Radioactive Clouds, Antimatter Molecules, and the Dying Earth

A quick physics news update, on some stories that came out last week:

"Thundercloud "accelerator" fires gamma-ray beam:" A team of scientists in Japan has seen a 40-second burst of gamma rays from a thundercloud. This was presumably produced by electrons accelerated to extremely high velocities within the could coming to a sudden stop-- a process with the fabulous German name "bremsstrahlung." This was not associated with lightning, and indeed, one of the scientists quoted in the article says that lightning would be counterproductive, basically "shorting out" the multi-million-volt potential difference needed to produce gamma rays.

But, really, the main point of this is: "Dude. Gamma rays from thunderclouds!"

Matter-antimatter molecule makes its debut: When a positron and an electron encounter one another, they form a sort of transient pseudo-atom, known as "positronium." The two orbit each other for a time, and then collide and annihiliate. Now, a group at UC Riverside has managed to create a sample with a high enough positronium density to see interactions between neighboring "atoms."

You can also read a press release, which makes the faintly hilarious claim that this "could one day help develop fusion power generation as well as directed energy weapons such as gamma-ray lasers." The Physics World piece says some more measured things about using gamma-ray lasers for nuclear-scale microscopy, which is more plausible.

Earth could survive a red-giant Sun: It wouldn't be pleasant, but if your retirement plans for five billion years from now involve real estate speculation, you'll be happy to learn that observations of an extrasolar planet suggest that the Earth might survive having the Sun swell into a red giant. So, you know, there's that to look forward to.

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Here is some technology that will assist in fusion power.

Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

It has been funded:

Bussard Reactor Funded

I have inside info that is very reliable and multiply confirmed that validates the above story. I am not at liberty to say more. Expect a public announcement from the Navy in the coming weeks.

The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and Boron 11 which does not

The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.

If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame.

BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.

I thought your readers would be interested in looking at these energy technologies and EPS's theoretic base for ball lighting.

Aneutronic Fusion: Here I am not talking about the big science ITER project taking thirty years, but the several small alternative plasma fusion efforts.

There are three companies pursuing hydrogen-boron plasma toroid fusion, Paul Koloc, Prometheus II, Eric Lerner, Focus Fusion and Clint Seward of Electron Power Systems

Vincent Page (a technology officer at GE!!) gave a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research , which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion

He quotes costs and time to development of P-B11 Fusion as tens of million $, and years verses the many decades and ten Billion plus $ projected for ITER and other "Big" science efforts

Clint Seward also provides a theoretic base for ball lighting : Ball Lightning Explained as a Stable Plasma Toroid http://www.electronpowersystems.com/Images/Ball%20Lightning%20Explained…
The theoretics are all there in peer reviewed papers. It does sound to good to be true however with names like MIT, Delphi, STTR grants, NIST grants , etc., popping up all over, I have to keep investigating.

Last year support has also come from one of the top lightning researcher in the world, Joe Dwyer at FIT, when he got his Y-ray and X-ray research published in the May issue of Scientific American,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00032CE…
Dwyer's paper:
http://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/PDF/Gammarays.pdf

and according to Clint Seward it supports his lightning models and fusion work at Electron Power Systems

lightning produces thermonuclear reaction
This new work By Dr.Kuzhevsky on neutrons in lightning: Russian Science News http://www.informnauka.ru/eng/2005/2005-09-13-5_65_e.htm is also supportive of Electron Power Systems fusion efforts .

Here are the links:

http://www.electronpowersystems.com/

U.S., Chilean Labs to Collaborate on Testing Scientific Feasibility of Focus Fusion http://pesn.com/2006/03/18/9600250_LPP_Chilean_Nuclear_Commission/

However, short of a Energy "silver bullet" like fusion , Here is a fully DOABLE technology

Time to Master the Carbon Cycle with Terra Preta Soil Technology;

The integrated energy strategy offered by Charcoal based Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:

Terra Preta soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.

I thought the current news and links on Terra Preta soils and closed-loop pyrolysis would interest you.

SCIAM Article May 15 07

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=5670236C-E7F2-99DF-3E2163B9F…

After many years of reviewing solutions to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) I believe this technology can manage Carbon for the greatest collective benefit at the lowest economic price, on vast scales. It just needs to be seen by ethical globally minded companies.

