[PD] pd thunder

[Andy Farnell]

On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:27:32 -0500
Martin Peach <martin.peach at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> 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

Ah yes, so it is. Thanks Martin.
I still think that sonoluminesence blue is coming from Nitrogen though, call it a hunch :)


> It seems to depend on the amount of water in the air what colour you 
> get, the hydrogen makes it more red.

Yeah, I've seen that, and orange lighning too.

> 
> > 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.

Yes, we're clear on that. I was responding to Chris suggesting that maybe there's
some nuclear interactions at work in lighning (which I am open minded about but
sceptical), and he mentioned sonoluminesence, which I believe has a rather more
established explanation (ie it isn't fusion or anything weird)

andy


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