What’s this? Another crackpot saying he can generate power out of water, thin air or garbage? Blacklight Power is more than sketches and talk: The well-funded company says it has built a prototype of its power generator, claiming it can crank out 50,000 watts at a tenth the cost of the cheapest coal, nuclear, or wind-generated power. The astonishing science behind this dynamo has to do with a concept that many scientists say doesn’t even exist, the Fifth Force (the first four being gravity, electromagnetism, and the two nuclear forces, strong and weak).

Randell Mills, the Harvard-educated physician and maverick behind this power-generation tech, says he’s applied a catalyst (insert miracle here?) to hydrogen atoms derived from plain old water, changing the orbits of their electrons and turning them into what he calls hydrinos. When this happens, lots of energy is released, enough to create more hydrogen via electrolysis. Sounds near-miraculous, but the company says the generator you see here is real (update: we changed the pic to show what is believed to be the prototype), and can be scaled up to megawatt size or down to micro size. Click Continue to see a diagram of the generator in action.

Beyond the practical aspect of this project, Blacklight Power also claims to have gone beyond quantum mechanics and discovered a Theory of Everything, the elusive Grand Unified Theory Einstein was searching for but never found. Could this be the real thing? Blacklight says it will have a factory built by next year to mass-produce its power generation devices, so we’ll know soon enough. If true, this could change the world forever.

Blacklight Power, via Next Big Future