From: terry@aslws01.asl.dl.nec.com (Terry Bollinger)
Subject: Re: Various responses + Twist of Ribbon physics
Organization: NEC America, Inc Irving TX
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 21:03:18 GMT

In article <1992Oct13.195644.24273@asl.dl.nec.com> terry@aslws01.asl.dl.nec.com (Terry Bollinger) writes:
>Hi folks,
>
>Well, our system types finally got "rn" back up.  Never knew how dependent
>I'd become on this excellent little program by Larry Wall until I had to
>do without it for a week.
>
>(Larry: We're all waiting for you to write an "aspect_rn" program to provide
>instantaneous non-information-carrying Bell Inequality correlations between
>readers of sci.physics.fusion at multiple sites.  What's your planned
>release date??)
>
>This one is long, so I've included headers for quick visual scanning.
>I've also taken the trouble to actually defend "Twist" a bit.
>
>
>CHUCK SITES AND HYDROGEN BANDING
>
>Some comments and questions I've accumulated since "rn" went out on us:
>
>In <1992Oct6.072726.110@coplex.com> chuck@coplex.com (Chuck Sites) says:
>
>> ... T. Bollinger and I proposed (serendipitously) that D with some
>> metals could form band structures similar to electron band states found
>> in solid state systems. Heavy particle banding (HPB) is what we are
>> calling it...
>
>As he mentions, Chuck Sites came up with the heavy-particle banding idea
>on his own (and took it in a somewhat different direction, I believe).
>
>My mouth dropped six inches when he put that idea on the net, because it
>had taken me a couple of months of digging at the Library of Congress to
>eventually come up with the same idea, and even then it was via a very
>indirect route of a chemical-to-nuclear domain communication argument.
>
>Bravo to Chuck for using some great "farfetching" to hit on an idea that
>was subsequently verified to to be real, at least for surface phenomena,
>in transition metal lattices (March something 1992 of Nature).
>
>
>TERRY GETS AN ADVOCATE
>
>In <WEBB+.92Oct7152352@DUCK.WARP.CS.CMU.EDU> and
><WEBB+.92Oct9095837@DUCK.WARP.CS.CMU.EDU> webb+@CS.CMU.EDU (Jon Webb) says:
>
>> And anyway, I advocate Bollinger's total mass conversion theory (or
>> farfetch if you prefer), and if that theory is correct, all your
>> measurements wouldn't show anything, just some heat coming out.
>...
>> [Dr. Steve Jones], I'll send you a copy of Bollinger's "A Twist of
>> Ribbon" under separate cover.  I don't know if there's anything to
>> this idea, not being a physicist; but I like its elegance.
>
>Wow.  The support is appreciated, Jon, but I have to be adamant that Twist
>does NOT qualify as a physics theory.  Physics theories are mathematically
>quantified.  Twist is not.  (Yes, much of it can be and perhaps should be,
>but there is very little quantification in "A Twist of Ribbon.")
>
>
>DR. JONES VOTES "X-RAYS ARE A MUST"
>
>In <1992Oct8.120533.159@physc1.byu.edu>
>jonesse@physc1.byu.edu (Steven E. Jones) says:
>
>> Jon Webb suggests that Bollinger's total mass conversion idea would make
>> measurements of nuclear particles impossible in a recent posting.  Please
>> explain how in such a model heat could be produced in a cell without
>> producing secondary x-rays.
>> 
>> I am serious about this.  I want to know why looking for secondary x-rays
>> could not be a crucial experiment to determine whether the "excess heat"
>> is nuclear or not.
>
>Hmm.  Well, if it works at all, my own TMC idea is highly unlikely to make
>X-rays.  I know of no clear-cut way to quantify what it *would* produce, but
>I doubt you'd get much higher than UV distributed throughout the matrix.
>
>
>IN DEFENSE OF TWIST: LOOKING FOR "BORN VIOLATIONS"
>
>I probably need to explain something: if Twist works at all, it requires
>a *major* violation of the usual interpretation of the wavefunction as
>defining the probability distribution for where to find the particle.
