Physics Discussion Forum

Farsight wrote:No. I don't think stars have anything to do with it, inertron. Stars are mainly hydrogen, and hydrogen consists of one proton and one electron. The particles are thought to have been created after the big bang before there were any stars.

I've been trying to understand the relationship between gravity and energy-density and it seems as though there's a relationship. Hydrogen, for example, is least dense, so the energy of hydrogen stars seems to prevent them from collapsing too much on themselves - whereas helium is slightly denser, so helium stars seem to able to compress more tightly because they have more gravity, etc. So I think that to have a situation hot enough to generate very high-frequency gamma rays, you would need a certain mass of star. Such a star would generate electrons and positrons along with the various other things that cook within it. I assume there are also stars that would be big/heavy enough to produce protons/neutrons, though Idk if there's any more of those around anymore. I think the early universe must have been very strange with such heat and density that neutrons/protons were forming at the same time as part of a combined process of super-gravitational compression and super-hot turbulence and expansion. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there were still stars around that produced gamma radiation sufficient to generate electrons.

inertron wrote: I think the early universe must have been very strange with such heat and density that neutrons/protons were forming at the same time as part of a combined process of super-gravitational compression and super-hot turbulence and expansion. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there were still stars around that produced gamma radiation sufficient to generate electrons.

You brought up an interesting issue.
See this article on Gamma rays :

A notable example is extremely powerful bursts of high-energy radiation normally referred to as long duration gamma-ray bursts, which produce gamma rays by a mechanism not compatible with radioactive decay. These bursts of gamma rays, thought to be due to collapse of stars called hypernovas, are the most powerful single events so far discovered in the cosmos.

So if the mechanism isn't radioactive decay, what would the mechanism be?

Bill Angel wrote:

inertron wrote: I think the early universe must have been very strange with such heat and density that neutrons/protons were forming at the same time as part of a combined process of super-gravitational compression and super-hot turbulence and expansion. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there were still stars around that produced gamma radiation sufficient to generate electrons.

Thanks for posting this.

So if the mechanism isn't radioactive decay, what would the mechanism be?

A great mass of radioactive matter decaying under great pressure while moving at very high speed toward the target of the emissions maybe? E.g. a neutron star accelerating near the speed of light?

Hi Inertron and Bill Angel,

Inertron wrote:I think the early universe must have been very strange with such heat and density that neutrons/protons were forming at the same time as part of a combined process of super-gravitational compression and super-hot turbulence and expansion. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there were still stars around that produced gamma radiation sufficient to generate electrons.

Surely you would agree that almost all the electrons, protons and neutrons formed a moment after the big bang. These particles form out of the intense flux of radiant energy at that point in time. Something separated and preserved some of the "normal" matter, perhaps due to the special circumstances found at that time. Pressure may not have been a factor but I believe that general spatial confinement was.... the universe was the size of a single atom but growing very fast. After the big bang, there are some energetic processes that form matter such as electrons and protons but they also form "mostly" equal amounts of anti-matter and therefore self annihilate with only a small number of other processes that can provide nett flux of electrons or other processes. The heart of stars are not currently considered "special enough" to create nett matter like what occurred at the big bang.

So the suggestion is that the pressures inside stars form particles such as electrons spontaneously without the attendant anti-particle (such as a positron) breaking Lorentz Symmetry (CPT Symmetry)? This Lorentz symmetry breaking would be conjectured to occur inside the dense state near the cores of stars where the energy density is high enough to perform this trick. Thus the cores of dying stars bring actual new matter into being .... not just rearrange the available number of protons and neutrons and electrons left over from the big bang?

Cheers

Good Elf wrote:Surely you would agree that almost all the electrons, protons and neutrons formed a moment after the big bang. These particles form out of the intense flux of radiant energy at that point in time. Something separated and preserved some of the "normal" matter, perhaps due to the special circumstances found at that time. Pressure may not have been a factor but I believe that general spatial confinement was….

The question is what factors were involved in shaping the internal dynamics of the "intense flux." Pressure, to my knowledge, can result from different factors, such as force-attraction causing objects to focus their kinetic energy centripetally. In a turbulent system in which the mass is diffuse enough for gravitation to occur non-centripetally, however, pressure would result from powerful currents colliding and merging, etc.

