On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
Isn’t this a case of missing the forest, for the trees? > Probably! :) > The problem with this invention of “gamma suppression” for which there is > no > proof in any field - is not whether it might happen in principle, or some > of > the time. It probably could happen in a carefully prepared experiment with > a > narrow spectrum, for part of the time. The insurmountable problem is the > statistical problem that gamma suppression must happen 100% of the time in > practice, or else it is not just observable, but deadly. > I am not blind to the magnitude of my error, here. It's obviously audacious of me to pursue this line of reasoning. I would venture that the error of proposing either a novel nuclear reaction or a conventional nuclear reaction in which there are no gammas is of the same order of magnitude. :) I'm thinking that the heterodyning effect (or whatever nonlinear optical mechanism it may be) is pretty much fully effective -- not at all like trying to catch a bullet after it's been fired in order to slow it down, and instead like firing a bullet in water rather than air. The medium totally overwhelms the process, and the gamma is disrupted from the start. > The only realistic alternative is that there are no gammas. > You are probably be correct, here. But I bet with some ingenuity we can think of some processes in which suppression occurs 99.9999 percent of the time. The slides from Piantelli that Axil mentioned indicated that there were gammas counted in the 2.5 MeV range, if I remember correctly, so we don't need to assume a suppression of 100 percent; these, I assume, arise from secondary scattering, so we can still go with 100 percent suppression if we like. > It might be possible to rationalize that there could be a burst of gammas > on > startup, but thereafter, the reaction itself produces none. If gammas are > produced at all, the nature of the radiation is that some always get > through > – even through thick lead shielding. > > IOW - if there were any produced at all, some will always get through. > I don't think our understanding is all that far apart. Eric
