Ruggero Maria Santilli (born 1935) is an Italian-American physicist and a proponent of fringe scientific theories.

Biography

Ruggero Maria Santilli was born in Capracotta, in the Italian region of Molise. Santilli studied physics at the University of Naples and went on to attend the Graduate School in Physics of the University of Turin, graduating in 1966. In 1967 he was invited by the University of Miami to conduct research under NASA financial support. Starting in 1968, Santilli was an Associate Professor of Physics at Boston University, teaching physics and mathematics, and conducted research for the United States Air Force. During this time, he became a naturalized American citizen. In 1976 and 1977 Santilli was a visiting scholar at the Center for Theoretical Physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978 he was briefly involved in research at Harvard University, sponsored by Shlomo Sternberg in the Mathematics Department. In 1983 Santilli became the President of his newly-formed Institute for Basic Research.

Work

Hadronic mechanics

Although Santilli has published papers in the mainstream scientific literature, a large amount of his work has dealt with his so-called hadronic mechanics, a novel fundamental theory of the universe which is not generally accepted by the physics community. Santilli, a voluminous writer, has published hundreds of papers and a number of books on this and related subjects, including applications to chemistry, superconductivity, biology, and cosmology.

Most of his work on this theory has been published in Hadronic Journal, a journal of which Santilli himself is the founder and chief editor. Santilli has also established the journals Hadronic Journal Supplement and Algebras, Groups and Geometries, in which he publishes papers by himself and others. These journals are published by Hadronic Press, a firm of which Santilli's spouse Carla Santilli is the sole officer/director.

Magnecule theory

Santilli claims to have developed novel fuels, named MagneGas and MagneHydrogen: these names are trademarks of Hadronic Press They are produced by plasma arc gasification of liquid waste. Santilli claims that these fuels are composed of magnecules. These hypothetical magnecules are a type of chemical species theoretically proposed by Santilli, distinguished from better-known species by containing a novel type of bond called a "magnecular bond", which he claims consists of atoms held together by magnetic fields which arise from toroidal polarization of their electron orbitals. Neither these claims nor the existence of magnecules have been generally accepted by the chemistry community. Magnecules have also been invoked to justify novel unverified claims about oxyhydrogen gas, which he calls "HHO gas".

This paper by Santilli claims (e,g, on its p. 21) that many types of magnecules have been identified.

Santilli's theory has been discredited by other scientists as having 'many serious misinterpretations, and misunderstandings of the “data” presented... [the paper] creates some doubt as to whether [the author] actually knows the difference between a gas chromatograph (GC) and a mass spectrometer (MS).'

International Committee for Scientific Ethics and Accountability

In 1999, Santilli established the International Committee for Scientific Ethics and Accountability to "oppose scientific frauds, plagiarisms, and deceptions", which stated that it would sue anyone who performed various acts, such as anyone who plagiarized "either in part or in full, the following parametric deformation of Lie theory, and of Heisenberg equation in their infinitesimal and finite versions".

Selected publications

• Santilli, Ruggero (1978). The inverse problem in Newtonian mechanics. New York: Springer-Verlag.
• Santilli, Ruggero (1978). Foundations of Theoretical Mechanics. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
• Santilli, Ruggero (1983). Birkhoffian Generalization of Hamiltonian Mechanics. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
• Santilli, Ruggero (1984). Il Grande Grido. Louisville: Alpha Pub.
• Santilli, Ruggero (1984). Direct universality of the Lie-admissible algebras. Nonantum, Mass.: Hadronic Press.
• Relativistic hadronic mechanics: Nonunitary, axiom-preserving completion of relativistic quantum mechanics, Ruggero Maria Santilli, Foundations of Physics, 27, #5 (May 1997), pp. 625–729. DOI 10.1007/BF02550172.
• Santilli, Ruggero (2001). Foundations of Hadronic Chemistry: with Applications to New Clean Energies and Fuels. Berlin: Springer.
• Structure and Combustion of Magnegases, R. M. Santilli and A. K. Aringazin, arXiv:physics/0112066v1.
• Santilli, Ruggero (2006). Isodual theory of antimatter with applications to antigravity, grand unification and cosmology. Dordrecht: Springer.

Works discussing Santilli

• Exploding a Myth: Conventional Wisdom or Scientific Truth?, Jeremy Dunning-Davies. Chichester, UK: Horwood Publishing Ltd., 2007. ISBN 1904275303.
• Book review of Foundations of Hadronic Chemistry with Applications to New Clean Energies and Fuels, by R. M. Santilli. Reviewed by Jeremy Dunning-Davies. Foundations of Physics, 32, #7 (July 2002), pp. 1175–1178. DOI 10.1023/A:1016542928371.
• The Thermodynamics Associated with Santilli's Hadronic Mechanics, by Jeremy Dunning-Davies. Progress in Physics, 2006, #4, pp. 24–26.

References