>This (Born) interpretation of Schroedinger's original wave equation has
>been very successful, and clearly is correct for just about every set of
>circumstances imaginable.  (I happen to be quite fond of the Born inter-
>pretation myself, which is another reason why I'm not overly gonzo about
>calling Twist a theory without very good experimental reasons to do so.)
>
>However, the "Born Violation" implied by Twist would only be invoked for
>certain extrema in the range of possible wavefunctions for a particle,
>extrema that would occur only under a very narrow range of conditions.
>The standard analogy, I guess, would be Newtonian vs. relativistic physics.
>Newtonian works for 99.99% of everyday human-scale phenomena, but begins
>to fall apart when things get too small, too big, too fast, or too heavy.
>
>BAND SOLITONS AND WAVEFUNCTION EXTREMA
>
>Band solitons are capable of doing some distinctly strange and unusual
>things to wavefunctions, and represent about a good of a class of wave-
>function extrema as I'm aware of.  Plus they're not as well explored as
>you might expect, since the phenomenon is notoriously difficult to model
>mathematically (the density of states goes to infinity, making things
>a tad messy).
>
>Let me give a specific example.  Depending on whose interpretation
>you accept, it appears that band solitons are capable of splitting a
>particle wavefunction into two distinct and separate "nodes" that may be
>separated by distances of many centimeters or more.  As R. Feynman notes
>in Physics Lectures Volume III, there is nothing in QM that requires a
>wavefunction to be contiguous.  Non-contiguous forms can be constructed
>just as readily as contiguous forms, but are seldom used because there
>are very few problems that require them.
>
>Well, band solitons appear to be one of those problems.  It's important
>to note that the "splitting" of a particle wavefunction by band solitons
>is not at all like the ephemeral splitting seen in electron two-slit
>(self-interference) experiments.  It's a real, measurable splitting in
>which each of the locations can have *fractional* quantum numbers.  If
>I take Larry Wall's Aspect aspect question seriously (?), the answer is
>quite simply "No, it doesn't apply.  Both ends of a wavefunction split
>by solitons are real and can be observed locally as if they were real
>particles (called quasiparticles)."
>
>For example, if you split an electron with polyacetylene band solitons,
>you get two quite real charge centers, each with a charge of 1/2 e.
>This is a really strange effect, and requires a rather precise setup to
>achieve it.  But once you have it, the resulting charges can be seen
>and measured.  (Incidentally, the 1/2 charges are not directly observed
>in the case of polyacetylene due to spin degeneracy.  Visible fractional
>charges have been observered in other similar systems, however.)
>
>LOOKING FOR BORN VIOLATIONS IN DISCONTINUOUS WAVEFUNCTIONS
>
>Now here's a little question for you.  A discontinuous wavefunction that
>"splits" a particle into two widely (possibly very widely) separated
>regions of space and allows them to persist there as real, measurable
>quasiparticles is clearly a doggone good candidate if you are looking
>for wavefunction extrema.  If it is postulated ("farfetched") that such
>a wavefunction configuration would be a good place to look for Born
>Violations, how might one go about looking for them?
>
>Polyacetylene and other electron band-soliton compounds would clearly
>be one such starting place, and in fact I would argue that there are a
>few isolated indications that the physics of electrons in the presence
>of band solitons are not fully understood.  That is a far cry from
>having to invoke a Born Violation to explain such anomalies, but on
>the other hand it's also a nice place to start looking.  Examples?
>Well, the high-temperature superconductors remain basically unexplained,
>despite the incredible amounts of experimental and theoretical attention
>that has been applied to them.  They are also electron band media for
>which I'm pretty sure that quasiparticles such as solitons have been
>proposed from time.  Farfetching the idea that some sort of Born
>Violation could be involved in such intractable solid state phenomena
>could be a most interesting line of pursuit for someone willing to
>postulate that some unknown physics are involved in such superconductors.
