In Is the Sun Hot? (November 1999's Mensa Magazine) Richard Milton presents a brief account of the Ranque tube and the work of Boscali. He suggests this offers a better explanation of how stars are formed. It offers better explanation for wider events than this.
The phenomena could have bearing an how planets are formed, but could it influence the climates of formed planets? Could it explain the markings of gas giants like Jupiter?
What of novae and supernovae? Why do neutron stars or Black Holes remain after this manifestation? Why didn't these stars blow themselves to oblivion? Why did they take so long before they blew up? Why was something left behind?
Do the dense cores of these stars act like damping rods in a nuclear furnace, until, so super-cooled by the Ranque effect, they develop superconductivity? When this happens will it not be as if the damping rods had suddenly been withdrawn. Would not the reactions in the shell be uncontrolled and explode on a scale related to the size of the star?
The same force of explosion observable from the outside would also be directed inwards at the core. Because of this inward acting force less mass would be required to produce a black hole.
One might wonder if super-cooling of cores precludes the existence of Wormholes and White-holes. But moving on....
Could Ranque have a bearing on the creation and end of the Universe? Does it give a clue as to what happened to the missing antimatter?
I imagined a 'body' consisting, not of matter and anti-matter, or even of quarks, but of some pre-quark material. This would become a hodge podge of assorted quarks, and then a mix of matter and anti-matter, but not a nice, even mix but random masses of each material. When opposites came in contact they would not be totally destroyed. The energy created by the first contact would keep them apart.
Sooner or later, chance will allow the core and the shell to become prominently matter or antimatter. In the case of our universe the core came to contain more antimatter than matter. Once this happened more and more antimatter would be accepted into the core whilst matter would be held at bay by the energy of contact.
With the appearance of matter and antimatter must come a form of space and time; a space and time not as we experience it but something compressed and alien. To our senses events would be instantaneous.
Existence in this new universe is mainly only potential. For instance, beyond the compressed time and space is a potential event horizon of this 'primeval atom'. It cannot have existence because it is outside of time and space. Unless it exists the developing 'primeval atom' cannot become a Black Hole. This is important. If the primeval atom were to become a Black Hole why should it behave then any differently from any other Black Hole? Why should it go 'Bang'?
If this primeval body is not already doing so, it now begins to spin and the Ranque effect makes itself felt. The antimatter core begins to cool and matter shell begins to heat up.
The core would also produce a second potential event horizon inside the first, but still beyond the compressed time and space, so as yet the core cannot become a Black Hole.
Matter and antimatter is still destroyed producing enormous quantities of energy, but some matter continues to reach the 'safety' of the shell and some anti-matter that of the core. The core is becoming super-cooled by the Ranque effect and will acquire superconductivity. When this happens the shell will explode. At this time the body would be spinning at such an enormous rate that it would be disc shaped. Most of the explosive force would be expended along the plane of the spin. This would result in a flattened universe.
This Big Bang would compress the core still more which would bring its potential event horizon 'closer' . The shell would begin its expansion, and time and space would become more like the time and space that we experience.
As the bulk of the expanding shell passed the potential event horizon of the anti-matter core, this horizon would become a reality and the core which has been left behind would become a Black Hole, sealing in for the lifetime of the Universe the balance of anti-matter.
Time and space, meanwhile, drives on towards the original potential event horizon it can never reach. At the instance of the explosion this horizon began to move away as the average density of the Universe fell. As the Universe continues to expand and become less dense it will keep an doing so forever - unless some other phenomenon were to manifest itself. This explains the recently observed distant galaxies accelerating away from us: Gravitational effects on them are lessening and there is no real event horizon.
What phenomena could end the Universe? When the average density of the Universe becomes too 'thin' to support space and time, will the clock stop?
The anti-matter Black Hole, because it is at the centre of the Universe, and because of its very size and its super-cooled core, will be the most vulnerable body. Immediately outside of itself the space and time which played a part in maintaining its event horizon's existence will either have disappeared or become too weak to support the event horizon's position. It will move towards the core. As it reaches the surface of the core all space, time and matter within its boundary will have disappeared into the core. The core will shrink and the event horizon will follow suit until it pops out of existence. Half the mass of the Universe and its contribution to gravity and the Universe's density will have ceased to be.
