Pvkeller

Cold Fusion

Apparently for nearly 20 years the theorists have been trying to explain how two nuclei can fuse when still inside their electron shells. They've been failing for nearly 20 years, too. That's plenty reason for me to insist that "It makes no sense to assume fusion is the source of the claimed/observed excess heat, if that very first question cannot be answered." (The "first question" was about how to get those nuclei outside their electron shells.) I got the impression from what you wrote that for some unknown-to-me reason the theorists were SUPPOSED to keep butting their heads against the problem of finding a way for the Strong Force to work across atom-width dimensions, more than 10,000 times its normal effective range. I'm quite aware that if the nuclei DO escape their shells, then the "typical" fusion mechanism (involving very high speed) has to contend with electrostatic repulsions that can be millions or billions of times the strength of electron-shell repulsion. But your pointing-out of that makes no sense if the nuclei never approach each other closely enough (for such repulsion to exist), because they start out stuck inside their electron shells!!! SO, (A) if "Something" enhances the Strong Force's range enough, then, sure, it won't matter if the nuclei are inside atoms; they are going to fuse regardless of however-much electric repulsion is going to happen while pulled together, yanked out of their atoms. OR (B) the repulsion you talked about is nonsense, because it doesn't exist and cannot exist until AFTER the nuclei escape their electron shells. So, why put the cart before the horse, and insist that nucleus-repulsion/fusing problem has to be solved before the nucleus-escape problem? The way that Hypothesis did it, the proposed solution to the "easier" problem led straight to a possible solution to the difficult problem. Do you have an objection to that? V (talk) 07:46, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

You are knocking down a strawman that you set up. Nobody is saying the nuclei are stuck inside their electron shells. Well, you are saying that, but nobody else is. The shells actually help the nuclei approach - they make them charge neutral at a distance and allow them to bond together when their mutual repulsion would keep them apart.

The problem is not getting rid of the electrons, the problem is that the electrons are too big - their mass-energy is so small, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle puts them in a cloud on the order of one Angstrom. If the electrons were smaller (or rather, formed smaller clouds), they could be used to shield the positive charges of the nuclei and allow them to approach more closely.

That is exactly what happens in muon-catalyzed fusion. The big difference betwen a muon and an electron is that a muon is hundreds of times more massive. The effective size of a muon is accordingly much smaller than an electron. When nuclei bond using muons rather than electrons, they are far-far closer and the fusion rate goes through the roof.

The uncertainty principle prevents you from pinning the electrons down to specific locations and keeping them their long enough to draw or push the nuclei together.

If you want to dream about this, here are two explanation that are somewhat plausible, at least within the limits of my knowledge:

(1) Within the Pd cathode, or on its surface, two or more (n) electrons combine to form a previously unknown particle of charge -2 (-n) and twice (n-times) the electron mass. This particle acts like a muon to catalyze fusion. Perhaps this unknown particle can only exist in a metal lattice.

(2) Under just the right conditions within the electrode with an externally applied electrical potential gradient, things line up perfectly to form a kind of particle accelerator. Fusion then occurs by a process akin to piezo-electric fusion. http://www.physics.ucla.edu/research/putterman/news/PyroScience.pdf

The cuteness of theory (2) is kind of messed up by the fact that piezo-electric fusion gives the expected branching ratio. Leadsongdog posted that muon-catalyzed fusion gives the expected branching ratio too, but I have not seen that for myself. Of course, you could avoid that branching-ratio problem by speculating that the reaction is not D+D. ~Paul V. Keller 13:22, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Edits to Mass/Energy equivalence

Please do not put back the tags on statements that you think are wrong. The statements you were tagging for removal are both correct and common knowledge.Likebox (talk) 19:44, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

The devil is in the details. Do not rely on your assumption that you are right. The article cannot be based on your understanding, however trivial you believe your inferences to be. WP:OR. And you should not have removed the tags. See WP:VER.

Here is why the potential energy part is wrong, or at least misleading. Consider two objects, both at rest, very distant from one another. Think of them as planets. Each, considered individually has a relatavistic mass M₁. (I withdrew the cite tag relating to this point) Draw a box around the two of them and consider the total energy of the new system and, big surprise, the relatavistic mass is 2M₁. However, using a conventional representation of gravitational potential, there is now a large potential energy term. Obviously, nothing has changed and the relatavistic mass is still 2M₁. The only thing that has changed is your representation, so do not go looking for a physical manifestation when the objects are distant. ~Paul V. Keller 21:21, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

You may think about where the energy comes from as the objects fall together. Well, that is where you look at the field and the potential energy term. Viewed as a separate contribution to the total mass-energy, the potential energy must be zero for the distant objects as I have explained. That will make all the gravitational potential energy that manifest as the objects approach negative. I will be interested to see what your sources have to say about the possibility of assigning a location to this negative energy that is separate from the masses. Perhaps you will invent anti-gravity. ~Paul V. Keller 21:42, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Hydrino theory

I rv'd your edit to Hydrino theory only because it ran too many things together in one go. Please take them individually. That said, if a source is not a WP:RS because it is self-published, don't just remove the publisher info, please either mark it as {{dubious}} {{self-published}} or remove it altogether (both citation and assertion) per WP:SPS.LeadSongDog (talk) 23:13, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

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