wohnzimmer farbe 2017
in 2013 the safireproject was created. the objective was to replicate the sun'satmosphere in a laboratory on earth. a lab was designed and built and at its heart was thesafire plasma engine, the only one of itskind on the planet. okay we can see you and colin and you see me in the backgroundtalking to you on the cell. today, four years later the safireteam gives a tour of the lab, via the web to a scientific review panelscattered all over north america.
two things define safire: a unique premise, and a remarkablypowerful methodology. the premise driving the project is the ideathat electricity plays an essential role in the functioning ofthe sun's atmosphere. the methodology used to buildand run the safire lab comes from the world ofengineering and manufacturing. it is a statistical procedure thatallows for incredibly precise control over the design andmanaging of experiments.
this combination ofpremise and methodology has yielded remarkable,if not startling results. in august of 2017 the safire teampresented its most recent discoveries at the electric universe conference,â€future science†in phoenix arizona you were justlistening to safire and that's just the beginning. so, safire has provenitself to be capable to contain, control and stabilize,high energy dense plasmas. and you're going tosee that tonight.
we're seeing chemistry changes; we are slowing thespeed of light down; we're seeing variations in electron density,comparable to the photosphere-heliosphere; and nuclear bombs. electrical confinementof high-energy photons. these are just someof the things, and all of these things here, are dueto charged plasma affecting matter of a differentelectrical potential. so, this time i want totake the opportunity,
which is usually saved until the end ofthe presentation, because time is short, to thank the othervery key members who are contributing so muchthe success of this endeavor. so, first of all i like to thankscott and bruce mainwaring for their ongoing and unwaveringfinancial and moral support. dr. james ryder for your insight, for an earto hear, and with help herding the cats; and dr. lowell morgan foryour amazing knowledge and insight into thecomplexities of plasma physics. wal thornhill for your work in theelectric universe model in cosmology,
and dr. donald scott for your work in developinga more mature model of the electric sun. jan onderco for your hardwork in data acquisition. leighton mcmillanfor your hard work and the assistance in buildingsafire in such a short time. jason lickver for your work inmechanical engineering and telemetry. i'd like to thankyou susan schirott for your untiring help in administration,finance and legal matters, helping to make this projectgo so much smoother. tracey childs for yourongoing financial work
and for always being anawesome woman in my life. ben ged low for your work on the teamand pulling this presentation together. and none of this would have startedwithout you david talbott, making that providential call topersuade me to take on this project. so now i would like tointroduce part of our team who are joining me tonight to assistin presenting our discoveries. please welcome dr. michaelclarage and dr. paul anderson research objectives: there's a lot of detail to it butfundamentally safire stands for:
stellar atmosphericfunction in regulation; the objective soundsway out, there but basically the contract says we’re to do everything we canto recreate a “star in a jar†and test the electric universeand test the electric sun model. so, the technology we're going to usein safire or have been using in safire: we have floating potential,plasma potential, plasma density, ion current density, electronenergy distribution, electron temperature,mass spectroscopy,
optical spectroscopy,thermal measurements, infrared thermography, radiofrequency measurements, electromagnetic measurements,scanning electron microscopy, optical microscopy,voltage across the plasma, current across the plasma,voltage feeding the plasma current feeding the plasma, and videocapture of the plasma phenomena. and we're going to discuss each oneof these with you in detail tonight; just kidding. what we will show you however,is how we use this technology
to reveal some of the most startlingdiscoveries we made this year instead. now, michael you're up. - i'm up;- let's get started. optical spectroscopy.so, jim ryder said everything we know is from light i'll think about that but almost everything we know aboutthe sun is definitely from light. and optical spectroscopy is areally good friend, as a scientist. every element emits verycharacteristic frequencies;
a lot, you could imagine, like everyspecies of bird has its own song, and you would never confuse achickadee with a seagull, right? so, if you study theseelements spectrographically, each one is quite unique, and we can learn a lot aboutwhat's going on for those atoms, by things like the relativeheights of those spectral lines; the widths of those spectral lines;the shape of those spectral lines. here's three different dischargeregimes in our plasma. on the left, you can see there'sthe center anode, very bright
and then aroundit is halo, okay. those are double layersin a halo around that. in the middle panel you can see thatthe double layer is gone, right? just the center anode is thereand on the right-hand panel we basically just crankedall the dials up to 11 and that got a superhigh-powered discharge. you can see there, that's ourspectrographic probe tip it's a fiber optic that we can movearound anywhere we want in the chamber, to study what's going on.
