To anti-crackpot:
Your figure for R-infinity at 1.09 73731 6 * 10^7 m^-1 is correct. To get the figure for real hydrogen you correct for the reduced mass ratio of a proton/proton+electron, so you have to multiply by 1836.1/1837.1 which gives you the 1.09 6775 or 1.09 68 figure you give. Why...
Ah ha! Thanks, the_wolfman. I'm glad it caught you by surprise. That proves it wasn't a stupid question. The meme that the Sun's primary energy reaction is so hard it's never been verifiably done in the lab, is worth spreading as a cool factoid. It goes along with the known "compost heap" rate...
The title should be "Has proton-proton FUSION ever been observed in the lab?"
At 15 million K the mean proton KE in the Sun's core is indeed about 15 kev. But raising this substantially wouldn't increase fusion cross section much, because it's not inhibited by Coulombic repulsion, at much over...
Sure we all know it happens at the core of the Sun, but the half life for a proton there is a billion years because p + p -> D + e + v is so unlikely
A thermonuke bomb using light H would give no extra energy at all above the fission primary. Even the Sun only gives a few watts for bomb...
We should remember another factor, which is that clogged filters in vacuum cleaners possibly act like clogged filters in clothes dryers. They help burn out the motor not by increasing the load and electrical power in (for reasons noted, this doesn't happen) but instead by cutting down on air...
I suppose. I can't imagine how a massless charged particle would interact. How can you tell how much of the electron's mass is electromagnetic, and how much is due to Higgs? Perhaps without Higgs, the electron's rest mass would only decrease by the amount of rest mass of an electron-neutrino...
Binding energy is as negative as a credit card balance-- you have to add energy to it to get zero. That's what we MEAN by "negative". A debt is negative money. Binding energy is negative mass. A deuteron has less mass than a proton and a neutron. You have to add energy (and therefore add mass)...
The attractive force between quarks stays constant (at long distance) and the energy therefore increases without limit. But you're still adding energy to separate the things, which means they give energy up, as they get closer. There's no getting around a negative mass, so long as the force is...
Tom S. has said the same, so I'll ask you the same question I asked him, which was how the energy of a binding field can have positive mass. That is not the way G or EM or nuclear fields (residual strong fields between nucleons) work. Each results in a mass defect, since it is an attractive...
Okay, so you seem to say that it's no problem, as most of the mass of ordinary matter (which is NOT quark or electron rest masses) is NOT due to the Higgs mechanism. If quarks were massless, you contend that everything would "weigh" 99% as much as it does already, since we're "weighing" gluon...
The Higgs is supposed to couple to fermions but not photons. Nevertheless, photons add mass to systems in SR. Also kinetic energy (KE) of fermion motion adds inertia and mass to systems in SR theory. So, how does the Higgs field "tell" that this type of mass from photons and KE IS mass, and give...
For an ideal elastomer dE/dl = 0, where l is the length change on work load. I kid you not. See http://individual.utoronto.ca/alisonmcguigan/teaching_and_supervision/elasticity_lectures_student_lecture_1.doc
That means all the work done on the elastomer ends up as heat (or work done BY the...
Well, if you use a tank of old (re-cooled to ambient temp) gas to do work, then the initial work you did when you compressed the gas was "stored" as heat. Whether that's heat still in the gas, or heat which escaped since you compressed it, is a matter of taste. Certainly it's conserved. But only...
Potential energy
Well, it's the Lagrangian plus the kinetic energy :). Energy stored when work is done against a force field (this does NOT happen when you compress a classical gas or stretch a rubber band). Seriously, it's all those kinds of energy which show up associated with mass and...