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- From: houle@nmt.edu (Paul Houle)
- Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion
- Subject: Re: Implications of hypothesis of subground states
- Message-ID: <1993Jan25.205939.6346@nmt.edu>
- Date: 25 Jan 93 20:59:39 GMT
- References: <1993Jan24.085220.17739@coplex.com> <1993Jan25.011105.16977@ns.network.com> <1993Jan25.044246.16642@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
- Organization: New Mexico Tech
- Lines: 35
-
- In article <1993Jan25.044246.16642@zip.eecs.umich.edu> monkey@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Monkey King) writes:
- >In article <1993Jan25.011105.16977@ns.network.com> logajan@ns.network.com (John Logajan) writes:
- >>chuck@coplex.com (Chuck Sites) writes:
-
- >Here is a physics question: when an electron in a atom radiates, which
- >particle loses mass -- the electron or the nucleus or both? For example,
- >suppose a proton and an electron at rest, initially unbound, the total mass
- >is M = Mp + Me, where Mp and Me are rest mass of the particles, respectively.
- >The electron then combines with the proton to form a hydrogen atom in the
- >ground state, losing 13.6 eV in the form of radiation. The total mass of the
- >two particles is now M - 13.6 eV. Now the question is which particle is
- >lighter than before? And why? Can you say here that you can't ask such a
- >question because you have to treat the atom as a single entity? This
- >quesiton is relevant to Bollinger's argument about the electron becoming
- >lighter and lighter when it falls thru the basement to become a hydrino. I
- >hope experts in this group can give a serious answer to my question (Blue,
- >Carr, Jones, are you listening?).
-
- Actually, neither particle becomes lighter. The "negative energy"
- in the system is going to be "negative" electromagnetic energy in the
- space around the particles. Of course the net energy is going to be positive,
- but you will find the difference if you, say, compute the electric field of
- a positive and negative charge at a distance of 1m and at a distance of .5 A
- and then work out the energy density and integrate to find the total energy.
-
- If you care about the inertia of the whole system, you have to
- remember that the fields have inertia too -- since particles already have
- "electromagnetic mass".
-
- Of course there was a little swindle here because we have serious
- problems in defining electromagnetic energy; i.e., the electromagnetic
- energy of a point particle is infinite. This is a problem that isn't
- entirely resolved; but it is still pretty meaningless to say that
- either particle actually "loses mass", only that the system (including
- fields) does as a whole.
-