In the present universe, the forces are pretty well insulated and differentiated from each other. Atomic nuclei are often shielded from collision by electron 'shells,' stars are shielded from each other by large gaps of potential motion (space/time), etc. In those hot turbulent clouds of an early universe, gravity would have been too strong to allow electron-degeneracy pressure to build up around nuclei, right? Yet, the 'neutrons' if you want to call them that, would also not have been able to settle under the centripetal gravitation of a star, so I think huge gaps would be forming due to pressure-differentials resulting from turbulence. One current of high-gravity neutrons pulls away from another and you suddenly have an enormous amount of vacuum between the two currents. Maybe that vacuum has something to do with how particles form, idk. How can you even know whether the 'neutrons' were particles or some primordial form of undifferentiated energy-matter?

the universe was the size of a single atom but growing very fast. After the big bang, there are some energetic processes that form matter such as electrons and protons but they also form "mostly" equal amounts of anti-matter and therefore self annihilate with only a small number of other processes that can provide nett flux of electrons or other processes. The heart of stars are not currently considered "special enough" to create nett matter like what occurred at the big bang.

Well, in a wild fire not all the CO gets converted into CO2, even if the temperature is sufficient for it to do so. I assume matter/antimatter formation situations are similar, with lots of the emergent particles re-combining and releasing their energy - but a lot of that energy is going into pushing the other particles further away from each other. Eventually I assume the remaining particles are far enough away from each other that they start to coalesce under their own gravitation, which might cause some last matter-antimatter annihilations, but eventually you would be left with only fusion/fission of non-antiparticles.

As for current stars not being 'special' enough to make matter, who can say? Look at Jupiter's storm. We are able to see that because Jupiter's not a star, but imagine the strength of the turbulence generated by that storm compared to the regular atmospheric and ocean pressure on the surface of the core. If stars have fusion-turbulence that is so volatile, how can you say it's impossible that energy isn't being shifted to frequencies high enough to form electrons and positrons?

So the suggestion is that the pressures inside stars form particles such as electrons spontaneously without the attendant anti-particle (such as a positron) breaking Lorentz Symmetry (CPT Symmetry)? This Lorentz symmetry breaking would be conjectured to occur inside the dense state near the cores of stars where the energy density is high enough to perform this trick. Thus the cores of dying stars bring actual new matter into being .... not just rearrange the available number of protons and neutrons and electrons left over from the big bang?

Wouldn't the cores of stars be relatively non-dense since gravity cancels itself out in the center of a massive body? I think the densest part of a star would be its mantle. Probably they all have a storm, like Jupiter's, caused by a low-pressure system that forms near the core. Maybe that contributes to the energy density you are referring to?

Hi Inertron, and Farsight and others,

Inertron wrote:Maybe that vacuum has something to do with how particles form, idk. How can you even know whether the 'neutrons' were particles or some primordial form of undifferentiated energy-matter?

Current experiments suggests that neutrons are something other than "pure particle". Recent experiments at the Thomas Jefferson Labs suggest that the nucleus of stable atoms have a thin veneer of "neutron" coating them. Inside that thin veneer it is probably an excess of "protonic" material. However other separate recent discoveries at that same lab suggests that the quarks that make up the spinning core of the "fundamental particles" are spinning transversely with greater and greater speeds towards their centers which are moving at high relativistic velocities... very much like the electron as a confined photon executing a twisted ribbon path that has a great amount of internal orbital angular momentum. So the nucleus is not like a "bag of marbles" at all. The Lab says that if all their recent discoveries are true and confirmed then this will considerably "trash" current particle theory and something new must certainly emerge.... I "assume" something other than the Standard Model. As Sherlock Holmes said "Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!".
New picture of atomic nucleus emerges
Tricky Spin Experiment Yields Evidence of New Quark Behavior
Not only that... there is a CERN experiment headed by Ulrik Ingerslev Uggerhøj that is trying to determine the length of formation of particles. So in the beginning there was a very short period of darkness then there was light. Recent work at CERN (Danish offshoot) is concentrating on the length of formation of photons but it equally applies to all particles including the particles and antiparticles. See this Thesis...
Ultra-Relativistic Particles in Matter
So "confinement" is a strong influence on all emerging particles and to their formation. I would not rule any theory out. But I am a great believer in "the experiment" so until we have something to go on current theory is presently the Titanic and anyone clinging to it will go down with the ship and the rest of us are left clinging to lifeboats.

