At 16:50: on Fri, 25 Dec 2009, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote [snip] Yeah. "Very high compression and mobility" is somewhat of a proxy for "very high temperature." But not exactly. Thermonuclear fusion would refer to fusion taking place because of the high energy of the nuclei, allowing them to overcome the Coulomb barrier by sheer momentum. High compression and mobility, absent the high nuclear velocities, would increase the number of potential collisions and possibly reveal some tunneling or shielding effect. No idea was expressed, in the news conference or this article, that high temperature was the cause of the apparent nuclear reaction. And that is what "thermonuclear" means. [end snip]
I think if he meant heat he would have said so, I suggest this was a very early attempt at what Naudts later calls relativistic hydrogen or what Caltech refers to as "squeezing" toward a one dimensional atom. Since the energy density between the conductors of a Casimir cavity is less than normal, Casimir energy is said to be negative. The very high mobility mentioned by P/F is not a proxy for high temperature. The atom is actually decelerating relative to any reference point outside of the catalyst "plates". The "absolute" delta of acceleration between a reference point in the normal isotropic ZPF and the reduced ZPF field is still energy but I wouldn't call it heat. Relativity through equivalent acceleration normally occurs at astronomical distances where gravity accumulates at a slow gradient as a space craft takes position in a deep gravity well. Cavity QED however suggests "equivalence" can also occur as an abrupt boundary where the situation is reversed, The higher energy ZPF exists outside of bubble formed by the plates of a cavity such as the skeletal catalyst Rayney nickel or the pores of plated cathode alloy in electrolysis. The lower suppressed energy inside the plates would represent a "gravitational hill" as opposed to a well, Italian researchers DiFiore et all pretty much proved this differential can not be exploited into a lifting force so we must presume it is either a drag on the ambient field outside the plates or there is a balance inside the plates where distributed "wells" exactly matches the segregated "hills" accumulated in the depletion zone between the plates. IMHO Fran
