Electron-assisted fusion

Quote from Wyttenbach

Planets move in slow motion compared to electrons...Nevertheless their orbits are far from being stable they only look like being so... But for our live Condensed matter physics is far more important thus please don't start a gravity discussion!

But a system of planets moving outside of a single plane (i.e., in three dimensions) would exhibit wildly chaotic behavior, whereas even in Gryzinski's classical model of electrons orbiting a nucleus in the manner of planets, the electrons exhibit stochastic behavior within well-defined grooves. I conclude from the analogy with the planetary system, which bears a lot of resemblance to Gryzinski's initial setup, that in order for the atomic system to show so much more order than the gravitational system there must also be standing waves which are not in evidence in the planetary system, and Jarek broadly agrees. Where we are still trying to find agreement is whether the standing waves are an intrinsic outcome of the operation Coulomb force (Jarek) or whether there is something else going on (my tentative conclusion). Drawing the analogy between the gravitational and Coulomb forces helps to highlight the key difference in the two systems.

Quote from Jarek

( journals.aps.org/prb/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevB.80.165404 )

Quote from Jarek

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-8949/1988/T22/016/

These look like they may be very interesting articles.... unfortunately for me they are behind costly paywalls. At best, I have to pay dearly, or travel to some academic library (15 to 300 km) offering the hard copy or other public access. Or I have to accept the title and abstract at face value (that can be quite misleading in occasional cases) and/or your testimony that the full article remains relevant and makes the point you assert.

As an aside: It has been an on-going public interest issue in the US at least, that research results often substantially, if not completely, supported through public funding are becoming less accessible to many citizen taxpayers.

Quote from Jarek

What other explanations? That we live in an multiverse splitting in every moment

This is one of the positions in the debate on what's going on under the hood in quantum mechanics. The position is one that is empirically unfalsifiable at this point, as are all of the several other positions that have survived. As such it cannot be ruled out, except perhaps on the basis of intuition/taste/Occam's razor. I do not personally find it all that likely. But I'm not willing to say that it's impossible. My position is one of agnosticism on this question.

Quote from Jarek

Here you have: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-8949/1988/T22/016/ uses Penning trap to bound the size of electron's elementary charge by 10^-22m.
All experiment trying to determine size of electron can only say that they see it as a point.
What means: not being smeared over e.g. 10^10m size standard atom, or 10^-6m size Rydberg molecule.

Your question seems something like: if all experiments say that e.g. our Sun shines, it doesn't mean there is no experiment saying that our Sun doesn't shine.
Sure, you can even say that we live in a matrix and so we cannot be certain of anything.

What you've shown can be interpreted in more than one way. The way you seek to interpret it is to see it as a particle whose size is being measured. Another way to interpret it is the size of the point of contact when there is a wavefunction collapse at the time of measurement. In that interpretation, one would conclude that that point of contact is very small indeed. Neither this interpretation nor the one about electrons being waves is my position, for my position is one of agnosticism.

Quote from Jarek

If you are taking seriously a possibility that particles have only one nature at the time (Afshar?), please at least make it self-consistent: propose conditions and mechanisms for switching between these natures?

You have mistakenly attributed the position that particles must have only one nature at a time to me. On the question of whether this is the case, my position is that I don't know if it's the case or not. I do not rule it out.

Quote from Jarek

Hmmm ... maybe because all experiment trying to determine size of electron can only say that they see it as a point?

This conclusion arises from your assumption that the electron must be a point particle. Another way to interpret the evidence is that what has been measured is the size of the point of contact when the wavefunction collapses. There are surely other interpretations. Which one is the correct one? That gets us into the whole swamp of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My position is one of agnosticism at this point.

Quote from Jarek

I totally agree that continuing this discussion leads nowhere - unless you provide a single real argument to support your faith:
- that there is an experiment, or even a tiniest piece of real argument (not just made up by human philosophers) to support your faith that elementary charge can be objectively smeared ... opposing all experiments verifying that it's practically a point,
- if you indeed believe that particles have only one nature at a time, please at least hypothesize a possibility of completing the picture: what are conditions and mechanisms for switching between wave and corpuscular nature? I would love to ridicule your proposition (e.g. Rydberg molecule).

Here you describe me placing faith in (1) the likelihood that the elementary charge is objectively smeared over the probability distribution and (2) particles having only a wave or a particle nature at a time. My position in this context is agnosticism as to the various possibilities. Your faith in your assumption about the electron being a point particle is preventing you from stepping outside of your worldview and seeing other possibilities. No matter. It looks like you might be willing to agree to disagree on this whole question.

