Hello from John Duffield

[Doug Coulter]

A-thermal sounds good Doug. The thing that the public don't seem to appreciate is that when it comes to particle physics, hot is fast moving. A proton doesn't have any property of temperature. Re the crystal, to improve your chances you don't shoot from exactly face-on. Take a step to the side and kneel down, and shoot into a long crystal. You're seeing more nodes, this kind of thing:

.oO.oO.oO
.oO.oO.oO
.oO.oO.oO

Well, yes, the "hot is fast" thing is in my opinion, very overused. Hot is fast in all the degrees of freedom, which means energy is wasted into degrees of freedom that do me little or no good.
If I'm trying to collide stuff along the X axis, all this motion along the other two is utterly wasted and smears out the energy, as well as velocity, costing me luminosity. That simple little conversion factor used all over is an oversimplification of what's really going on, or what I hope to have going on. I've even seen schemes for tokomak heating that get all the particles going around the loop the same way, and they call that hot -- in their case, it's like traffic down a highway -- well ordered, and all going th same way, so no collisions, and they wonder why it doesn't work that well (it works sort of after enough of the input energy gets thermalized). But if I have say 3 degrees of freedom that means 3 times the input energy to get the same relative energy particle to particle. Very much not what I want here.

I'll check out your link. Though I don't plan to get married to D a s fuel, it seems any knowledge is better to have than not.

Curtis is one smart dude, he's been here for visits. Very much an outside the box thinker, an autodidact. More big picture than details, but we need all types.

Yes, well, I'm trying to understand what protons and neutrons really are, and perhaps more importantly, what a nucleus really looks like at the wave function level. What shapes the fuzzy blob takes on, and how to get them arranged like I desire (which I don't even really know yet).

Yup people are people.

I've always suspected there aren't two types of wave, just was trying to synthesize the two together and get more meaning out of that.

And yes, this is "lying on the ground". I'd be willing to bet that most of what I want to know has been documented in some place where I'm not looking (and neither do the heavy theory guys).
It goes to the overspecialization/fragmentation of science -- and often as not the theory guys and the experiment guys don't communicate well enough. Which I think is what our respective boards might help with -- a good thing if we pull it off.

More later, duty calls.

[chrismb]

I've even seen schemes for tokomak heating that get all the particles going around the loop the same way, and they call that hot -- in their case, it's like traffic down a highway -- well ordered, and all going th same way, so no collisions, and they wonder why it doesn't work that well (it works sort of after enough of the input energy gets thermalized).

Actually, this is the exact inverse of the tokamak reality. The *majority* of the overall fusion reactions in current tokamak pulses is due to "highway traffic" ions in the induction current colliding with background nucleii. That is to say, *most* of the claimed neutron count in tokamaks is actually beam-target fusions, because the tokamak doesn't actually get up to 'thermo-nuclear' conditions quickly enough.

Of course, the idea is that the heat generated by the fusion reactions will cause thermal motions in the plasma that can self-drive a toroidal current, without the external inductive pulse, and it will become dominantly thermonuclear. But even if that were to ever be the case, it still requires an inductive pulse long enough to get into a phase of operation where the tokamak fusion is actually 'thermonuclear'.

So; the best tokamak pulse ever is claimed to be 22MJ power in and 16MJ fusion out. Claimed as 'so nearly break even' so often that it is actually now referred to as having achieved break even! But in any case, the reality is that the 16 MJ fusion output is composed of about 8 MJ of beam-target fusion (the motorway traffic collisions during the pulse!), and 1 to 2 MJ or so is due to direct beam-plasma fusions as the 12 MW (not sure exact power?) neutral beams fire into the plasma to warm it up. So the *actual* calculation is 22MJ of external heating + 8 MJ of heating from the inductive beam-target fusions and 2 MJ of heating from the neutral beam fusions, whilst the actual thermonuclear output is only 6 MJ.

It sounds a different outcome, doesn't it!! Going from a claim of 22 MJ in for 16 MJ [all] fusion energy out, to 32 MJ in for 6 MJ [thermonuc] fusion energy out. How far from break even did they say?.....

