On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 10:45 PM, <mix...@bigpond.com> wrote: In short, in order to make a difference, the "helping-hand" already needs > to be > "at hand" before the reaction begins. > > (unless momentum can be "tunneled", and the tunneling process itself is > inherently FTL). >
Thinking about this a little more, I want to argue that the influence of nearby nuclei on a nuclear reaction that is underway is inherently faster than light in a sense. Consider a point in time t, at which a two-deuteron resonance is about to decay into one of the various branches. Suppose that t+dt is a point later in time, at which the decay will occur, and that the interval is shorter than the time required for light to travel from the nucleus to the unstable two-deuteron resonance. At that point in time there will still be an "image" of the nearby nucleus at some earlier time t' in the background. I'm guessing that the two-deuteron resonance will interact electrostatically with that earlier image and that it does not matter that the influence does not originate at time t, when the reaction started, as we are considering a force that is relatively constant over time and does not changing much. So I suppose this implies that the two-deuteron resonance, in branching towards kinetic energy for the 4He and the palladium nucleus, is pushing off of the ghost image of a nucleus that preceded the start of the reaction? Eric
