From: Mark Iverson (about 9 months ago): This story might tie in to what Jones has been saying in a number of vortex postings. Is the radius of a proton wrong?
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-textbook-radius-proton-wrong.html In answering Mark, back then, a little more detail was added to the contention that the proton, despite being a fundamental particle - is surprisingly NOT very well known, physically ! To requote Asimov: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!") but rather "hmm ... that's funny ..." I'm bringing this up again today, in the context of LENR, since there is apparently a new paper out (which I have not seen yet) which builds on the observation that an all-important factor [slight variation in proton mass] can provide a theoretical short-cut to an more effective theory for thermal gain in LENR. In short, the size and mass of the proton are not certain with great precision, and probably not stable, and certainly not quantized. That may come as a surprise, but if the quark mass is not quantized, then how could the proton mass be, since it depends on quark mass? It is true that what can be called the "average proton mass" is known to within the range of PPM (parts per million), but there is still a lot of potential "overage" (mass above the average mass) which can be employed to provide excess heat in LENR experiments - yet with none of the normal indicia of nuclear reactions. As little as one PPM of "overage" in the heavier protons in any experiment (including the protons of the host metal), if fully used and converted into energy, provides a thousand times more energy than chemical processes. In fact, this overage-mass is not exactly "nuclear" but more precisely "subnuclear" in the sense that no real nuclear change takes place in the identity of the reactant, and the identity of the proton stays intact. Subnuclear mass will change within the mélange of various particles, resulting in a range for the larger accumulation. The textbook values for other physical properties of protons are almost as flakey. Mass of the proton, historically, was measured at different values in different countries using different techniques, and even in modern times with Penning traps, there are severe problems with the generally accepted value. And since a 125 GeV Higgs isn't compatible with the Standard Model, the reference frame is crumbling. Believe it or not - along with the lack of definitive physical measurement - there is NO decent model or hypothesis to predict the mass of a Proton! Wow. Many in fizzix assume there is at least a workable model, but they are wrong. (there have been dozens of efforts to do this, as in QCD - but none has gotten much traction AFAIK.) Since proton mass cannot be derived elegantly from other known values, it is taken on faith as a practical matter. I should mention that this unit of mass could be related to various beta-decay processes - and it has been derived that way (several attempts have been made). However, there are too many transformations to account for in nuclear decay - such as spin, kinetic energy, weak isospin, weak hypercharge, color charge, bosons/gluon identity, not to mention: quark mass and neutrino mass and therefore: the quandary of variable-mass remains. We need a derivation from first principles which matches actual measurements. None exists. My contention is that no proper derivation exists because the mass of the proton is inherently variable. BTW - in the Standard Model, the mass of the proton is given as 1.672 621 637 x 10^ -27 kg, or 938.272013 MeV, or 1.007 276 466 77 atomic mass units. Other values can still be found in "official" sources and I'm not sure where this one comes from, but who cares? It is slightly wrong ... if the billions spent on the Higgs was well-spent. More on this topic - when the details and citation for the paper in question arrives. Jones
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