On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Jojo Jaro <jth...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > This argument applies to all other neutron creation ideas brought up in > this thread - ie. cosmic rays, stray gammas, nanoantennas etc. While these > mechanisms are probable, it just is not occuring at the correct rates to > explain the phenomenom. > It seems to me that the matter of rates is straightforward. Assume a mechanism in which a large percentage of the gammas that are emitted feed back into the process. This is an important assumption, but it is not that off-the-wall, I suspect. Almost any plausible fusion event that we can enlist for generating our helium and power will release high energy photons. This is an inconvenient fact that will bedevil any explanation but which we we seem to periodically forget. We somehow want to make the photons go away without doing anything with them. Doing that is as magical as assuming that a large percentage of photons feed back into the system. Concerning cosmic rays, perhaps in the older Pd/D experiments they served to jump start the reaction where spark plugs will do the trick in the newer setups. But once the reaction gets going, it becomes self-sustaining somehow and does not require cosmic rays anymore. Science and technology owe a huge debt to science fiction. We once thought of a kind of electric book, where you could pull up all kinds of information, and now we have tablet computers. We once thought of sending people to the moon, and then we did it. We once conceived of the possibility of traveling under the water, and then it happened. So even though science fiction has often gotten things wrong and has been harebrained about many of its assumptions, not infrequently it has led to new avenues of exploration and discovery. In the spirit of science fiction, here are two more possible pathways for cold fusion. Assume an elongated cavity in a nickel substrate. 1. Assume the cavity is an optical cavity, such that a photon that enters in one side will reverberate back and forth within it. Assume the cavity is loaded with hydrogen or deuterium by way of gas loading or electrolysis, and that a high energy photon, in the hundreds of keV, enters the system. The photon interacts with a nearby hydrogen atom and is reemitted back into the cavity at a lower frequency, imparting part of its energy to the hydrogen atom in the form of kinetic energy. The new, lower-frequency photon bounces around and then interacts with another hydrogen atom, imparting kinetic energy and being reemitted at yet a lower frequency. This continues until a sort of thermal equilibrium is attained among the hydrogen atoms. The photon eventually leaves the system as a soft x-ray. The hydrogen atoms are now very energetic. 2. A high energy photon enters the cavity, causing electrons to be ejected from the walls of the cavity. As the photon bounced around, more electrons are ejected. A kind of electron pressure builds up that turns the cavity into an oven, heating the hydrogen atoms to a very high temperature. I don't think either of these approaches would require neutron formation. Eric
