From: Roarty, Francis X
I am ok with negating the "sealed heat engine" but since we aren't talking about combustion but rather what you referred to once as a cold engine I remain open to a possible "sealed cold engine" based on changes in isotropy where reversible chemical reactions runaway when compression reduces bounding gas pocket geometries around ionized gas like hydrogen down into the active Casimir region such that disassociation is discounted below the amount of energy returned when the gas immediately re-associates. Fran, good point. Your basic suggestion sounds viable if the facts support it. A hydrogen-based reaction (Casimir or Casimir instigated redundant ground state reaction in a "noble gas matrix") would be a more interesting proposition if we could show that Papp had used hydrogen in his gas mix, but there's not much evidence for that. Another possibility, if there were persistent ions in the gas (aka "hydino hydride"), is a version of the exploding or "variable capacitor" model. John Berry posted on this once (http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg32772.html) but I'm not sure anyone ever suggested that this particular engine is a version of it. H2 could arguably have been a common contaminant in tanked helium in that era. Back in the late sixties, helium probably did have a fractional percent or more. H2 could also have been Papp's trade secret, but if the energy comes from f/H - it materializes as thermal gain. There should be lots of heat for UV radiation. The exploding capacitor scenario is also a heat engine proposition. If the engine is marginally air-cooled, and hydrogen ionization and redundancy is occurring - then its temperature should rise rapidly during operation. It the cylinder does not heat up, as appears to be the case, then it does not seem to operate as a heat engine and it seems to violate Boyle's law. The advocates of this engine might say that the purpose of the "mix" of noble gases was to take the fill as far away from an ideal gas as possible. No problem with that, but the explanation does not imply that heat can completely disappear for one area of space. IOW - even if there is a thermodynamic cooling anomaly of major proportions due to the non-ideal gas mix, that does NOT mean that an engine of this type is capable of self-running without a heat source. And it means that a self-runner requires two completely separate miracles - the anomalous heat source and the anomalous cooling source. If Josef Papp found those two miracles at the same time, then maybe he also invented the 300 mph submarine :-) and was the most misunderstood man on earth (till AR came along). Jones
