From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Feb 20 2003 - 19:39:27 MST
Michael Dickey writes:
> LEGAL NOTICE
> Unless expressly stated otherwise, this message is confidential and may
> be privileged. It is intended for the addressee(s) only. Access to this
> E-mail by anyone else is unauthorized. If you are not an addressee, any
> disclosure or copying of the contents of this E-mail or any action taken
> (or not taken) in reliance on it is unauthorized and may be unlawful. If
> you are not an addressee, please inform the sender immediately.
But that's not the important part. However these kinds of disclaimers
always puzzle me when the message is sent to a public mailing list.
I can't help worrying that I may be somehow violating the provision
and breaking the law. Did Michael *really* intend me to read it?
Did he "expressly state" that the message was not confidential and was
unprivileged? I didn't see anything like that. The language seems a
bit unfriendly, threatening and heavy-handed.
Anyway, he also asked about
http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news/NewsReleases/2001/NR-01-08-05.html:
> From that paper - "In other words, the X-ray irradiation did not decrease
> the time it takes for hafnium to decay; a result that Becker and the team
> claim is consistent with nuclear physics"
>
> My knowledge is limited on this subject, but I was under the impression that
> the nucleons of Hafnium could be excited to higher energy levels and remain
> stable and coaxed to release their stored energy as gamma rays when hit with
> X rays. The nucleonic excitation has nothing to do with the weak nuclear
> radioactive decay of the host atom. So what does it matter that the LLNL
> found that the X-Ray irradiation did not 'decrease the time it takes for
> hafnium to decay" It shouldn't, it should, however, decrease the time it
> takes for the excited nucleons to decay to a non-excited state! Did these
> researches just misunderstand what was going on here? Or am I just entirely
> confused?
I think all these uses of "decay" refer to the same phenomenon, the
decay from the excited state to the non-excited state. Normally this
occurs very slowly, with a half-life of 31 years. The claim is that
X-rays trigger the decay to happen quickly so that we get high energy
emissions.
Re-read the article with the idea that whenever they talk about "decay"
they don't mean nuclear decay via alpha or beta emission to another
isotope, but rather emission of gamma radiation from an excited to an
unexcited nuclear state. It is this form of decay which is supposed to
be accelerated by the X-rays and which LLNL did not observe.
One possible explanation of the difference that occurs to me is that the
original report apparently used dental machine X-rays, while LLNL used
a third generation X-ray beam, their "Advanced Photon Source", which
sounds pretty damn fancy, not to mention it's 100,000 times stronger.
Maybe differences in the triggering radiation could explain the different
results.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Feb 20 2003 - 19:43:27 MST