On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:27:32 -0500 Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.ca wrote:
Andy Farnell wrote:
On Wed, 6 Feb 2008 21:58:49 -0500 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 04:30:19PM +0000, Andy Farnell wrote:
As I see, the unipolar vacuum collapse theory only makes sense, if there is a chemical reaction that removes CO2, H2O, O2 or N2 from the atmosphere, (and one assumes no matter is transformed to energy) - well NO2 and O3 are produced, but that doesn't account for the volume.
Really? I'm not so sure about that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminesence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_shrimp http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pistol+shrimp&search_type=&search=Search
I'd love to believe that sound can turn matter into energy, it would really cheer up my day. But I think esoteric explanations of sonoluminesence are quite unnecessary, This looks like plain old "pumping" to me. The smoking gun is the colour...blue-green which is the 337nm emission of nitrogen... which is in air.
337nm is invisible ultraviolet. See the spectrum here, it is multicoloured: http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~koppen/discharge/nitrogen.html Here's one of air: http://www.scitechantiques.com/MMs_project/reference%20paper/Air_Spectrm_5mm...
Ah yes, so it is. Thanks Martin. I still think that sonoluminesence blue is coming from Nitrogen though, call it a hunch :)
It seems to depend on the amount of water in the air what colour you get, the hydrogen makes it more red.
Yeah, I've seen that, and orange lighning too.
So it's electronic in nature. No need for mini-black hole theories, the energy comes from the sound and somehow (probably by dipole movement) becomes electromagnetic, excites the nitrogen shell and is re-emitted as a 337nm quanta.
The sound is a result of the expansion of the ionized air in the channel that was suddenly heated by the passage of huge numbers of electrons.
Yes, we're clear on that. I was responding to Chris suggesting that maybe there's some nuclear interactions at work in lighning (which I am open minded about but sceptical), and he mentioned sonoluminesence, which I believe has a rather more established explanation (ie it isn't fusion or anything weird)
andy