Nah, I wasn't right all along </s> - but I'll be right when they catch up. They still don't understand that it's any nonlinearity that breaks the oversimplified 2nd law, but they're getting there - with full credit given to themselves, of course.
I'm just a crackpot who knows diddly about how the universe works, right? Because I didn't pay to get paper credentials, I therefore can't know anything much.
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.htmlI have a really funny book around here somewhere, math-laden as heck - probably sold negative copies or near-zero due to the maxim "every equation cuts your sales in half". Called "Molecular engineering", by Henry A McGee Jr if you're interested. The whole first half of the book pedantically, no, that's not the right word - religiously - states there are zero exceptions to the 2nd law - every condition with energy has it equi partitioned into all degrees of freedom. What makes me roll on the floor laughing is that the second part of the book is all about lasers - which require a population inversion to happen, eg, a non-maxwellian and non equal distribution of states...Of course it all evens out eventually, but in the meantime...interesting things can happen...
I'm surprised the cognitive dissonance hasn't exploded some heads, but I'd bet they don't even see the contradiction.
Why do I even care? Because it's this misconception that my fusion plan is based on. The equating of a temperature (2nd law equidistribution of energy into all degrees of freedom) that's totally overused is just dead wrong. A bullet doesn't have to be hot - can even be at one millikelvin or less - and still kill you.
Hoping random kinetic energy on deuterons is going to efficiently push a bunch close enough together for long enough for the probability of tunneling into fusion (via the strong force we have no control over directly) is a pretty thin hope. Shooting them directly at one another seems a more obvious way to achieve that, does it not?
Yet plenty of physicists (especially those with degrees working in fusion) will equate the energy in that bullet to a temperature...as if it was flying around in all directions at once, while spinning around all 3 axes. Yeah, that's the ticket.
It's not hard to show that being thermalized wastes *at least* 5/6 of your input energy, and it's actually worse when you're trying for collisions because two things moving fast but side by side won't collide at all (and all the sub sets of that sort of thing also). So, good luck, plasma guys...maybe you can make it work, and I'll applaud if you pull it off, but I think it will merely "annoy the pig". Your bear will never be a ballet dancer, but it'll be cool if it dances at all, fer sure.
Now, that's not the only trick I think I may have up my sleeve here - I've told a few people about the other one. They've mostly been pretty nice to me about it, unlike the science community as a whole who laughed at my theoretic ability to violate "what everyone knows" - the 2nd law. Which they are now taking credit for violating in just the way I predicted would be possible, though they haven't built anything yet as far as I know that's practical with it and don't seem to be getting the basic understanding right even now. But we'll give them another decade or two to forget about this crackpot that embarrassed them all. If they even paid attention, which most of them probably didn't - I'm sure my writings to that community mostly went into a round file.
I found out that when consulting, if it's your idea, it's crap. Wait a few months and the customer, having forgotten where they heard it, has the same idea and it's like it came from heaven, let's do that. Seems that phenomenon of humans is more universal than I thought...
Pardon a crusty old fart in the morning...I musta gotten out of the bed on the wrong side before I saw theft of my work. Which probably wasn't even theft - most of what I see in the science press is people thinking they invented something I have musty old books describing...blind leading the blind, as if all history didn't matter. Or the parts that are too hard to learn. Obviously they don't miss Archimedes and try to prove that all over again...The rest - well, people graduate and need grants and stuff, so they invent things to get grants for, knowing that the grant givers don't know history either.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.