The difference between seeing and reading.

The former leads to clarity, the latter to argument.

Just now a new paper reveals that as we gain the ability to ‘see,’ the real behaviour of matter in its native ecology, is seen to be far from what our ‘politically correct’ view has been.

So much of the reigning dogma of physics derives from ‘readers’ that have become like ‘media critics and pundits’ using their ‘bully pulpits’ to profiteer from their point of view as opposed to real observations.

Seeing is believing and it seems that by using tiny laser pulses, one to poke matter, followed by many other laser illuminations to paint a stroboscopic flip book of the poked behaviour, that it is observed that energy is able to redistribute itself in a far faster fashion than the here-to-fore posited normal jostling of atoms portends. This new view of nature has great ramifications.

Imaging atomic-scale electron-lattice interactions: A laser pulse (red beam coming from right) gives electrons in a manganese oxide a ‘poke’ of energy while a high-energy electron beam (blue) strobes the atomic structure.  Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

The group of scientists including physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory has shown their new laser-driven “stop-action” technique for studying complex electron interactions under real-life conditions. They use one very fast, intense “pump” laser to poke electrons, and a second “stroboscopic probe” laser to measure the ‘electrons’ energy level and direction of movement as they settle back to their normal ‘un-poked’ state. Will curious boys ever stop poking at ant hills ;)?

“By varying the time between the ‘poke’ and ‘probe’ laser pulses they build up a stroboscopic record of what happens, a movie of what this material looks like from its rest state through the violent interaction to how it settles back down,” said Brookhaven physicist Jonathan Rameau, one of the lead authors on the paper.

“It’s like dropping a bowling ball in a bucket of water to cause a big disruption, and then taking pictures at various times afterward,” he explained.

“We see a very strong and peculiar interaction between the excited electrons and the lattice where the electrons are losing most of their energy very rapidly in a coherent, non-random way,” Rameau said.

At this special energy level, he explained, the electrons appear to be interacting with lattice atoms all vibrating at a particular frequency-like a tuning fork emitting a single note. When all of the electrons that have the energy required for this unique interaction have given up most of their energy, they start to cool down more slowly by hitting atoms more randomly without striking the “resonant” frequency.

A practical application of this super fast movement of energy in the ecology of atoms.

In my decades-long bench studies of Cold Fusion it became clear that in well-performing systems frequently the ‘cold fusion’ occurs when special microdomains of metallic composite materials are created. Jostle those domains just right and cold fusion will occur. It may be slight or amount to thousands to millions of adjacent nucleon pair fusions taking place in such short order of time, e-15 seconds, that nanoseconds are more like millennia. In such short time frames an incredible amount of nuclear heat must move away from the reaction site or else.

Seeing is believing as in this sonofusion example.

Palladium target foil having melted while in a ‘room temperature bath’ D2O experiment exposed to ultrasonic induced asymmetric cavitation. See close up view of the melt zone below.

The ‘volcanic-like’ eruptive vent featured required millions of nuclear fusion events to produce the energy required to vapourize, melt, and eject with resulting ‘sputtered’ palladium. The thermal energy of the large number of nuclear fusions overwhelmed the ability of the metal to distribute the heat without damage. Prodigious ‘anomalous’ helium is produced in such experiments over continuous operation time frames measured in hours to weeks.

Practical Technology Near

The principal engineering technology problem in delivering practical cold fusion into homes and industry is simply reducing the fusion energy release by dilution down to where the heat can be moved from its nanoscopic points of origin to our macroscopic world, the great heat sink that is our home and within which we live on the edge. For starters, a simple duty cycle of poking the cold fusion dragon seems to work almost ‘good enough’. Lasers are a pretty good poker.

From a theoretical point of view whatever mechanism is needed to transfer nuclear energy via phonons vs photons must be able to move a great deal of such energy over a considerable distance to ‘cool’ the CFAE (cold fusion active environment). When the energy distribution, aka heat transfer system, is inadequate eruptive ‘volcanic-like’ events become obvious. So from an evidentiary point of view most mechanisms to move heat ‘conventionally’ is insufficient.

To get to a working theory a more plausible model for matter is needed.

Working to conform our present politically correct notions, physics dogmas, to the observations just results in more compromises in terms of behavior of the ‘particles’ we assume make up atomic to molecular scale matter. It’s far more likely that the ecology of atoms consists of bits that don’t conform to our present peculiar reductionist point of view.

I rather like the view of real matter in its native state being squishy bags of quark soup with rather indiscriminate boundaries, perhaps with even greater dimensionality that we living on the edge in our macro world interact with, or think we do. Therein the utility of special harmonic states clearly provides for sufficiently rapid distribution of energy to accommodate the list of out of the box observations that is ever-growing as we gain the ability to see.

The real problem with humanity as made so clear by ‘social media’ is so very few of us choose to do what it takes to ‘see’ while the vast majority take a back seat, sit back, and only read. (Yes, Mr. Sulu, there is a difference between real and reading.)

How to deliver technology.

Amongst the few real vs. imaginary explorers in the complex atom-ecology of the universe, seeing is believing. Technology is not about knowing perfectly the why and how things work but rather how to reproduce an observed ‘ecological’ effect that is good enough to be useful. Only dogma requires the more ‘perfect’, aka politically acceptable dogma, ‘sociological’ explanation.

Ain’t it wonderful when one’s life’s favourite pursuits cross paths, here’s such a cross-over from my not so secret life with plankton.

While I was born to a nuclear physics father I became a plant ecologist by choice of paths of the profession, not that my father’s genes allowed me to remain exclusively so as my life in cold fusion has revealed. My ecological life remains and here’s a delightful intersection. Surprisingly, photosynthesis appears to be related to this recent article on fast coherent behaviours in the ecology of atoms. See a very recent physorg article: “Why cryptophyte algae are really good at harvesting light,” December 8, 2016.

It seems life finds a way, as seen in this report on how phytoplankton, algae, fine-tune their most vital parts vibrations (synchronizing their periodic oscillations) to “ingest” the energy of light (in the form of photons, of course) in an extremely efficient way, far more so than ordinary physics/chemistry would seem to allow.

In the case of photosynthesis, finely tuned periodic oscillations gather and organize energy (in the form of photons). In the case of the all-seeing article that sparked this blog post finely tuned oscillations dissipate energy (I assume in the form of phonons). In both cases, highly organized systems of periodic oscillators, interacting in harmony with each other, dramatically improve and speed up the gathering or dissipating process.  Now if this isn’t an intersection of plant-ecology and atom-ecology I just don’t think you understand. Seeing is believing.

So too cold fusion organizes and synchronizes itself both at the local and spookily active at a distance scales.