On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 7:37 AM, Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote:
To be brutally honest, this makes no sense. You cannot have it both ways. > The underlying reaction is either hot or it isn’t. Plus, the larger > problem: > Boltzmann’s tail (of the Maxwellian distribution). > I think we agree more than may be apparent. I've probably used "thermalization" incorrectly, or at least in a confusing way. The specific mechanism I personally have in mind is that the mass-energy of the fusion intermediate state is siphoned off via a near-instantaneous electromagnetic interaction with electrically charged particles in the environment, e.g., perhaps to the surrounding electrons, rather than being yielded via the slower processes that give rise to fast particles and to gamma photons (the longest of the processes, and hence the least likely). Think of the yielding of a gamma as the long process of filling up a capacitor bank until it can be discharged in one big blast, and instead there being something that is short-circuiting this and resulting in low-grade heat via photon emission from nearby electrons, which are momentarily given a good "shake" by the fusion. If something like that is happening, I would expect broadband emission and few high energy photons. With the mass-energy of the fusion intermediate state being sapped away, you would get neither the gamma (the discharge of the capacitor bank), nor the fast particles (which also take a bit longer to be yielded). This particular description may be implausible, or it may be plausible in some scenario but not applicable to the current one. In the present context it's intended primarily as an illustration of the more general idea of "thermalization" I had in mind. Just to clarify, I do not believe there are electrons intercepting gammas, as in W-L. But if a process of this kind were found to apply, it would seem, then, to be the main way that the underlying mechanism of cold fusion is different from hot fusion; which is to say that they wouldn't seem to be all that different, just carried out in different contexts. Of course, if such a process were not occuring, all bets are off, and cold fusion and hot fusion may be entirely different creatures. Eric
