This is the title of a provocative piece on quantum mechanics written by Dr. Dave on the "Ask a Physicist" series.
The article is fairly lightweight but the conclusion is valid: Physicists have no idea how the wave function collapses ... cough, cough ... but they suspect it happens on a very short time interval, so that it is not easy to document even with state of the art instruments. Since the collapse is transient and the situation returns to normal in a femtosecond or so, one can almost opine that wave function collapse could be a fiction (but it is not a fiction if you are a quick study, so to speak). At any rate, looking for QM answers - to LENR questions - can confuse everyone unless one is very careful with the element of "time lapse." Here's Dr. D's (paraphrased) thirty-second quantum mechanics course: At a fundamental level, everything in the universe behaves like a probability wave. Particles are literally in many places at once, each with some probability. Take an electron and fire it at a screen with two slits cut through it, and astonishingly, the electron will go through both slits simultaneously. But if you set up a pair of super-fast cameras to monitor which slit the electron goes through - then suddenly - poof - the "wave function collapses" and it really goes through only one of the two. Somehow "observing" the system directly affects the outcome, or at least having a very fast camera allows one to document what has happened. OK. Does this tell us anything about LENR? Can the required observer be reduced to nano-dimensions? Is a virus an observer? What about a proton? What about a proton which is now designated as the surrogate observer in the "expectations" of an optimistic experimenter? We have talked about the "expectation effect" in LENR before - and the fact that those who expect better results more often achieve them - but this particular detail goes beyond that bit of trick-cyclery. We want to examine the collapse of the nickel wave function in the context of time, with or without ego-expectation. IOW we might explain thermal anomalies better if we can open up the time lapse window significantly. Nickel CAN open that window ... much wider than other hosts for at least one outcome. This is because nickel has at least twice the chance of a favorable redundant ground state outcome at a short time interval - compared to other proton conductors (when we look at this in the Rydberg sense). Nickel has 10 valence electrons of its 28 total electrons, and it should be noted that the first five IP electrons of Nickel represent a Rydberg multiple and also the first 6, so consequently there is a wider "target" for coupling hydrogen to a wave function collapse - since both five and six are active. The 11th Rydberg multiple (27.2 eV * 11) which is seen in this partial collapse is almost a perfect fit for nickels 6th IP sum. For nickel, that total is 299.96 eV and the perfect fit would be 299.2 eV. But as fate (and physics) would have it, nickel also has a 5th ionization potential that sums to 191.96 eV and that can be contrasted to the seventh Rydberg level (27.2 eV * 7 = 190.4 eV). In effect, what this means that if wave function collapse is a very short interval phenomenon, say femtosecond, then having two adjacent Rydberg holes gives the host twice the chance of capturing hydrogen. Therefore, there could be energetic significance to there being a physical fit at two adjacent ionization levels in nickel. However, these ionization levels are deep, and for all practical purposes there is little way that we would ever see "real" ionization which could remove 5 or 6 valence electrons to create the required "energy hole" with which to catalyze the redundant ground state of hydrogen, which happens to be in the vicinity of nickel atoms. This is where we must depart from Mills into what is really a version of normal QM, which is specifically rejected by Mills, and thus none of this is really Millsean. The salient issue is "how" does this kind of deep energy hole develop without physical ionization? The answer to that can be labeled as tunneling due to collapse of the wave-function of the nickel on a regular basis... which is due to ingrained local charge imbalance - and a subsequent reinflation in which there is an enhanced window for gain. The ingrained charge imbalance is the direct result of what makes nickel-62 unique in the periodic table. In this hypothesis, that property can result in a regular and rapid spontaneous collapse and decoherence - which almost immediately returns to normal state, but with anomalous side-effects happening at a much higher probability in the interim. Since this nickel isotope is a singularity - having the highest bonding strength per nuclide in the periodic table, this simply cannot be coincidental. The high bond strength (8.8 MeV per nucleon) indicates another specific physical factor: excess neutrons per unit of expressed (positive) nuclear charge. By all rights Ni-62 should represent more than 3.6 percent of all nickel atoms, since it possesses the highest bonding strength per nucleon, but that is counter-balanced by Coulomb instability in a nucleus having too many neutrons per proton giving the least expressed positive charge - which is precisely why the nucleus with the highest binding strength of all is found in low enrichment. Get it? Two conflicting tendencies are resolved with the result being maximized nuclear charge imbalance. The leap of faith then is that maximum charge imbalance between nucleus and electron cloud comes with maximized periodicity of wave function collapse. At any rate, if you are still with me on this convoluted argument - the advantage of nickel for cohering excess energy from chemistry alone (without a nuclear connection) depends on capturing the angular momentum of electrons which manage to "shrink" into a Rydberg energy hole caused by the regular collapse (and immediate reinflation) of the nickel wave function on an extremely short time scale - so that having two adjacent Rydberg "holes" makes all the difference for success. To make things even more confused - there is high probability that both nuclear and non-nuclear processes overlap in Ni-H ... and although the non-nuclear supplies most of the excess energy, there is evidence of both. To make things triply confused, the non-nuclear process described above is probably a prerequisite for subsequent nuclear activity. Now ... that level of complexity, really smarts... so to speak. Jones
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