>
>On the other hand, electrons are simple particles -- there is nothing
>they can decay into without violating the major global symmetries of
>space itself.  That is, spin, charge, and mass must all be preserved
>in any low-energy event involving electrons, and the only way that can
>happen is for the electron to remain, well, an electron.  This places
>some significant limitation on the nature of any postulated Born
>Violation, because it means that *even if the violation was of a very
>drastic nature*, it would probably show up in electron band systems
>only as a some set of rather odd, hard-to-explain correlations in the
>way the affected electrons behave.
>
>LOOKING FOR BORN VIOLATIONS USING "NON-BASEMENT" PARTICLES
>
>Thus is would be nice if a real experiment in which a more complex
>particle could be "split" by something like a band soliton, *just in
>case* the postulated Born Violation involved more than simple particle
>correlations.
>
>Candidates for an extended Born Violation search?  Very few.  The
>particle must be a fermion, and it must be capable of significant
>delocalization in some form of solid-state matter.  Neutrons would
>be nice, but are generally incompatible with the stability of solid-
>state matter -- they are absorbed too quickly by most isotopes of
>most materials.  Muons are an interesting possibility, but are almost
>certainly too unstable for conceivable experiments.
>
>That pretty much leaves the fermion species of the three hydrogen
>isotopes (H, D, and T) and their ionized forms.  Anything heavier has
>little chance of delocalizing sufficiently.
>
>Fortunately, it turns out that these species are highly soluble in some
>transition metals, and that such TM hydrides show a range of unusual
>chemical and even room-temperature quantum effects that indicate rather
>complex behavior in such media.  Example include palladium, nickel, and
>tantalum hydroxide, all of which require explicit modeling of how H
>isotopes can "tunnel" from site to site.  Tunneling of this sort is
>not synonymous with band behavior, but is very definitely a prerequisite
>for it.  Recent results indicate that such hydrogen banding, as first
>proposed to the best of my knowledge by Chuck Sites and myself on this
>net group, really does occur in some transitions metals.
>
>SO WHY NOT AT LEAST LOOK?
>
>So...  The original postulate or farfetch was that the wavefunction
>configuration extrema made possible by band solitons, such as multi-
>node wavefunctions, would be a good place to look for Born Violations,
>should any such effect exist.  Furthermore, there is some possibility
>that currently unexplained or incompletely explained electron band
>phenomena such as high-temperature superconductivity could at least
>accommodate (or conceivably even depend on) such violations.
>
>Finally, the best media in which to perform a full-fledged experiment
>Born Violation search would probably be in hydrogen or deuterium that
>has been delocalized to form a (preferably full) band in some highly
>permeable transition metal or transition metal hydride.  Palladium
>deuteride would be a very good starting point, since palladium has
>the highest permeability and deuterium should form a neutral atomic
>fermion species within it.
>
>One highly specific (put probably hard to implement) route for trying
>to verify the Born interpretation for one class of wavefunction extrema
>would be to arrange the atomic equivalent splitting an electron wave-
>function into two distinct nodes separated by a distance of, say, at
>least a centimeter.  (Other extrema experiments using solitons are
>also possible.)  The behavior of the system would then be compared to
>the standard Born prediction that the wavefunction would still be
>nothing more than definition of the probability function for finding
>the atom in one or the other of the two distinct nodes.  If any sign
>of a Born Violation was found, it would need to be quantified and
>verified experimentally.
>
>THE "TWIST OF RIBBON" BORN VIOLATION POSTULATE
>
>"A Twist of Ribbon" postulates that Born Violations exist in these and
>other related wavefunction extrema (particularly in highly discontinuous
>"multi-node" wavefunctions extrema), and these violations are sufficiently
>severe to lead in what amounts to evaporation of the involved particle
>subject only preservation of the quantum numbers implied by the global
>symmetries of space -- that is, preservation of mass (energy), spin, and
>charge.
>
>
>Other than that, I'm not proposing anything really radical...   :)
>
>				Cheers,
>				Terry Bollinger
>


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