by Doug Coulter » Sun Jul 17, 2011 4:55 pm
I'm a punster myself -- but I'm in awe. One wonders, if perhaps through a different path, this is why that pic I posted of alternate wavefunctions for D from a physics book is true? One kind of squished-ball shaped, and one dual-ball (or dual dough-nut depending on how sliced)? If in fact the "all quarks" state is the lower energy state, then the preconditions I *think* I want for fusion are the rarer ones -- which, among other things I've been looking at (conservation laws, more or less, for spin, parity, exclusion and so on) seem to very much explain why the lousy cross sections for DD fusion into any particular set of output products, and Q.
Actually, this is good - any new science and thinking have to satisfy the idea that they don't falsify all prior research, or at least don't contradict empirical results of it, and indeed, should also satisfy the Feynman criterion -- they aren't worth much if they don't predict something new as well, and aren't lab testable to boot.
I think we've got that one covered here with this idea set of getting the ions prepped into the right states before trying to stick them together, using observations of what that might take and how to do it that have been accepted almost since the last world war. Via other tricks known to work, from Stern-Gerlach, to NMR and gammas (and near-miss collisions) able to set up meta-stable states, we might just have come upon something here. For it not to have happened already in nature (and maybe would have wiped us all out early in the game) it has to require some fair subtlety to make it happen in bulk, or it'd be observably happening int he universe at large, right? So it has to be something that takes a lot more than a putting a lot of stuff together and hoping for randomness to make things right (the tokomak or even the approach used by stars). If all this stuff has to be "right" at the moment of interaction to make it "go" -- then that explains a lot not only about how rare it is, but how one might make it happen better.
As a science/engineer, this makes me real happy -- red meat!
Let me state this another way. Suppose there are about 10 degrees of freedom, and we'll be conservative and say most of those are binary -- 10 bits of state (reality is that at least 6 of those aren't only binary -- translations and rotations). Now for two things to "go" they both have to have the right state to compliment the other -- total 20 bits. That accounts for the rarity of "random" and if those things can be set up without tons of energy input -- there's your factor of a million right there.
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In a more off the wall sense, we know humans are fairly good at making babies, but there's a rather exotic dance that goes on to make it happen. If you just shoot them out of cannons at one another, well, there's most of the same issues -- for one thing, you need one each sex, and they have to not hit head to head or feet to feet (or butts to butts). Then the guy has to be "there" at just the right moment....and so on -- there's just a fun example of things that kinda want to happen, but don't happen well in a random situation (in only some senses, the analogy fails badly in some ways).
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.