[PD] pd thunder

[Martin Peach]

Andy Farnell wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Feb 2008 21:58:49 -0500
> Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 04:30:19PM +0000, Andy Farnell wrote:
>>     
>>> As I see, the unipolar vacuum collapse theory only makes sense, if there 
>>> is a chemical reaction that removes CO2, H2O, O2 or N2 from the atmosphere,
>>> (and one assumes no matter is transformed to energy) - well NO2 and O3
>>> are produced, but that doesn't account for the volume.
>>>       
>> Really? I'm not so sure about that.
>>
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminesence>
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_shrimp>
>> <http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pistol+shrimp&search_type=&search=Search>
>>     
>
>
> I'd love to believe that sound can turn matter into energy, it would really
> cheer up my day. But I think esoteric explanations of sonoluminesence are quite
> unnecessary, This looks like plain old "pumping" to me. The smoking gun is the
> colour...blue-green which is the 337nm emission of nitrogen... which is in air.
>   
337nm is invisible ultraviolet. See the spectrum here, it is multicoloured:
http://astro.u-strasbg.fr/~koppen/discharge/nitrogen.html
Here's one of air:
http://www.scitechantiques.com/MMs_project/reference%20paper/Air_Spectrm_5mm_labeled.jpg
It seems to depend on the amount of water in the air what colour you 
get, the hydrogen makes it more red.

> So it's electronic in nature. No need for mini-black hole theories, the energy
> comes from the sound and somehow (probably by dipole movement) becomes 
> electromagnetic, excites the nitrogen shell and is re-emitted as a 337nm quanta.
>   
The sound is a result of the expansion of the ionized air in the channel 
that was suddenly heated by the passage of huge numbers of electrons.

Martin