3 body problem in nuclei

[Doug Coulter]

Well, once in awhile these crappy "press release science" sites come up with something cool. I think this might be one of those times.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-tan ... -body.html

Turns out you can't get right answers just doing things pair-wise as all have assumed, and computing perturbations on even the finest scales.

[Doug Coulter]

Weirder and weirder -- if this is true, we're hosed in doing DD fusion. Somehow I think it may not be.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-unseen.html

[johnf]

Doug
But it may be a QUIRK of nature


sorry for the pun!!

[Doug Coulter]

I'm a punster myself -- but I'm in awe. One wonders, if perhaps through a different path, this is why that pic I posted of alternate wavefunctions for D from a physics book is true? One kind of squished-ball shaped, and one dual-ball (or dual dough-nut depending on how sliced)? If in fact the "all quarks" state is the lower energy state, then the preconditions I *think* I want for fusion are the rarer ones -- which, among other things I've been looking at (conservation laws, more or less, for spin, parity, exclusion and so on) seem to very much explain why the lousy cross sections for DD fusion into any particular set of output products, and Q.

Actually, this is good - any new science and thinking have to satisfy the idea that they don't falsify all prior research, or at least don't contradict empirical results of it, and indeed, should also satisfy the Feynman criterion -- they aren't worth much if they don't predict something new as well, and aren't lab testable to boot.

I think we've got that one covered here with this idea set of getting the ions prepped into the right states before trying to stick them together, using observations of what that might take and how to do it that have been accepted almost since the last world war. Via other tricks known to work, from Stern-Gerlach, to NMR and gammas (and near-miss collisions) able to set up meta-stable states, we might just have come upon something here. For it not to have happened already in nature (and maybe would have wiped us all out early in the game) it has to require some fair subtlety to make it happen in bulk, or it'd be observably happening int he universe at large, right? So it has to be something that takes a lot more than a putting a lot of stuff together and hoping for randomness to make things right (the tokomak or even the approach used by stars). If all this stuff has to be "right" at the moment of interaction to make it "go" -- then that explains a lot not only about how rare it is, but how one might make it happen better.

As a science/engineer, this makes me real happy -- red meat!

Let me state this another way. Suppose there are about 10 degrees of freedom, and we'll be conservative and say most of those are binary -- 10 bits of state (reality is that at least 6 of those aren't only binary -- translations and rotations). Now for two things to "go" they both have to have the right state to compliment the other -- total 20 bits. That accounts for the rarity of "random" and if those things can be set up without tons of energy input -- there's your factor of a million right there.

**********
In a more off the wall sense, we know humans are fairly good at making babies, but there's a rather exotic dance that goes on to make it happen. If you just shoot them out of cannons at one another, well, there's most of the same issues -- for one thing, you need one each sex, and they have to not hit head to head or feet to feet (or butts to butts). Then the guy has to be "there" at just the right moment....and so on -- there's just a fun example of things that kinda want to happen, but don't happen well in a random situation (in only some senses, the analogy fails badly in some ways).

[William A Washburn]

Kinda reminds me of my Physical Mechanics course so many years ago and the
use of the Laplacian and Hamiltonian viewpoints used to investigate the three-body
problem.

Sometimes one must look at a problem from the energy or momentum point of view
rather than starting simply with position and velocity.

It only makes sense, though, that one not eliminate higher order contributions to a problem
in mechanics and risk losing a true picture of what's really happening.

[Jeff Lapointe]

I found this link to some very recent new developments in the 3-body problems.

http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013 ... dy-problem

The actual model to the newly found solutions lies here.

http://suki.ipb.ac.rs/3body/

[Doug Coulter]

I suppose a few special cases are better than nothing, but...
z{n+1}=zn^2+c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A


Tell me without recursion whether a point "blows up" during recursion of this simple math. In only two dimensions.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

Then we can discuss the real issue:

How about our (very roughly) 1018 body problem, with several different E/M ratios and +, -, and neutral polarities....just as recursive but in quite a bit more dimensionality than mere 2d + color (which is merely how many iterations it took to blow up)?
Please don't leave out spin or any other conservation law, while you're at it. I'm not trying to be snarky, just that math is no longer leading, but following at best.