So the traffic-like collisions during the inductive phase are actually one of the tokamak's dirty little secrets that the tokamak researchers seem to prefer not to discuss. This is actually a successful way of getting fusions, but they're trying to skip on by that phase to the theoretically-nice thermonuclear regime, without seemingly contemplating if they can make the beam-target phase of tokamak operation work for them.

What actually seems to happen is that once those beams do thermalise - then it all goes haywire!

[Doug Coulter]

Assuming your analysis is correct (I'm willing to do that, pretty sure it's not far off if at all) then they are just at the stage where I started, as did most fusors -- beam on neutral, going away, target, yuck -- and that's evidently the best they are doing. So they've yet to find the factors of 5, 10, 500, we've found here already. Hah! Thought that might be so too. And I at least am a long way from anything that looks like I can't take it farther by a goodly bit. At present we're chasing a gradient in Q that is going up fast and no peak in sight.

But wow, if they really got MJ of actual fusion (are you quoting from DD or DT?) then I'm glad I wasn't in the room with that, that's one of a lot of neutrons.

Wonder why they keep trash talking about increasing the pulse length if all the good stuff is happening at the beginning? Ah, but it's always the beginning for each particle as it comes in from that neutral beam injector...gawd, that's awful. Funny, the guys I know from there don't seem like a pack of liars. But they are all so specialized (the ones I know - one guy just designs feed throughs, that's all) perhaps they aren't in the loop at that level of understanding. (and we should really put your and my posts on this over on our tokomak space for all to see, just for giggles. I don't like that whole idea any better than most here). I wish them luck just the same, but gee whiz, I guess in this case politics won over scientific analysis, again.

Sure would be easier to just do a beam on gas target right off -- but then there'd be no way to credibly claim that "in step two, a miracle occurs" -- even the politicians could see though that.

[Farsight]

Well, yes, the "hot is fast" thing is in my opinion, very overused. Hot is fast in all the degrees of freedom, which means energy is wasted into degrees of freedom that do me little or no good...

Fair enough. I had electrons in mind. Yep, I know what you mean about the highway.

Curtis is one smart dude, he's been here for visits. Very much an outside the box thinker, an autodidact. More big picture than details, but we need all types.

Sounds like me!

Yes, well, I'm trying to understand what protons and neutrons really are, and perhaps more importantly, what a nucleus really looks like at the wave function level. What shapes the fuzzy blob takes on, and how to get them arranged like I desire (which I don't even really know yet).

Start with the electron, move on up to the proton, then the neutron. I've sent you something that should be useful. As for a whole nucleus, that gets trickier. But note that the residual strong force that keeps helium-3 together is essentially "neutron linkage".

I've always suspected there aren't two types of wave, just was trying to synthesize the two together and get more meaning out of that.

It seems pretty straightforward. See what you make of this: http://www.physicsdiscussionforum.org/w ... on-t9.html. Then think pair production, and what would happen if a wave of displacement travelled through itself. It would displace its own path. Get it right, and that path is a closed path.

And yes, this is "lying on the ground". I'd be willing to bet that most of what I want to know has been documented in some place where I'm not looking (and neither do the heavy theory guys).

That's what I found. Read the original Maxwell and Einstein, and see this: http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~menasco/Knottheory.html

It goes to the overspecialization/fragmentation of science -- and often as not the theory guys and the experiment guys don't communicate well enough.

IMHO I'd say it's more than that. There are theory guys out there who do great stuff and communicate well, and experiment guys out there who do great stuff and communicate well. Some people are both. And some are bona-fide academics at universities and institutions. But you tend not to hear about their papers.

Which I think is what our respective boards might help with -- a good thing if we pull it off

I don't know if my baby board qualifies as theoretical physics, but it's good to talk.

[Doug Coulter]

"It's lying on the ground". I like the thought of that, hope you are right. But, does it fall up?

Seriously, can you think of a better "Turing test" for the existence of someone with real brains/knowledge on a science discussion board? Worked, didn't it
(private joke, y'all)