Terry,
I'm having a real problem understanding this. The 21 cm
hydrogen line is caused by the hyperfine structure of the 1s
level of the hydrogen atom. This splitting of the 1s level is
due to the interaction of the nuclear spin and the electron
spin. When these spins are parallel the hydrogen atom is in a
slightly higher energy state and spin flipping results in the
emission of a 5.9 x10^-6 eV photon.
In your OPines on molecular hydrogen nuclear spins, are you
saying that flipping the electron spin can change the molecular
spin?
Why not? Are you going to surprise me with an overlooked bit of
insight? ....Given that the hydrogen atom in its ground state is a
spin zero object, this seems to indicate that the molecular
"regular" spin imparted by an EM field alone may be sufficient to
flip the quantum spin without any real kinetic "collision" being
necessary to change (or "pump") the isomeric state back up to
ortho.... or is there a false assumption there? I realize that it
is a mistake to link orbital "spin" with quantum spin, but in fact
the two are often coordinated. If there is an error in this line
of reasoning, this is a good candidate.
BTW There is a web nice page with some images on gas collision
rates at:
http://itl.chem.ufl.edu/2041_f97/lectures/lec_d.html
What could be special about a gas collision rate of 1.42 * 10e9,
assuming that spin-spin is linked ? Certainly nothing is special
about it in air; but in hydrogen, this is coincidentally in sync
with the energy gap between the two isomers: ortho and para. One
possibility of that being the case may be simply that the
collision rate acts as a catalyst, if there should be an imbalance
in the normal ratio of o-p for a given temperature. The catalyst
would speed up the rate of change.
The more difficult "leap of faith" is that the collision rate
actually coheres "excess" EM energy from ZPE in order to keep the
gas in an isothermal state, especially since it is over the
inversion temperature. Normally when heat would be recaptured,
when going from p back to o, then the gas itself would cool, and
there would be a lowering of pressure - except in that crazy
circumstances of inversion, where the 'normal' effect of
contraction when a gas cools is suspended. Could inversion itself
be a ZPE effect?
It is all very confusing. Do you find any fault with the suggested
experiment, however?
A couple of interesting factoids, re air. At the density of the
atmosphere at sea level, each gas molecule experiences collisions
at a rate of about 10e10 times per second. Since this is not
"that" far off, is there anything special about the lower
collision rate of MAHG? The average distance traveled by a
molecule between collisions is the mean free path (MFP). The
higher the density of gas, the smaller the mean free path (more
likelihood of a collision) At sea level the mean free path is
about 60 nm. At lower pressure, this gap is larger, plus the
Casimir is most potent from 10 nm down to 2 nm. Hmmm... lost my
train of thought there, but anyway it would seem that if the
Casimir alone is operative, without isomers, then it should not
work as well at the lower pressure of MAHG as it would at a higher
pressure.
More later, TGIF
... except I swore off drinking as my new year's resolution. Makes
me wonder if any of those bars are open here - have you heard -
the English call it AWOL... those naughty Brits...
Jones