Inertron wrote:One current of high-gravity neutrons pulls away from another and you suddenly have an enormous amount of vacuum between the two currents. Maybe that vacuum has something to do with how particles form, idk. How can you even know whether the 'neutrons' were particles or some primordial form of undifferentiated energy-matter?

I don't feel too enthusiastic about these mechanisms being able to form lone electrons or positrons from just energy. It is still quite common for matter and antimatter to form in the Sun and also in outer space such as in the Van Allen Belt in some localized regions which are held in place by magnetic traps. But overall the production of electrons are balanced by the production of positrons and ditto for heavier particles. There have been some tantalizing instances of a difference in symmetry between matter and antimatter recently been discovered. This offers possibilities for almost anything given the "right conditions".

Inertron wrote:Wouldn't the cores of stars be relatively non-dense since gravity cancels itself out in the center of a massive body? I think the densest part of a star would be its mantle. Probably they all have a storm, like Jupiter's, caused by a low-pressure system that forms near the core. Maybe that contributes to the energy density you are referring to?

Yes... gravity vanishes at the center of stars but the atmospheric pressure does not vanish. There has also been some interesting superficial layers discovered in the solar corona which resemble a kind of "very hot shell". "the sun's atmosphere, or corona, is a few million degrees hotter than the surface, which has a temperature of about 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius)"
Sun's Super-Hot Shell Cooked by Plasma Jets
There are some interesting theories but this "fact" still seems "counter-intuitive".

Of course they have been very active recently at CERN creating a Quark-Gluon "soup" which is the primordial stuff that would have emerged initially from the big bang. These experiments, though not the first time this "stuff" has been made in a Lab, are telling us something new also about Baryogenesis. "This corresponds to about 3.7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (2 trillion degrees Celsius), which is about 125,000 times hotter than the center of the sun." All these phenomena are charting the behavior of various kinds of exotic "plasmas" (photons plus charged "neo-particles" like electrons at one end of the spectrum of "stuff" all the way through to "much more heavy fractions of quarks and gluons"... and other more exotic materials) which then form quasi-particles with the embedded "common" particles eventually condensing out of the soup. IMHO quarks seem more like mutually dependent yet inseparable "tornadoes" of rotating "fractional quanta" of energy, based on the fundamental photon and the electron, that mutually feed off each other and exhibit topological charge and relativistic mass. Each one of these "dynamic balls" with flywheel cores being related to their spatial and temporal dimensions that they seem attached intimately into and mutually deform. Space and time seem to be thoroughly "stirred up" together. Of course that description is not scientific.

Since all the old ideas about the atom and the nucleus are probably partially defunct it is a good time to just wait and see what happens now.

Cheers

Inertron wrote:Wouldn't the cores of stars be relatively non-dense since gravity cancels itself out in the center of a massive body? I think the densest part of a star would be its mantle. Probably they all have a storm, like Jupiter's, caused by a low-pressure system that forms near the core. Maybe that contributes to the energy density you are referring to?

The pressure at the center of protostars is characterized as very high.
See: http://www.astrophysicsspectator.com/to ... stars.html
According to that article:

"A protostar has a simple evolution because it has a simple internal structure. Energy is transported from the core of the protostar to the photosphere through convection....With convection tying temperature to density, the pressure within a protostar varies only with density... A star with such a simple relationship between pressure and density has a polytropic structure...The density of a polytropic star peaks at the center of the star and falls to zero at a finite radius...As a protostar radiates, it shrinks in size to generate the energy that replaces the radiated energy. This shrinkage increases the self-gravity of the protostar, which is accompanied by an increase in the pressure at the protostar's core.."

I understand the point that Inertron is making. As the physics textbooks state, if a given mass m is inside a spherically symmetric distribution of mass, that part of the mass outside its radius does not contribute to the net force on it. But the statement that the net gravitational force at or near the center of a massive body is small would not imply low density and/or low pressure and temperature at the center.

Good Elf wrote:Current experiments suggests that neutrons are something other than "pure particle". Recent experiments at the Thomas Jefferson Labs suggest that the nucleus of stable atoms have a thin veneer of "neutron" coating them. Inside that thin veneer it is probably an excess of "protonic" material.

That's interesting. How does that help explain the fact that neutrons decay into protons and electrons and the reverse?

