In reply to Eric Walker's message of Sun, 23 Jun 2013 12:09:38 -0700: Hi, [snip] >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
What you are essentially saying is that momentum is exchanged with the field, rather than the particle itself. My initial reaction to this was to agree, however I am left wondering. There are always fields of all particles in the universe present at every point in the universe, so if such interaction were possible, then wouldn't it completely alter what we understand as Newton's laws? (or just explain them?) I suspect that your model would make it possible to "push off" against the entire universe, which clearly doesn't happen in reality, or we would never see the T / 3He reaction at all. I think that if you are correct, then the strength of the interaction must depend on the distance, as in Coulomb's law. BTW I think what you are talking about is the basis of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
