Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...
  • What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
  • Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
  • This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
  • The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
  • The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
  • It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Aha!

Search for this term, and check out the PDF from the SLAC people at Sanford: CHANNELED PARTICLE ACCELERATION BY PLASMA WAVES IN METALS

You'll get this link.


I obviously am not the first to think along these lines.

And people say I'm just crazy.

The fields inside solid materials are to charged particles inside their structures very very strong compared to the fields we make in accelerators. In fact, what that paper describes is actually far stronger than is necessary to fuse protium, deuterium, or tritium, or even boron and protium.

See the Wiki entry on aneutronic fusion.


Anyhow, it should be possible to create a system that easily drives an ionized fuel source to fuse and release energy. The trick then is to immediately capture said energy and transfer some back to the generator and use the rest across a load. Going beyond break-even should be relatively simple if we can figure out the absorption method properly. I'm thinking something like a solar cell, but for higher energy radiation.

You know, you can channel and even bend gamma rays like light and they do this for astrophysics. Perhaps a metallic crystalline matrix for intercepting and moderating gamma rays and x-rays down to more manageable wavelengths and then knocking electrons loose creating a potential. We'd have to be able to get rid of the charged ions in an aneutronic system, or allow neutron scattering but I think the proper beryllium compounds might work there too.

This is going to require quite an amount of calculations for some very enterprising people across a dozen disciplines starting with molecular mechanical physics to design the appropriate matrices and then chemical engineers to consider how to make those compounds and grow the crystals and perhaps engineers to figure out how to do molecular compositing...

But... a solid-state fusion battery pack should be possible.