and so right there, that fiber-optic tipis looking right into the double layer. okay it's not looking at the anode,it's looking at the double layer. the next one thedouble layer is gone so the probe tip is just lookingat the general plasma discharge. and then the last onewe moved the probe, but it's looking at this superhigh power discharge. so, we'll just look atone spectrographic line. this is like one note. one note being emittedby the hydrogen, okay.
it's the 656 nanometer line, one of the most famous spectrographiclines in the universe. and we can measurethe width of that, and inside the double layer we seethe width is 0.12 nanometers, okay? that's pretty tiny; these arepretty good instruments we have. we boosted the resolution spectrographicallyby about a factor of 4 or 5, just recently. so we're getting...it's good right? that's pretty good resolution. then the double layer goes away.
the width of that line, sameline, hydrogen emission, the width goes downto 0.07 nanometers and then for the third one, the super-highpower one, it jumps back up to 0.09. this made us super excited to beable to see this and measure this. because one of the reasons theselines can change their shape like this, and get broader and more narrow,is the number of free electrons running around in the plasma and if there's a lot of freeelectrons running around the plasma, you can kind of picture that they'recrashing into hydrogen atoms,
and causing extra wobbles on topof the note that's being emitted, that tends to broadenthe line more, okay. that may seem like a small change, youknow, 0.05 nanometers from 0.12 to 0.07, but that represents like 50 to 100 timeschange in the free electron density. so double layers havewithin them about 100 times more free electrons runningaround than not, okay. this is super excitingthat we can measure this. if you just stick in a probe into oneplace, and you get one measurement, you're not necessarily so sure you canguarantee what you're looking at.
but if you can measurechanges like this, then you have much moreconfidence as a scientist, that you're actually observingsomething that you can talk about. and where do we seecomparable changes, you know, in free electron density? well, we see those changes going fromthe photosphere to the chromosphere, from the chromosphere to the coronaout at the end of the heliopause. so, we're actually gettinginto the realm where we have changing conditions in our chamber,and the ability to measure them,
that are also goingon in our star. that summarizes that. yeah, it’s too early to stop. do you think it's too early?i think it's too early to stop. i think they're justabsorbing right now. so we'll just take abreath and keep going? sure you can take abreath, i'll keep going. okay. it’s not always thismuch fun in the lab.
some more yelling and screaminggoing on, things like this. so, the next section is where we getinto the fun part: statistics, okay. but it's really,really important, because design of experiments(doe), actually is the mainstay. it's the foundation of thework that we're doing, because in science today there's alot of stuff that's in question, and we're not going to be subjectto those kinds of questions. so we impose what's calleddesign of experiments and dr. paul anderson is going to take youthrough what we've been doing with safire
and i think you're going to be amazedabout some of the findings with them, all right. thank you, monty. so just as monty said, we want to investigate some basic plasmaphysics that is occurring in our chamber. the first thing we did,was in looking at our chamber, was that we wanted totame the plasma, okay. and i'm going to show you first a videohere, of the plasma as we know it now. we can move the cathodes as you cansee, we can stabilize double layers, we can change the double layersas a function of distance.
at the same time we can also change gasconcentration and type of gas in there. it wasn't always that pretty; some of our initial plasmas werepretty dirty, very unstable. if you look at a lot of old plasma literaturebefore they even named it a plasma, they commented on how difficult it was tocontain this energy, and understand it. so, these are some ofour initial discharges. lots of impurities on some of thematerials that we use for the anode; striking different discharges; a lot of instabilitiesin the plasma.