Even with all the big corporations coming to the GHG negotiation table, like Exxon, Alcoa, .etc, we still need to keep watch as they try to influence how carbon management is legislated in the USA. Carbon must have a fair price, that fair price and the changes in the view of how the soil carbon cycle now can be used as a massive sink verses it now being viewed as a wash, will be of particular value to farmers and a global cool breath of fresh air for us all.

If you have any other questions please feel free to call me or visit the TP web site I've been drafted to co-administer. http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node

It has been immensely gratifying to see all the major players join the mail list , Cornell folks, T. Beer of Kings Ford Charcoal (Clorox), Novozyne the M-Roots guys(fungus), chemical engineers, Dr. Danny Day of EPRIDA , Dr. Antal of U. of H., Virginia Tech folks and probably many others who's back round I don't know have joined.

Also Here is the Latest BIG Terra Preta Soil news;

ConocoPhillips Establishes $22.5 Million Pyrolysis Program at Iowa State 04/10/07

Mechabolic , a pyrolysis machine built in the form of a giant worm to eat solid waste and product char & fuel at the "Burning Man" festival ; http://whatiamupto.com/mechabolic/index.html

Erich J. Knight
540-289-9750
shengar at aol.com

By Erich J. Knight (not verified) on 18 Sep 2007 #permalink

Where would Mendeleev have put positronium and neutronium of the periodic table? Both have atomic number 0 (no protons); positronium has atomic weight roughly 2/1836 that of Hydrogen; neutronium has atomic weight very close, but not identical (binding energy) to that of Hydrogen.

Background on the "element" whose diatomic molecule is di-positronium, cherry-picked from Wikipedia.

Croatian scientist Stjepan MohoroviÄiÄ predicted of the existence of positronium in 1934, in a paper published in Astronomische Nachrichten, in which he called the substance "electrum". It was experimentally discovered by Deutsch (1951), and became known as positronium.

Positronium (Ps) is a system consisting of an electron and its anti-particle, a positron, bound together into an "exotic atom". The orbit of the two particles and the set of energy levels is similar to that of the hydrogen atom (electron and proton). However, because of the lower reduced mass, the frequencies associated with the spectral lines are less than half of those of the corresponding hydrogen lines.

The ground state of positronium, like that of hydrogen, has two possible configurations depending on the relative orientations of the spins of the electron and the positron. The singlet state with antiparallel spins (S = 0, Ms = 0) is known as para-positronium and denoted 1S0. The singlet state has a mean lifetime of 125 picoseconds. The triplet state with parallel spins (S = 1, Ms = â1, 0, 1) is known as ortho-positronium and denoted ³S1. The triplet state in vacuum has a mean lifetime of 142.05±0.02 nanoseconds. Positronium in the 2S state is metastable having a lifetime of 1.1 μs against annihilation.[citation needed] If the positronium is created in such an excited state then it will quickly cascade down to the ground state where annihilation will occur more quickly. Measurements of these lifetimes, as well as of the positronium energy levels, have been used in precision tests of quantum electrodynamics.

Annihilation can proceed via a number of channels each producing one or more gamma rays. The gamma rays are produced with a total energy of 10^22 keV (since each of the annihilating particles have mass of 511 keV/c²), the most probable annihilation channels produce two or three photons, depending on the relative spin configuration of the electron and positron. A single photon decay is only possible if another body (e.g. an electron) is in the vicinity of the annihilating positronium to which some of the energy from the annihilation event may be transferred. Up to five annihilation gamma rays have been observed in laboratory experiments, confirming the predictions of quantum electrodynamics to very high order.

The annihilation into a neutrino-antineutrino pair is also possible, but the probability is predicted to be negligible (a branching ratio of 6.6Ã10^â18).

By the way, not having seen the Physics Today article yet, I don't see how dipositronium leads to a graser.

As I suggested in print years ago, stimulated by Freeman Dyson, and a decade before philsopher Nick Bostrom rediscovered the idea but poorly cited his predecessors, we are probably simulated by a far-future dilute electron-positron ambiplasma civilization:

"Human Destiny and the End of Time" [Quantum, No.39, Winter 1991/1992,
Thrust Publications, 8217 Langport Terrace, Gaithersburg, MD 20877; ISSN 0198-6686]

It wouldn't be pleasant, but if your retirement plans for five billion years from now involve real estate speculation, you'll be happy to learn that observations of an extrasolar planet suggest that the Earth might survive having the Sun swell into a red giant.

But, won't this drain Superman of all his powers?

How will the Earth survive without Superman??