On Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 11:37 AM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
> Normal gasoline engines operate on the high pressure gases that are > generated when the fuel burns causing an increase to its temperature. Since there was no exhaust outlet in the Papp engine, I wonder whether a general increase in temperature might have defeated it, by raising the overall pressure. Its mechanism seemed to proceed in short bursts of thrust, which, whatever it was, appears to have worked despite the lack of an exhaust pathway. (In retrospect, perhaps this should have been a tipoff that something weird was going on.) If you had a switch that could control the decay rate of an alpha emitter with great reliability, so that it went crazy for a short period of time while the switch was on, and you put the alpha emitter in an inert gas, what might be expected to happen, without the benefit of prior experimental knowledge of the system? > Do you know of another mechanism that can cause the pressure to increase > without the addition of heat? One thought here is that the prompt alpha particles partially ionized the noble gasses, and that the excited electrons relaxed back into levels above the ground state, causing the size of the atoms to be larger. (These atomic states are sometimes referred to as "Rydberg" states; the connection to Holmlid is not intentional, although this process may be behind the "Coulomb explosions" that he has seen, rather than the production of mesons and muons I have heard attributed to him.) > Could it be possible to break diatomic atoms into individuals, like N2 gas > into two N > atoms, on a temporary basis? I also like this idea, but I don't know enough about chemistry to know what effect it would have. > Of course, many > vorts like myself are skeptical of the Papp engine itself. There is no need > to define something that does not actually exist. I think skepticism of the Papp engine is justified. I've just become a little wary of explaining away a series of observations that seem to have a systematic character. I recall that Feynman's investigation ended inconclusively (apart from the unfortunate accident). Eric
