To really understand LENR, we must really understand how the vacuum works. There is a new pile of dots involved in this effort that must be strung together before a coherent picture of the vacuum can take shape.
It seems that the vacuum takes its behavior from what is flowing in it. This is what makes LENR so complicated. When many different items compete for the management of the vacuums behavior, things really get complicated. One of the dots that has just shown up is the data analysis from Supernova 1987a. --------------------------------------- http://phys.org/news/2014-06-physicist-slower-thought.html Physicist suggests speed of light might be slower than thought --------------------------------------- Snip Measurements here on Earth picked up the arrival of both photons and neutrinos from the blast but there was a problem—the arrival of the photons was later than expected, by 4.7 hours. Scientists at the time attributed it to a likelihood that the photons were actually from another source. But what if that wasn't what it was, Franson wonders, what if light slows down as it travels due to a property of photons known as vacuum polarization—where a photon splits into a positron and an electron, for a very short time before recombining back into a photon. That should create a gravitational differential, he notes, between the pair of particles, which, he theorizes, would have a tiny energy impact when they recombine—enough to cause a slight bit of a slowdown during travel. If such splitting and rejoining occurred many times with many photons on a journey of 168,000 light years, the distance between us and SN 1987A, it could easily add up to the 4.7 hour delay, he suggests. EndSnip A beam of light may be a series of discontinuous transfers of energy packets between virtual particles created by the presence of the photon as it travels along. A larger packet of photon energy carried by the vacuum means more virtual particles are produced by the vacuum. An energetic photon must fight through a blizzard of vacuum self-catalyzed virtual particles as it matches its way through space. Neutrinos, on the other hand, produce not virtual particles as it travels along and it can make good time at the supposed speed of light. I suspect that what the vacuum actually does in the way of producing virtual particles is based on the kinds of zero point particles that are floating inside of it. If LENR is ultimately caused by the injection of energy into the vacuum, what the vacuum will do in response can be very complicated based on the kind of stuff that it contains.
