From: terry@aslws01.asl.dl.nec.com (Terry Bollinger)
Subject: Various responses + Twist of Ribbon physics
Organization: NEC America, Inc Irving TX
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 19:56:44 GMT

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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