Quote from Jarek

For example for free electron traveling through vacuum (corpuscle) which finally meets a proton and form quantum orbital (wave) - when exactly this change of natures happens? What is the mechanism of such metamorphosis?
Opposite situation is in this photos of orbitals experiment ( journals.aps.org/prb/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevB.80.165404 ) where they measure the final position of electron leaving the atom with subatomic precision.
... or could you elaborate on acrobatics in Afshar experiment with photons jumping between the two natures?

My position on the question of whether the electron can jump between wave and particle behavior or whether there are always both at the same time is one of agnosticism.

Quote from Jarek

I still don't see a tiniest real argument (based on experimental evidence) in your posts that elementary charge of electron can or should be objectively smeared over an atom (10^-10m, or even 10^-6m for Rydberg) - in opposite to all experiments showing that it is practically a point.

I still don't see the tiniest real argument (based on experimental evidence) in your posts that the electron is practically a point. You ignore the clear evidence that shows the electron is a wave. We know from other contexts that the attributes of waves are spread out over the entire wave, so experimental evidence leads us to suspect that the elementary charge is spread out over the entire wavefunction. By contrast, when a point measurement is observed, we can suspect that this is the wavefunction collapsing to a single point, like a bubble popping when it touches a surface. You have not yet produced any experimental evidence that the electron is a particle and ignore the evidence that shows that it is clearly a wave. Am I doing this right?

You read the experimental evidence with a prior conclusion that the electron is already particle and don't realize that you're doing this. Perhaps you disagree, and you think you're simply being objective. Fine. Let's agree to disagree.

Quote from Jarek

Also, you don't even propose any hypothetical conditions or mechanisms for switching between the wave and corpuscular nature you need ... for what you see as an "explanation" alternative to being simultaneously both wave and corpuscle, what
- is directly observed in experiments like Afshar's, ...

Can you describe your understanding of how Afshar's experiment shows that an electron must simultaneously be a wave and a particle at the same time, and cannot switch between the two modes?

Quote from Jarek

Your "agnosticism" is exactly like between creationism and evolutionism - which some argue should be taught alongside in schools as just equivalent alternative "explanations".

Your certitude is like the certitude expressed by priests and clerics. Your conclusions are held with the same tenacity as the religious beliefs of the leaders of the Inquisition. Am I doing this right?

Quote

Sure, I cannot prove that creationists are wrong, nor that unicorns don't exist ... but for me it is not sufficient to treat their "explanations" seriously, e.g. due to Occam's razor.

I think your lack of imagination as to possible alternatives is making it difficult for you to step out of the assumptions in which you find yourself embedded and consider other possibilities. That's fine. Sometimes we're limited by constraints that are invisible to us. We live our lives and we move on. We can still be happy and content despite such limitations.

Quote from Jarek

Your "agnosticism" is exactly like between creationism and evolutionism - which some argue should be taught alongside in schools as just equivalent alternative "explanations".

Quote from Jarek

Now please explain it with light having only one nature at the time, switching between them?
Again - what is the condition and mechanism for such switching?

Don't fight for semantic details! Models are there for supporting the imagination of human brains. There is no truth and there will never be a truth. We just have the possibility to falsify our assumptions.

In Mills model e.g. the charge current (electron around proton) flows over the whole spheric surface on circles - bounds of plaines - perpendicular to the spin (magentic, z axes). In Bor it's just one plain boundary, in QM there are density clouds. Everything works in some aspects and was falsified for the specific use.

Only much more sensitive experiments will tell us how far these models support their claims. As I mentioned, atto second time resolution is not enough! for frequencies of 10²⁰ you need
^{1000x finer one.}

One more thing: Mills calculates the "thickness" of the (bound) electron to be close to 10-⁵³... This explains why scattering always only sees a point!

Quote from Jarek

Example of experiment showing that electron is practically a point is the one I have cited a few times here - limiting electron radius to 10^-22m in Penning trap: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-8949/1988/T22/016/

I have mentioned your suggestion in a new thread on Physics Forum. Please correct anything I might have misstated in conveying your position. You may find this reply interesting.

Quote from Jarek

So which of two natures such electron beam has?

I think we agree that the electron has both wave- and particle-like behavior. Now that I better understand the terminology you've been using, what you've been calling the "elementary charge," I've been calling the "electron."