However other separate recent discoveries at that same lab suggests that the quarks that make up the spinning core of the "fundamental particles" are spinning transversely with greater and greater speeds towards their centers which are moving at high relativistic velocities... very much like the electron as a confined photon executing a twisted ribbon path that has a great amount of internal orbital angular momentum. So the nucleus is not like a "bag of marbles" at all.

Considering that we know that light frequencies are the result of the oscillation frequencies of the electrons that emit them, doesn't it make sense that all particles would have resonation frequencies that correspond to some wavelength of light? I guess this is the idea that string theories are based on but since I haven't read much about string theories, idk.

The Lab says that if all their recent discoveries are true and confirmed then this will considerably "trash" current particle theory and something new must certainly emerge.... I "assume" something other than the Standard Model.

While it does seem logical that nothing is ultimately fixed in terms of being modelable in terms of solid matter, such as marbles, I don't think that means that everything known is wrong. Th'at's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Besides, what is really so questionable except maybe the imagery that's been assigned for visualizing the constituent phenomena? The forces and their phenomenal interactions are still all viable models for observed data, no?

Not only that... there is a CERN experiment headed by Ulrik Ingerslev Uggerhøj that is trying to determine the length of formation of particles. So in the beginning there was a very short period of darkness then there was light. Recent work at CERN (Danish offshoot) is concentrating on the length of formation of photons but it equally applies to all particles including the particles and antiparticles. See this Thesis...
Ultra-Relativistic Particles in Matter
So "confinement" is a strong influence on all emerging particles and to their formation. I would not rule any theory out. But I am a great believer in "the experiment" so until we have something to go on current theory is presently the Titanic and anyone clinging to it will go down with the ship and the rest of us are left clinging to lifeboats.

Einstein's prediction of light bending around the sun during an eclipse made for a very nice observable astronomical experiment but when you're dealing with the internal dynamics of extreme gravity interacting with nuclear force, how can you ever expect to observe it directly? At best, I think you could come up with possible observable consequences of theoretical scenarios and search for those, asking critical questions that whose answers would support or undermine your hypotheses. Is that what you mean by experimentation?

I don't feel too enthusiastic about these mechanisms being able to form lone electrons or positrons from just energy. It is still quite common for matter and antimatter to form in the Sun and also in outer space such as in the Van Allen Belt in some localized regions which are held in place by magnetic traps. But overall the production of electrons are balanced by the production of positrons and ditto for heavier particles. There have been some tantalizing instances of a difference in symmetry between matter and antimatter recently been discovered. This offers possibilities for almost anything given the "right conditions".

I would be happy to see a whole thread devoted to these various situations where matter/antimatter are thought to form and how that occurs, exactly. It's very hard for me to imagine how magnetic fields could result in particle-formation.

Of course they have been very active recently at CERN creating a Quark-Gluon "soup" which is the primordial stuff that would have emerged initially from the big bang. These experiments, though not the first time this "stuff" has been made in a Lab, are telling us something new also about Baryogenesis. "This corresponds to about 3.7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (2 trillion degrees Celsius), which is about 125,000 times hotter than the center of the sun." All these phenomena are charting the behavior of various kinds of exotic "plasmas" (photons plus charged "neo-particles" like electrons at one end of the spectrum of "stuff" all the way through to "much more heavy fractions of quarks and gluons"... and other more exotic materials) which then form quasi-particles with the embedded "common" particles eventually condensing out of the soup.

I don't understand how these processes work, much less how they work without gravitational compression of large amounts of matter. To me, it seems like there are two extreme poles on the spectrum of force and energy, 1) the extreme compression of matter by centripetal acceleration and turbulence and 2) extreme speed within vacuum space. Particle accelerators do the latter, right, so how does that simulate the former? Are they analogous in a force sense somehow, the way G-force of acceleration in a moving vehicle is analogous to gravity?

IMHO quarks seem more like mutually dependent yet inseparable "tornadoes" of rotating "fractional quanta" of energy, based on the fundamental photon and the electron, that mutually feed off each other and exhibit topological charge and relativistic mass. Each one of these "dynamic balls" with flywheel cores being related to their spatial and temporal dimensions that they seem attached intimately into and mutually deform. Space and time seem to be thoroughly "stirred up" together. Of course that description is not scientific.