and what we wanted, we eventuallywanted it to look like this. right? this is a very simple plasma, which entails a simple anode onthe left, and a cathode on right, and this isbasically a 1d plasma where you're striking a dischargebetween these two electrodes. you can adjust the gas pressure,the gas type in this, as well as thevoltage in this system. fairly straightforward. this is a top view of safire;
it's not as straightforwardas the plasma tube. this is looking down on safirefrom monty's model here, and as monty listed previously,all the instruments that we have, we have them therefor a reason, and every single run we use all thecontrol instrumentation for the chamber as well as driving all thedetection that monty mentioned. so there's a numberof detectors on here as well as the fundamentalcontrol of the chamber. so, through a lot of dataacquisition and controlling,
we're able to now control that plasmachamber and carry out experiments. so, one of the first things we hadto confront is how to drive it and understanding the gas input like thisis just one aspect of the gas input here. this is the gas andvacuum control system. we also had tounderstand our sops, to implement safety procedureswhen you're working with 2,000 liters of hydrogen athigh temperature, right? so, we had a numberof things to control, in addition to wantingto control the plasma.
so, we looked in a literature and wetalked about it and we said okay, well learning to drive this, let'sconcentrate on plasma experiments that are well documented and that'swhy we came up with paschen’s law. we decided to choosepaschen’s law to understand the plasma ignition inthe safire apparatus. so, paschen’s law describes a point of currentflow at a particular electric potential through an ionizable gas, or gasbetween two electrodes, okay. so, fundamentally we have twoelectrodes, positive and negative; you have a gas, you have acertain pressure of that gas,
usually conducted under vacuum, and you have a distance between thoseelectrodes and you strike a voltage and there's no current flow initially,until you get to a certain point where that voltage can overcomeionized gas and conduct a current. now, when that occurs,(there) is a certain voltage. okay, so we decidedto do that in safire. so, this is a classicpaschen curve in hydrogen. the other gases also have othercurves that are very similar. they exhibit the same minimum;
so if you notice here in thegraph, or x-axis here, being a term of pd,pressure and distance. notice it's in alogarithmic scale. so, it's a reduced variable, you haveboth pressure and distance in one axis. in our y-axis, we have our voltagethat we strike to obtain a discharge. so, if you go ahead and do a bunch of plots atdifferent pressures at different distances, you'll end up falling on a curvelike this for your electrodes. so, what we did in safire we wentahead and did a safire apparatus with a spherical anode and our two cathodesat various distances, equidistant.
as much as we wanted to vary bothof them, we kept them constant. and we discovered already safireis acting very differently than a typical plasmadischarge apparatus. we had to use a modified version ofpaschen's curve which you see there, of the law, and we also found that the gammaterm which is in that lower denominator, in the denominator, that didadjust with different distances, and so that's somethingnew that we're exploring, and we hope to get apublication out of this. so you'll notice thatalready we have a departure
from regular plasma physics in aregular anode-cathode discharge; say a discharge tube. another reason why we did thisis, okay we ignited the plasma, but what is themorphology of the plasma, what does it look like atthese various settings? so it's kind of an experiment withkilling two birds with one stone, in that we determine theignition characteristics, which we needed tocontrol the plasma, and we also explored themorphology of the plasma.
so, that was a very powerfulthing: we were able to pursue some various regimes and thenestablish our design of experiments. so, we discovered thatthe configuration is a significant departurefrom typical plasma apparatus, that you may have from itstypical anode and cathode. so then we went into thedesign of experiments. we decided on where we're going to look,what kind of plasma regimes we want, because ultimately we want to dialin stability for experiments. there's no use in doingexperiments for double layers
if they appear for onemicrosecond and then go away. we wanted them nice and stable. now to obtain stabilityin any system, whether it's in safire or whetherit's in your kitchen, baking bread we, need reproducible results. but that only comes fromunderstanding your factors; factor is anotherword for variable. so, to understand those factors andvariables, you need more experiments, right? traditionally this is calledthe edisonian approach:
you have more factors, you do moreexperiments, you get more data. the problem with that is, that justbecause you do more experiments, you might not beincreasing the resolution. in other words, thesignal-to-noise. the signal-to-noise thatyou're looking for; you need to increase thatsignal from the noise, so you get reproducible results,and you know you're stable. and what design of experimentsdoes, it's a methodology. it increases the resolution,
but also it decreases the numberof experiments you have to do. so, i urge many of you who areexperimentalists, or who are curious, to look up design of experimentsand to learn the techniques. because it is extremely valuablein both saving time and resources and it greatly increasesyour resolution. now, again i won'tgo into why that is. i discuss a little bit of it in my pastpresentation and you can read about it online, but basically what you're doingis, you're conducting experiments where you're making sureyour points are orthogonal.
