For the absent-minded amongst us - Quantum flubber would be a hypothetical ball of very small radius which bounces higher and higher on every iteration for a few femtoseconds and then disappears.
Some years ago, physicists at IBM demonstrated a version of it in a famous computer model... well... err... they demonstrated the probable existence of "glueballs" - sub-nuclear particles that had eluded detection for decades. Their sim was a turning point in both computer technology and quantum physics. They did it in with 448 mainframes running for two years - in 1993-95. Today it could be done in about an hour on a PC with a NVIDIA(r) Tesla(tm) 20 ... but they did it their way, nevertheless, at great cost and it allowed identification of the glueball from old data (from prior accelerator studies). The physical evidence had been there all along. This is essentially what put QCD (quantum chromodynamics) into the physics vocabulary, and also computer modeling into IBM's ever-expanding bottom line. QCD describes the strong force - by far the strongest of nature's four fundamental forces, which binds quarks together. Since this must precede the formation of basic particles like neutrons and protons, it is not nuclear physics so much as sub-nuclear physics. Are we on the verge of opening up the field of LESR (low energy subnuclear reactions)?Maybe. That is because a version of the glueball might also be the driving force in the Ni-H reaction. And guess what, this speculation did not come from me, or the physical chemistry lab at Medfield College - instead it was implanted in my subconscious a decade ago by an article in Infinite Energy. Warm regards Gene, wherever you are. Anyway the energy would not be the glueball particle itself, since it is too massive not to produce tell-tale radiation. The lack of radiation in a reactor which consumes about a gram of hydrogen to produce about 100 kWhr is what we seem to be searching hard to explain these days, and there probably is a low energy route to get this kind of asymmetry in QCD since it is extra-dimensional, almost by definition. Anyway it is matter -> energy in the bottom line. This precise mechanism could involve Inverted Rydberg Hydrogen (IHR) which can be derived from spillover hydrogen, and IRH allows protons to get close enough so that strong force interactions can happen routinely, but since two protons at low energy cannot bind, something must 'give'. A glueball could be the result. It could metaphorically bounce around for a short while and then fade away - like quantum flubber. In effect, it would operate sequentially to remove mass from the proton in small quanta and convert that into heat. The process probably correspond to the Rydberg energy level, and thus would be the QCD version of CQM. If true - too bad for Randy Mills. He came pretty close to the same result, but may have missed the Ni-H boat by a quantum mile - simply because of a stubborn ego. Essentially when you reject QM, you implicitly reject QCD, and you never get to see the beauty of quantum flubber. However, I do not see him losing any sleep over this explanation, even if he does remind one a bit of Fred MacMurray. Jones
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