I'm glad you seem to have signed off on the basic soundness of the angry bees, even if only as one possibility among many. Do you know if this kicking-of-the-beehive approach has been described somewhere (apart from the context of the Polywell)? It seems a lot like Peter Hagelstein's theory, except that the decaying [2d]* or [pd]* is coupled with the electronic structure as a whole instead of the phonon modes, and except that it happens more or less instantaneously instead of through harmonic oscillation. The basic insight is that within an electron cloud, the branches that would normally produce gammas proceed altogether differently, and quickly dump into the cloud instead. I.e., the gamma-producing fusion branches become essentially electric, and the decay is like very large spark discharge. It seems like a straightforward idea, although it's weird to think that fusion could lead to an electrical phenomenon. If true, the possibilities for direct conversion to electrical current are very interesting.
To continue with the thought experiment, I assume there is also some of Ron's full mechanism going on (apart from the part about electrostatic dumping that has been borrowed), i.e., occasional coupling to lattice nuclei, fast particles, and a transmutation here and there. So there would be both "electric" branches present -- discharging into the electron cloud and occasionally pushing off of lattice nuclei. No doubt this would be a function of proximity of the short-lived intermediate resonance to the lattice sites and a roll of the dice as to which way things went. Ron will not agree with any of this, as he thinks that any screening would not apply at the distances needed to obtain fusion. He knows the relevant math and I do not, so I can only go off of intuition at this point. But I wonder whether he has paid sufficient attention to the mechanism of the Polywell reactor. Eric On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:08 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: I don't think it makes all that much difference which path it follows. > Either > way most of the energy is going to be used to ionize other atoms and > create more > angry bees. >