With that misunderstanding out of the way, I take it you believe the experiment you cite resolves the question of whether the elementary charge can have physical extent in your favor (i.e., that it probably does not)? The use of this kind of experiment for that conclusion is at the heart of our disagreement.

Quote from Jarek

For me this discussion the entire time was how to understand the wave particle duality.
Switching brings lots of unanswered questions and problem, like conditions and mechanism for it, objective smearing of elementary charge.

Accepting that they are simultaneously both, means we can ask for trajectory hidden behind the standing wave described by QM (like in Couder's picture), and this trajectory could remain between two collapsing nuclei - screening the Coulomb barrier, helping with fusion.

I hope you have gained from the Physics Forum thread at minimum a realization that your insistence that it is possible to use the experiments you're citing to settle questions of the kind you raise above is a contentious one and departs from the consensus understanding at a basic level. You are free to pursue your tendentious position, of course, but I think you will be more effective in doing so by appreciating that your conclusions are controversial.

Quote from Jarek

... QM textbooks just write that there is always perfect agreement with experiments, but don't dare to cite them ...

Jarek: Give up! You never are able to convince somebody that is a follower of a religion. Last year I attended the 100 years ART conference. There people (physicians..) in Q and A. sessions behaved like orthodox jews... To know how they work just read the bible...

The main problem is that nobody earns any reputation for publishing "not confirming" results, because the priests will tell him you didn't try hard enough...

For condensed matter physics, QM is nothing more than an mathematical engineering method to approximate the behaviour of electrons. One base (gauge) of QM is a still not exactly defined ground state of the hydrogen atom. To explain LENR QM is just the worst (least fitting) theory, where somebody will find the core of a solution...

Quote from Jarek

Also observe that they don't refer to experiments, only to the holy mathematical formalism - which has so much freedom that you can squeeze everything there, any inconsistencies could be explained as not enough approximations being done.

Normally I might be temperamentally inclined to go along with you on a statement like this, but in this case, I suspect you simply misunderstand the relationship between experiment and the role that quantum mechanics plays. Specifically, you think that the Penning trap can show that an "elementary charge" has a definite position and momentum (= trajectory). You were asked on that thread to mathematically relate the Penning trap to a prediction that departs from quantum mechanics, which you still have an opportunity to do. If you can mathematically relate something that falls out of the Penning trap with a predication significantly at variance with quantum mechanics, you will be supporting your argument. If you cite five other experiments that are not the Penning trap (e.g., Gryzinski), you will fail to support your argument, at least as it pertains to your claim that the Penning trap shows that the elementary charge has a definite trajectory.

Your argument with respect to the Penning trap is a high-level appeal to intuition. You were asked for something in the language of mathematics. This is natural enough, because the formalism of quantum mechanics is a mathematical one and not one framed in language that relies on intuition. If there is any substance to your argument about the Penning trap, you would do well to step back, pause for a moment and reconsider your approach and the objections that have been raised to it. You are talking past the people that appear to be raising valid objections. All of this is apart from some sociological theory about the inability of mainstream scientists to adapt. In the case of the Penning trap, it seems like you are simply missing the point.

Quote from Jarek

There are concrete experimental objections in Gryzinski's book - that in some situations, quantum calculations give unsatisfactory agreement in contrast to classical:

This is a different detail. Here you are arguing that another experiment that is not the Penning trap is yielding predictions at variance with some area of quantum mechanics. This is a very interesting possibility. When you raised this possibility on Physics Forums, Kashishi pointed out that the level transitions were indeed unequally spaced, contrary to the conclusion in your initial setup, to which you replied with further questions. That was an interesting and productive discussion. You might have something there. Hopefully there will be further replies.

In highlighting what you believe to be a discrepancy between the predictions of quantum mechanics for the Stark effect and some experiments of Grysinski, what you did not do was (1) show that the Penning trap demonstrates a definite trajectory for the "elementary charge" or (2) show that the Stark effect demonstrates a definite trajectory for the "elementary charge". So you're mixing apples and oranges by introducing this point.

Quote from Jarek

There is huge sociological problem with this agnosticism - that people are satisfied with magical explanations, lack of answer to basic questions like when this change of nature happens ... instead of searching for concrete ones, hidden details, dynamics ... exactly like in creationism vs evolutionism.

You might well be right. But I don't think you'll persuade anyone until you approach your argument much more carefully and listen to people's objections, some of which seem quite valid.