so, in other words two factorsare always opposite each other; you're making things symmetricin your design space. just an example of whatthat does for you: on the on the right column here,you can see the efficiency. that's a measure of theexperimental variance. you can actually calculate thevariance in your experiment, prior to even doingexperiments with your design. now ofat is stands for onefactor at a time. that's how traditionalexperimentation is done;
that's how the edisonianapproach is done. and so, you can see here, it's comparisonbetween a traditional number of runs, where you're kind of a shotgunapproach to experimentation, and what's called afull factorial doe. there are many types of doe’s out there, butthis is just the most basic taught doe. you can see that just withthree factors, right? say pressure, type of gas, anddistance of the cathodes, right? that's three factors, threevariables with the number of runs forofat you need 16 runs,
that gives you a certain experimentalvariance, or efficiency, of 2. but you're half that number ofruns with your full factorial doe. and as you get upwards, now you say, wow128 runs, that's still a lot of runs. but as i said, there are other doe formulationsthat you can pursue to help with this, to help decrease that number more and stillmaintain that experimental efficiency, without having todo 512 experiments. so, in a nutshell that'sreally what doe is. we explored this first in phase1; this is our phase 1 setup. very simple; we had an anode in abell jar surrounded by a cathode;
we had a voltmeter did add some otherinstrumentation crammed in there. but for the purposes of this,this was a just a snapshot of one of the bell jarexperiments with a small anode. and really what we determinedthrough design of experiments is these various regimes thatthe plasma goes through. so, we were already kind of dialing inthe anode, even in a small bell jar, so logic would assume we could dothat when we scale up as well. and actually it does, whenyou use the right approach, when you use designsof experiments.
so, we're really happywith our various regimes. this is a snapshot of, i would say,the main regimes we work with. that's not to say that therearen't others in between there. so, i'll just go through here alittle bit and show you close up. i call this a darkquiescent phase; this is right on the edge, very smallchanges here, this is not stable. very small changes in either voltage orcurrent, can lead to this extinguishing. but there is still a plasma layeraround the edge of the anode. now as we increase our current,we obtain what we call â€tuftsâ€
these are anode tufts. these have beenexperimentally seen before, but we can now control them,we can control the number, the concentration in a square area, andthey're always equidistant from each other. as you increase the energy, and as youincrease the current in the system, they start to grow in sizeand also squeeze together, until you reach a point wherethey actually start to coalesce. and this is what we referto as moving tufts. this can also be adjusted interms of pressure and current.
so, as these things start tomove, they actually spin more, and eventually what comes intobeing is this double layer phase, multiple double layers, that are controlledby current and gas pressure. so this was probably the mostdouble layers we obtained, i would say, with athree inch anode. this is a 3-inch anode. this is a 3-inch anode so those tufts, ithink we reached up to about 7 or 8 tufts at least in the design ofexperiments that we got. monty: “yeah they're bigâ€,
and they're stable and also we havequiescent phase: this looks familiar, doesn't it? we even got some holes in that, arising from something,we don't know. and that layer isfairly significant. it stands off thesurface of the anode, and we also have these asymmetricdouble layers that occur over time. time is also a factor, but weweren't able to quantify it yet
because what happens overtime, is your anode heats up. thermionic emission happens,it changes the properties so that's the one factor that wehave to dial in a little bit more. as we don't understand the effectof time on this anode yet, but we know it affects it. and also the zeppelin high-intensity,kind of let it loose phase. so, those are stableregimes, all right, so to dial in the plasma, also wewant to work with different anodes, different size anodes.
