Google has Philip Ball's book online: Critical Mass - How one thing leads to another
http://books.google.com/books?id=G-C9k_EvVJ8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=critica l+mass&source=bll&ots=Uw3Gj-mthN&sig=oNoCvJVRkgFRjaCQJQ6et53hs5Q&hl=en&ei=MH p9TZyjBoTWtQPBnbCDAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13&sqi=2&ved=0CHIQ 6AEwDA#v=onepage&q&f=false I have become convinced that what Rossi has discovered, serendipitously and possibly unknown to himself, can be characterized as a critical mass. "of something." Obviously, the 'something' is not related to nuclear fission, even though it may be partly nuclear. The phrase can be misleading, of course - due to the strong association with what has come into focus in Japan in the past few days. It is possibly related to a physical mass, but it could just as easily be leaning more towards intangible considerations - which casts everything into a different light. The behavior of the underlying system becomes "emergent" - in the way Ball describes in the book above, but he does not delve deep enough into quantum mechanics to be helpful in this precise pursuit (Rossi's discovery). However the insight on emergent systems is helpful. The irony here is that QM and critical mass are antithetical on one level of understanding. I wonder if 'probability' in the sense of 'correlation fields' is responsive to a kind of a critical mass (leading to emergent behavior) in systems which depend on a flux of 'pycno,' as opposed to neutrons ? 'Probability' is the underlying basis of 'critical mass' wrt fission via neutron interaction (chain reaction), but can it possibly be related to ZPE and 'enhanced decay' mediated by dense hydrogen, for instance, or by other pairings of interest? There are always "pairings" it seems, and chain reactions can incorporate a measure of time delay. Jones