Well there does seem to be something very universal about vortexes, doesn't there? Angular momentum results in Coriolis effects and self-contained lumps of fluid would tend to spin and have relative low and high pressure areas, right? So vortexes, toruses, etc. seem like they would be universal forms. If you think about it, even the seeming solidity of the rocky planets is only due to their having cooled to the point of their gravity becoming insufficient to fully mobilize their constituent particles. Stir them up enough and they would probably become toruses as well, no?

Since all the old ideas about the atom and the nucleus are probably partially defunct it is a good time to just wait and see what happens now.

What would you expect to happen exactly if everyone just sat back and waited?

Hi Inertron and Farsight,

Inertron wrote:

Good Elf wrote: Current experiments suggests that neutrons are something other than "pure particle". Recent experiments at the Thomas Jefferson Labs suggest that the nucleus of stable atoms have a thin veneer of "neutron" coating them. Inside that thin veneer it is probably an excess of "protonic" material.

That's interesting. How does that help explain the fact that neutrons decay into protons and electrons and the reverse?

A lot!... you can speculate all day long but the guys at Jefferson are still several experiments away from resolving a stable theory.

Inertron wrote:Considering that we know that light frequencies are the result of the oscillation frequencies of the electrons that emit them, doesn't it make sense that all particles would have resonation frequencies that correspond to some wavelength of light? I guess this is the idea that string theories are based on but since I haven't read much about string theories, idk.

Not strings... the scale is all wrong. Another point is the events that form particles do not occur in the wavelength that is the result of freely propagating light. In quasi-plasmas (as in matter) the wavelength of phenomena relates to quasi-particles which are "interactions" of light and charged matter (whatever that means). I point to the anomalous behavior of surface plasmon polaritons which shrink the wavelength of the light down and change the way light interacts. These phenomena are at different scales to what might be expected.

Inertron wrote:

Good Elf wrote:The Lab says that if all their recent discoveries are true and confirmed then this will considerably "trash" current particle theory and something new must certainly emerge.... I "assume" something other than the Standard Model.

While it does seem logical that nothing is ultimately fixed in terms of being modelable in terms of solid matter, such as marbles, I don't think that means that everything known is wrong. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Currently our theories are couched into that "marble" mold of "solid internally stationary particles. Nobody's said anything about throwing out babies with bathwater but the difference is treating "particles" like the "baby" or should we treating it like the "bathwater"... perhaps heading off down the drain? This current state of affairs is somewhat like Dalton's Theory of Atoms at the end of the 19th Century. And like Dalton's Theory we are still probably about that far off from a decent theory of the internal structure of the nucleus of atoms.

Inertron wrote:Besides, what is really so questionable except maybe the imagery that's been assigned for visualizing the constituent phenomena? The forces and their phenomenal interactions are still all viable models for observed data, no?

You tell me what we really know about relativistic turbidity theory of quantized superfluids? It's a much bigger "ballgame" than describing the motion of elastic billiard balls trapped inside a "spherical bag".

Einstein's prediction of light bending around the sun during an eclipse made for a very nice observable astronomical experiment but when you're dealing with the internal dynamics of extreme gravity interacting with nuclear force, how can you ever expect to observe it directly? At best, I think you could come up with possible observable consequences of theoretical scenarios and search for those, asking critical questions that whose answers would support or undermine your hypotheses. Is that what you mean by experimentation?

Sorry but you are not quite on track here. Need to read the section (Chap 9) on the King-Perkins-Chudakov (KPC) Effect or simply the Chudakov Effect. Recent experiment along these lines are already being published in PRL but look here for a short summary (too short) Going the Distance - Direct Measurement of the Formation Length of Photons - 16/Feb/2012 Physics. Unfortunately I cannot directly download the paper or a preprint of the one referred to. This seems to be a summary of the experiment for this year... Status and plans for 2012, CERN NA63 - U.I. Uggerhøj et al That seems to be the better reference and contains a log of U.I. Uggerhøj's data. I am very sorry about that first reference... too much information.

Inertron wrote:I would be happy to see a whole thread devoted to these various situations where matter/antimatter are thought to form and how that occurs, exactly. It's very hard for me to imagine how magnetic fields could result in particle-formation.

I guess under these extreme quasi-plasma conditions even some aspects of electromagnetic theory look like something else entirely. It is too much to expect that the explanation of phenomena would stay so simple as it did for so long. To get to the "next level" it is essential to understand that Bohr's version of QED is not correct when he made the suggestion that physicists should not worry themselves about the inner mechanisms of the nucleus and we can deal with everything as pure statistics. In truth we can know a lot more about the Physics and we are just beginning to get the tools to determine what these additional features are.

