On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 7:57 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
If your description of the process is accurate then one must assume that > the nucleons become attracted and bound to each other as the fusion > progresses. Personally, I do not set much store in Ed's theory. I'm no nuclear physicist. But it seems to me that in any context except perhaps a quark plasma the strong interaction and coulomb repulsion will continue to apply. Coulomb repulsion means that when you try to push two nuclei together, they'll bounce apart, like magnets with the same pole facing each other. The strong force means that if you somehow overcome this repulsion and push them close enough together, they'll snap together with great force. But Ed wants the process to be gradual rather than violent. There's also the problem of the weak interaction. Two protons will not stay together long, so you need to have an inverse beta decay if protons are the starting point. But inverse beta decay normally happens very infrequently, so for Ed's process to work, either you have to find a way to speed the weak interaction up, or to say that the weak interaction doesn't apply. All of this combines to make the nuclear-active environment very unique indeed. Perhaps the extreme magnetic field that many are speculating about is able > to confine the nucleons and one or more electrons in such a manner that > this can occur in 1 dimension. I'm not sure what other forces are thought to be at play, but I think that Ed believes the cracks in his theory to be responsible or partly responsible for confining the precursors to a single dimension. Eric
