Re: Neuron stars (was: Re: Setting the controls for the sun)
Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Mon, 18 Aug 1997 16:20:26 -0500 (CDT)
Damien wrote:
>
>A big problem with using neutron stars as computational platforms (a.k.a.
>turning them into neuron stars) is that they might actually be kaon or
>strange stars, and who knows what the physics is then? Gerald Brown and
>Hans Bethe have argued that the standard stellar dynamics narrative, in
>which gravitational collapse forces protons and electrons together (so to
>speak) to build neutrons and runaway neutrinos, might be only partially
>correct. They suggest that the electrons might do a lepton=>hadron
>transition, turning into kaons (which contain a strange quark). Usually
>massive kaons decay mighty fast, but the Brown-Bethe models sez that the
>weird environment of a supernova remnant could allow kaons to shed most of
>their quarky mass (decoupling from the Higgs field? don't ask me, mate, I
>just work here), so they skid around like electrons in a superconductive
>environment. Would you wish to upload into a substrate like that? Maybe
>it would be ideal - fast and slippery. Hmmm.
>
>Damien Broderick
>
The Bethe/Brown kaonic state is only stable for a few seconds, just long
enough to explain the delay in neutrino emmision (from supernova
1987A). It is postulated to be a gigantic, star-wide Bose-Einstein
condensate. Such a state cannot support much diversity, as all the
particles are in the same (for certain parameters) quantum state.
Forrest