Re: Mass/Energy Conversion

On Jul 15, 2:50 pm, Logan Kearsley <chronosur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I imagine one could get some further fun out of engineering ships that
can work under multiple sets of physical laws, for crossing domain
walls without blowing up and exploring new universes that are close
enough, but not quite identical to the original.

The brave explorers could be protected by their own tame domain wall
around their spacecraft, while they go exploring. Any matter that
goes outside into the native vacuum gets destroyed, of course, but as
long as they stay inside, they can look around.

I have no idea how to even begin figuring out the relevant figures for
keeping a stable domain wall.

Me either.

Making an analogy with crystal structure (from which the name domain
wall was taken, due to the similarity of the mathematics) there may be
metastable vacuums, something like diamond as a metastable form of
graphite. Just as diamond does not spontaneously turn to graphite if
the two are stuck up against one another, perhaps the metastable
vacuum could exist without decaying away enclosed in our vacuum. Of
course, this is just wild hand waving. There is also the scale of the
problem to worry about - if your alternate metastable vacuum is a
grapefruit sized sphere with as much mass as the moon, you will not be
using it for propulsion (although the antimatter it creates could be
used for such).

And pulsed operation seems to present the problem that every pulse to
set up a baryon-destroying environment would require more energy than
you expect to get from destroying the target baryons, making the break-
even efficiencies stupidly high with stupidly high power levels.

There is that - the temperature needed is about a TeV per particle,
and each destroyed baryon gives 1 GeV of energy (very roughly, for
both numbers). So you have a factor of 1000 to overcome from the
outset.

And
if you can do that, pulsed p-p fusion ought to be just as easy.

A factor of 1000 is easier to overcome than a factor of 1E22 to 1E25
that I would expect would be the imbalance of radiative losses to
fusion energy for p-p fusion (a fusion ICF pellet radiates on the same
order of magnitude as much energy as it produces in a time frame of
1E-9 s, for p-p fusion the same reactions will take 1E6 to 1E9 years =
3E13 to 3E16 s).

Stable Q-balls or monopoles, though, would be just about perfect. If
only we knew how to make them....

Indeed.

OK, I get your logic.
But, in the absence of tame monopoles and/or Q-balls, it seems to me
that all available options for baryon destruction are such that, if
you can manage that, you can manage fusion, too. And we have no idea
how to make Q-balls. So, with current knowledge, monopoles are
probably the best bet, yes? If they exist, manufacturing them could
just be a matter of determining their masses and slamming some
electron/positron beams together at just the right energy, if I'm not
missing something.

This is the best known method for producing both Q-balls and
monopoles. Q-balls might not actually be stable, so it is possible
they cannot be used. If either of these have a complex structure,
just slamming stuff together is entropically unlikely to generate the
right thing (much as slamming all the components for a 67 corvette
together is unlikely to get you a hot rod) in which case I have no
idea how to go about building one of these exotic particles.
Monopoles, at least, are predicted to come about naturally as a result
of topological imperfections of a condensing symmetry-broken vacuum
state.

Luke
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Relativity, Schilds Ladder
    ... vacuum itself has mass (this boundary is called a domain wall). ... The boundary has a definite energy per unit area. ... it acts just like a rest mass in all ways. ...
    (rec.arts.sf.science)
  • Re: vacuum cleaner redux
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    (alt.home.repair)
  • Re: Poms view of the Gilly debate
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  • Einsteins Equations are Holographic
    ... with the Cartan curvature 2-form with INVARIANT Hodge DeRham integrals ... Einstein's local GR from the rigid Goldstone phase of the Higgs Vacuum ... Note also that the Vilenken unstable flat DARK ENERGY vacuum domain wall ... Bohm-Aharonov effect of "Magnetism without magnetism". ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Einsteins Equations are Holographic
    ... with the Cartan curvature 2-form with INVARIANT Hodge DeRham integrals ... Einstein's local GR from the rigid Goldstone phase of the Higgs Vacuum ... Note also that the Vilenken unstable flat DARK ENERGY vacuum domain wall ... Bohm-Aharonov effect of "Magnetism without magnetism". ...
    (sci.astro)