The effect on the rest of the Universe will be catastrophic. (If there are any observers around to whom 'catastrophe' has meaning.) Time and space will disintegrate into isolated islands around galaxies and former galaxies. There can now be no relationship between these galaxies and never will be again. They become black holes with their own event horizons. Like the antimatter care at the centre of the Universe these event horizons will shrink, driving all time, space and matter into super-cooled cores. Each will 'pop' out of existence and with the last 'pop' the last of the Universe will be gone.
Perhaps each 'pop' might leave behind an anomaly, a Super Potential for a new Universe. Why not? We don't know what brought our Universe into existence.
Bob Cooper
Postscript : Richard Milton's article from Mensa Magazine (November 1999)
Is the sun hot? The question is, on the face of it, almost insane. No-one could possibly doubt that the sun is the only source of external heat on earth. And, certainly, the part that we see, the sun's photosphere, is some 5,800 degrees Kelvin. The solar corona, which extends into space, may be as hot as one million degrees Kelvin.
But what exactly is underneath this hot atmosphere? The explanation universally accepted without question is that it must be an even hotter mass of hydrogen gas, fusing into helium and other elements at temperatures of 15 million degrees Kelvin in a continuous thermonuclear explosion - a giant H bomb.
This universal view is based on the mathematical work of Arthur Eddington in the 1930s and Hans Bethe's theoretical confirmation in the 1950s (for which he won a 1967 Nobel prize). Above all, we have the awesome experimental confirmation of the nature of nuclear fusion by the test detonations of H bombs in the Pacific.
However, physicists have always been aware of nagging problems with the conventional view of how stars form and how they burn. And now, Italian physicist Renzo Boscoli, has published details of a theory that is staggering: the theory that far from being hot underneath its atmosphere, the sun may, at its core, be a ball of ice in which not hot, but cold fusion reactions are taking place.
The conventional view of how stars form is that a cloud of interstellar hydrogen collapses under gravity until, under enormous pressure, the atoms of hydrogen become so hot they fuse to form helium. Once ignited, the core of the newly formed star burns continuously, transmuting hydrogen to helium, helium to carbon and so on, until the fuel is exhausted and the star's life is over.
There are some problems with this view. For instance, when gases are compressed, as under gravity, they also heat up, and this makes them expand. As temperature increases, the outward force, due to expansion, will become greater than the force of gravity compressing the gas and the gas will simply dissipate in space again. How then could the condensing hydrogen cloud ever ignite spontaneously?
There are many other puzzling features of the sun: how can a surface at 'only' 5,800 degrees Kelvin give rise to a corona of one million degrees Kelvin? Why does the surface rotate faster at the equator than at higher latitudes?
Why does the planet Mercury have a strangely perturbed motion? In two ground-breaking papers published in Infinite Energy magazine, Renzo Boscoli offers some astounding answers to these puzzles. Boscoli points out a phenomenon discovered in the 1930s but - like many such anomalies - virtually ignored since. French physicist Georges Ranque discovered that if you make a body of gas rotate, as in a turbine, the hottest (most energetic) molecules are somehow separated to the outside of the mass, while the gas at the centre gets colder, It is relatively easily experimentally to make a 'Ranque tube' where the difference in temperature between air in the middle and air at the outside is more than 100 degrees C, simply by causing the air to rotate.
This experimental result appears to contradict the laws of thermodynamics and at present remains unexplained. But Boscoli points out that its implications for the formation of stars may be immense.
While a cloud of hydrogen condensing under gravity is an unlikely candidate for a new star because heat would make it expand and dissipate again, a rotating cloud of hydrogen would give rise to a remarkable object - one where the temperature at its exterior would continue to rise while the temperature at its core would continue to fall. At first the hydrogen core would become so cold it would liquefy and finally solidify.
Says Boscoli, "If this mass of gas... would begin to rotate upon itself, it would necessarily assume a progressively flatter ellipsoidal form as its rotational velocity increased. And... the Ranque effect would begin to be exerted, therefore producing a cooling at the centre and a heating of the periphery of the ellipsoid".
