You can tell when someone like Grimer is getting close to the truth . .
. his emails get "lost" in transit. Posted for Frank:
<><><><><><><>
I suppose I should really change the name of this
thread to a quarter of a million psi - but I rather
like the, now historical, sixty thousand. It has
overtones of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea - or even of that heroic folly characteristic
of my countrymen's courage and incompetence,
=============================
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."
============================
And now on with the business of explaining
PV^6 = a constant in a way that even my
grandchildren will be able to understand it -
well, perhaps not all fifty <g>.
In the traditional exposition of Boyle's Law
for gasses one is presented with a image of
a lot of little hard perfectly elastic tiny
spherical particles bouncing around inside
a container and exerting a pressure on the
walls. Halve the volume and double the pressure.
Halve it again and it doubles again and so on
and so forth which leads inexorably to one of
the first bits of physics schoolboys encounter.
pressure x volume = a constant
Mind you, when I think about it I have grave
doubts how many men in the street could answer
the question: "What is Boyle's Law" though I am
confident every member of this discussion group
can. 8-) [I asked my youngest daughter who's a
philosophy graduate and she didn't have a clue 8-( ]
Now one thing that is never referred to is the
aether space between the particles. This is
completely ignored and treated as nothingness.
As Wiki tells us, "today the aether is considered
to be an obsolete scientific theory".
What about Casimir? - Well, what about it.
In most of the references I have looked up on
Casimir they go to extraordinary lengths to
refer to it in terms of an internal tension
which is pulling the plates together. They
religiously avoid in viewing it as an external
pressure. That would be scien-tically incorrect
since it would imply that space had an
atmospheric type property of being able to exert
a pressure - a very thin end of a very fat wedge -
and the engineers amongst us will all know what
one can do with wedges -
(which reminds me of a funny story - but I've got
to the age where one is never sure if one has told
that story before - so I've stuck it on the end.) ;-)
Where was I. Ah yes, space. Well, the reality is
that space ain't empty at all. It's stuffed full
of Beta-atmosphere (inter alia) which is under a
humongous pressure. When the particles (the Solid
Phase) are far apart the inside and outside B-atm.
(the Fluid Phase pressures) balance and can be
ignored It is differential Solid Phase pressure
which is governs the volume. As the particles get
closer together the internal B-atm. is increasingly
shielded from the external B-atm. and its pressure
drops. In other words the datum for the compression
on the Solid Phase is dropping as the internal
Fluid Phase expands.
In the case of Bridgman's water results,
dp = - 6 dv
This is because the Fluid Phase is expanding six
times faster than the solid phase is contracting.
Most of the energy involved in compressing the
water is coming from the expansion of the internal
Beta-atmosphere. It's a classic servo-mechanism
situation. 8-)
How can I be so sure this interpretation is correct.
Because the very first piece of way-out research
(LN 167/FJG/1962) I undertook involved measuring
the strength of clays and clays stabilized with
cement (inter alia). These gave the same power
relations for pressure versus volume as water.
In the case of clays however one can measure the
negative pressures of the Fluid Phase (pore water)
directly and doesn't have to infer them as Robin
has done so helpfully.
Interestingly enough the research was so far
ranging and intruded on so many other people's
patches at the Road Research Lab that my director,
Sir William Glanville, ordained that
NOT FOR PUBLICATION was printed in caps on the cover.
That's when I knew it must be good stuff. 8-)
Well, it's been, err.... 44 years since that
note came out - but at least I now really understand
its significance. Truth certainly does grind
exceedingly slow.
I'll have to scan the note in and put it on the
Beta-atmosphere group site - a bit of a pain cos
it's on foolscap sized pages - what the Lab used
before we went over to A4
Cheers,
Frank Grimer
******************************************
Our mechanical engineering lecturer had a
strong German accent and one day he was at
the board talking about the action of a
wedge which he kept pronouncing vedge.
Soto voce someone pipes up from the back
of the class, "Two veg?" which brings the
response "No. Only vun vedge." followed by
peals of uncontrolled mirth from the
students. Unfamiliar as he was with the
British expression "meat and two veg"
I'm sure the poor man never understood
the class reaction.
******************************************
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