s the 1998 observation that universal expansion is accelerating.

Hydrogen, with one electron and one proton, is the simplest atom and the most studied. Quantum theory describes the electron orbit of hydrogen in isolation as being in the "ground," or most stable, state with a binding energy with the proton of 13.6 electron volts and a potential energy of 27.2 EV.

That orbit can't be lowered, only inflated to unstable higher radii when energy is added. Trying to take hydrogen's electron below the ground state is like "trying to go south of the South Pole," Park quipped.

Steven Weinberg, a 1979 Nobel laureate in physics at the University of Texas at Austin, seconded Park's certainty.

The idea of the ground state "is a fabulously well-tested mathematical theorem. I would bet my life on it."

The electron's position should be seen as a "cloud" of probabilities extending from the nucleus itself out indefinitely that collapses into it's most probable orbit when observed, Weinberg said. While "of course a theory can be wrong," and "we don't turn a blind eye to anomalies...you don't throw away 75 years because of an anomaly you don't understand. As far as we know, quantum theory is rigorously valid. I have no idea what would replace it."

The Mills model treats the electron as a definable object that can be manipulated. The electron, in his conception, travels as a two-dimensional disk of charge and wraps around a nucleus like a fluctuating soap bubble. He calls the bubble an "orbitsphere."

Senior astrophysicist Barry Turner of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory respects Mills' laboratory work, but still has strong reservations about the underlying theory because of "intuitive leaps" in his formulas. "His math is unsatisfactory to support the theory," Turner said.

"There's enough there that intrigues me though," he says. Mills' research methods impress Turner. "If there's any correctness to the theory, it makes a lot of sense to do what he's done in the lab. That logical step was not found wanting." Next, the theory could be cleaned up and filled in with data, he believes.

The world's largest single-dish, advanced radio telescope is under construction in Greenback, West Virginia. Turner proposes to train it on "ionized nebulae or other suitable regions" to search background radiation for evidence of Mills' claim that a diffuse hydrino gas is "dark matter" -- a term that physicists use to describe what is perhaps the deepest mystery of our time.

Observed matter, like stars and planets, don't have enough mass to account for the gravity apparent in the cohesive movement of galaxies. In fact, it seems we can't account for more than 90 percent of the universe.

Current theories bridging the Big Bang and quantum mechanics go so far afield as to speculate that matter trapped in other dimensions or other universes is affecting gravity in our realm. Mills maintains that there are only three dimensions (plus time) and no universes interacting with our own.

"Why is it that claiming dark matter is normal matter trapped in other dimensions is okay, but saying that it's normal matter trapped in a lower energy state is considered nuts?" Mills asked.

Mills also points out that hydrogen makes up more than 95 percent of the visible universe, so it might be logical to look to hydrogen in some form to deduce the composition of the invisible universe.

Turner's methods of verification will be very conventional, he explains. The electrons and protons that make hydrogen in both the ground and theorized hydrino states are magnetic and fall into a natural alignment. But on occasion a photon flying through space will knock that arrangement askew. When those magnets "click back into place," energy is released. In hydrogen, that energy travels at a 8.3-inch (21-centimeter) wavelength. It's a benchmark for radio astronomers.

If hydrinos exist, those magnets would be closer together and so interact more strongly, producing higher energy, tighter frequencies.

Turner said he will search, as a skeptic, for "analogous hyperfine splitting" at the 0.1-inch (3-millimeter) and "relatively unexplored" 0.4-inch (1-centimeter) wavelengths predicted for some hydrinos by the Mills theory.

Turner says he knows his proposal will draw some fire. "There are some people who will say, 'Dr. Turner must have lost his marbles,'" he said. "I owe it to science. I think nature would be fascinating if he's right."

In the end, it's only experimentation, not arguments, that will decide if Mills can journey "south of the South Pole." Maybe the analogy will prove inadequate. One might recall the words of Amerigo Vespucci, written after he'd sailed south of the sub-equatorial Torrid Zone, below which prevailing wisdom dictated no life could exist.

"Rationally, let it be said in a whisper, experience is certainly worth more than theory."