He adds, "Due to a constant Ranque effect I see no reason why the centre would not continue to cool towards absolute zero."
Boscoli first conceived his ideas some 30 years ago. He has published them for the first time because the Arecibo radiotelescope has reported finding an enormous hydrogen cloud that is very cold (around minus 200 degrees C) and that is rotating on its own axis.
Boscoli goes onto add that nuclear reactions such as that of the H bomb are impossible at absolute zero. But he believes that 'cold' nuclear fusion reactions may be possible due to the immense gravitational pressures.
The reaction he envisages is that of the gravitational collapse of a proton and electron, producing a neutron.
Boscoli's theory solves the problem of Mercury's strange orbit and the sun's differential rotation. It also explains sunspots as simply holes in the atmosphere. If Boscoli is right, there may after all, be something new under the sun.'
Further details appear on Richard Milton's Web Site at:-
http://www.alternativescience.com and he will be pleased to answer any questions by email at richardmilton@alternativescience.comNovember 1999
Bob : Thank you for your thoughts, so long in the gestation. I am not a physicist, so cannot authoritatively comment on either your or Richard Milton's speculations. I tried posting the article on PDGList in the hope of getting a bite, but no-one was willing to play. Maybe someone will respond this time when they see the articles in print. I have to say a couple of things though. Firstly, while these speculations are of some philosophical interest they are mainly concerned with physics, so maybe ought to be printed in PhiSIGma where there is more hope of a response. Secondly, and I'll now follow up on this presently, I'm uncomfortable about this approach, so popular in Mensa, of layering speculation on top of speculation, with little sound understanding of what's going on.
Reading Milton's paper, it sounds as though the Ranque effect is fundamentally a two-dimensional phenomenon - he refers to "the Ranque tube"; ie. it works in a rapidly rotating cylinder of gas. Maybe Boscoli has some explanation, but does the effect work in spherical bodies that rotate slowly ? Alternatively, if the Ranque effect forms when they rotate rapidly, is it still stable when they slow down, and what is the mechanism for their loss of angular momentum to allow this ? I feel the need for some mathematical modelling here - something notably absent from speculations.
You commence with a host of rhetorical questions, but do not indicate whether or not orthodoxy has any answers to them, nor whether your theory has any answers. Orthodox science often has hand-waving answers to questions where the detailed answer is unknown, but I dare say some sort of quantitative sketch of the answer, albeit incomplete, could be supplied. Can you do likewise ?
I'm not impressed by your vision of pre-quark material. For this to be a speculation forth its salt, don't you have to be able to say something about it, and how it's supposed to clump together into matter and anti-matter ? Why do you suppose that such clumps are kept apart by "the energy of contact" ? Do you have some sort of image of a lump of sodium fizzing about in a beaker of water ? I'd have thought a Zeppelin explosion a better model, only with a bit more pop. This makes your segregation of matter & anti-matter into core & shell rather unlikely.
And where does this compressed space and time come from ? What's this supposed to mean ? You lost me with your "primeval atom" idea. How does your primeval body suddenly start spinning ? Bodies do this under gravitational collapse to conserve their net angular momentum, but is your primeval body collapsing, and where did its angular momentum come from ? You refer to the body spinning at an enormous rate, leading it to become disk-shaped and resulting in a "flattened universe". What is this supposed to mean ? It is tempting to think that you are alluding to space-time being "flat" or nearly so - but this is a four-dimensional concept. The term "flat" is used by analogy with a two-dimensional surface. In four dimensions it does not imply disks or any other two-dimensional flat structure.
What are "potential event horizons" supposed to be ? An event horizon either is or isn't one, and it can only be passed in one direction - inwards - by definition. I liked the idea of hiding the antimatter away at the centre of a black hole, it's just that your mechanism for its production takes a bit of swallowing. Just why our universe consists primarily of matter does need explaining, but I'm not sure your explanation doesn't introduce concepts that require even more explanation.
I could carry on but space and time do not allow it.
Theo