-----Original Message----- From: Rich Murray > Thanks, I put this on Rossi's blog -- very interesting to read the old > article.
Wait, there is more. And it is what many of you have been breathlessly awaiting. Yup, it’s black box time. Show and tell. Here is what could be in the Rossi black box, so-called - at least as best I can describe it in such a way to get the required “negative temperature” for getting the quasi-BEC. Of course the mystery box is the power supply, and my guess is it contains a precision RF power supply – to wit: a microwave tube or microtron or maser operating at 1420 MHz, the famous 21 cm line for spin flipping hydrogen. There is also an internal magnetic field in the device so the PS provides DC or pulsed DC for that. Here is how your go from there to negative temperature. On application of a magnetic field, hydrogen atoms will tend to align so as to minimize the energy of the system. Energy is added using radio frequency (RF) causing a population to flip, providing to a positive temperature - which is also the trigger temperature. At some point more than half of the spins are in the spin-up position. In this case, adding additional energy reduces the entropy, since it moves the system further from max entropy. This reduction in entropy with the addition of energy corresponds to a negative temperature. Some of this is paraphrased from the Wiki entry and you can fill in the blanks. The leap of faith, as stated in the original post, is the proposition that negative temperature can substitute for cryogenics to give a quasi-BEC. Again, you have every reason to be skeptical of that hypothesis, since there is not only no proof, but the logical connection is strained to the limits. That is what usually happens in paradigm shifts, so we will have to wait till the fat lady sings - but if nothing else, at that point we can use it in a re-write of “The Rolling Stones”… I doubt if it will gather moss.