Inertron wrote:I don't understand how these processes work, much less how they work without gravitational compression of large amounts of matter. To me, it seems like there are two extreme poles on the spectrum of force and energy, 1) the extreme compression of matter by centripetal acceleration and turbulence and 2) extreme speed within vacuum space. Particle accelerators do the latter, right, so how does that simulate the former? Are they analogous in a force sense somehow, the way G-force of acceleration in a moving vehicle is analogous to gravity?

I do not think present day science knows swat about gravity. Gravity is the weakest force of all. Electromagnetism is 10⁴⁰ times stronger. All the other forces of nature are related to electromagnetism acting within their different realms of scale... it's seems plausible to me that Gravity is some phenomenon related to this overall electromagnetism acting in the context of the interface between matter and energy.

Inertron wrote:Well there does seem to be something very universal about vortexes, doesn't there?.....[..]......If you think about it, even the seeming solidity of the rocky planets is only due to their having cooled to the point of their gravity becoming insufficient to fully mobilize their constituent particles. Stir them up enough and they would probably become toruses as well, no?

Since matter can completely annihilate anti-matter producing just light as a product. It is clear that there is a process that may disintegrate "matter" into pure light. The cores of fundamental particles are like tiny tornadoes of bundled energy tied into a knot... in the case of a proton and neutron it is a trefoil knot-- 3₁. In the case of some mesons it is clearly two component knots (two quarks). In the case of the electron (just one entity... itself) it is a simpler knot or even an "unknot" if you call it the way the mathematicians would like it to be called. But just because these look like strings... they are not the strings of String Theory... these phenomena manifest inside of particles and even manifest with pure light or in plasmas which undergo internal Anderson Reconnections of the virtual photon fields. It is understood at one level of Quantum Electrodynamics and at another as Quantum Chromodynamics and there are other situations where matter and photons mix electro-dynamically in more complex phenomena.

All these are mathematical knots but as we know with the electron the actual "material" the knot is formed from can also be twisted even further and this causes it to behave in a way that appears anomalous to the way humans think. I am thinking about "Balinese Candle Dancing" or sometimes known as "Dirac's Party Trick". One loop with that twist and everything is in a twist while two loops in the same sense untwists the original loop. This is all about the more complex topology of light. This makes the electron have that "strange symmetry" that you need to rotate it completely twice to return it to it's original position... like the candle in Balinese Candle Dancing.
Balinese cup trick / candle trick / spinor demonstration
It is a symmetry that the fundamental particles will also have in a different form. It is easy to tie even single photons of light into knots using various forms of Optical Bessel Beams. The trick is to make this knot non-dissipative as a static quantum. This theory is not entirely there yet.

Inertron wrote:What would you expect to happen exactly if everyone just sat back and waited?

"Everyone" is not simply sitting back and waiting for something to happen. Only the "lucky ones" are allowed to "play" while the rest of us must wait and watch. I would not discourage any but it is currently a very big task and you need to be able to do all these experiments to test the theories.

Good Elf wrote:"Everyone" is not simply sitting back and waiting for something to happen. Only the "lucky ones" are allowed to "play" while the rest of us must wait and watch. I would not discourage any but it is currently a very big task and you need to be able to do all these experiments to test the theories.

Lots of food for thought on issues that are too complex to really factor into my simplistic mechanistic thinking in terms of relative force-strengths and configurations of phenomena such as electron-quantization and photon composition and behavior. As for sitting back and waiting, I'm afraid that's just too much more boring than thinking about what I know and slowly learning by studying discussions like these. Even if you don't have the means to test the theories, what's wrong with contemplating what tests you would do if you could? Maybe someone ends up telling me about an experiment I didn't know about because I brought it up in discussion. That's what happened for me when I was probing about what could possibly cause electrons to remain in a ground state instead of further collapsing into the nucleus, when Farsight directed my attention to the wiki page on electron degeneracy pressure. All these emergent issues that come up in discussion are intriguing but forgive me if I can only progress in my own thinking by slowly chewing the bites I can take and regurgitating the cud in the form of new thoughts and questions. There are some very knowledgable posters on the site so I hope I won't bore them too much with my relative naivety or otherwise offend. To all of you, I appreciate your willingness to share knowledge and reflect openly about it.