the top is a 1.5 cm [errata: inches, see 26:16]anode, the bottom is a 3-inch anode. you'll notice that we'reobtaining the same regimes; a little bit different shapes, but for themost part we're getting the same numbers, and at proportionallythe same current. and what do i meanby proportionately? well, when you're impinging a 1.5-inchanode compared to a 3-inch anode, the current density is alot higher on that, right? so, we had to adjust our current densityproperly to obtain the same response. so, that's what we did in this experiment,and these are just some numbers.
if you want to havefun with the numbers, we're calculating that we're gettingabout 85 w/cm2 in the top discharge, but you can see in the bottomone, where we throw in 22 amps, we're getting a little bit lesswattage there with the calculation, but within erroryou're almost there. so we're tracking very well with scalabilityof the plasma between different sizes and as you can see, thecurrent is the main driver, that's what has to be adjusted. now you say here, i may sayindications of a transformer.
well that's only in a way. that's why we have it in quotes right?transformer. so, as double layers form, plasma resistance decreases andcurrent flow is less impeded. michael alluded to that earlier: electrons are more intense or moreconcentrated in these double layers. why is that? we want to study some more. but now is where we getinto our statistics.
what you see on the graph isan actual by predicted plot. this is what comes out ofdesign of experiments, okay? it may just look like a straight lineto you, but this is very powerful, because what it enables you todo is to predict things, okay? so, the top graph here has, as you can see on the y-axisor the vertical axis (thank you), on a vertical axis youhave voltage actuals. so that's the voltagewe actually measure
and what do you see here? voltage predicted. so, when you read papersscientific papers, or any kind of reports that have predictionvalues, that's what they're referring to. they're building a model and they're seeinghow well the model can predict the voltage, or whatever responsethey're studying. so, we can look here that the equationof the line is pretty darn good, considering the fact that we'reworking with a plasma, okay? it's r-squarevalue is about 0.92.
you look at the error, it's only plusor minus 10 volts in that prediction. we had a number of responses,or a number of observations in this set of experiments,31 experiments. so, we have sufficientdegrees of freedom, when we're only looking atthree or four factors, to determine which ofthe factors do what. we want to know, is pressurea factor, is the number of double layersa factor, current, right? and that's what this is, so youcan see here the green circle.
the parameter estimates are whatyou'd back out of statistics. that tells you the mostimportant factor in your model, and what is this telling us? it’s telling us the pressure isactually a pretty darn important thing in this design of experiments. so, your pressure is leading thosesignificant changes in your voltage. kind ofmakes sense, right? followed by your numberof double layers. now double layers, and we'restruggling with this right now,
double layers can either be a responseor it can also affect the system. just like v = ir, the typicalohm's law v = ir what is your response andwhat is your factor? it depends on how you setup your measurements, and it depends on whatyou're measuring. so, our current though, is also animportant factor, as you can see there: parameter estimate of about 10, but you see these otherthings down here. the pressure is multiplied bythe number of double layers
and the number of double layersis multiplied by current. these are what's known as second-order interactions,higher-order interactions right here. and what that means is thatthey also have an effect and they're needed toexplain the model. they're significant enough tobe needed to explain the model. actually i left this last one inhere; you see that 0.14 p value p-value is a measureof statistic. that one is below 0.05, that means that that parameter issignificant, it's real in a model.
you should definitely include it so that one's 0.15-ish and sothat's not a significant factor. i just left that in there,just so you could see, but all the other ones aresignificant, they're below 0.05. so, pressure exerts the largesteffect, followed by double layers and the second-order interactionsdecrease that voltage response. again, what happens, whatcan we do now with that? that's just a bunch of numbers. how do we visualize whathappens in a dynamic system?
and that's where modern softwareand modern computers come in, because they enable us to dothese designs of experiments. so, as we create double layers,what you see here on this graph, you have three factors which areyour x-axis which you can vary now. we have a model that'sabout 92% accurate, and we also have a voltage, ourpredictive voltage in our system. so as we change these factors we canobserve what happens through the voltage, so if you keep your eyes onthe number of double layers i'm going to increase thenumber of double layers here.
now what happens tothe other curves? there's slope changes right? i'm going back and forth here. so, if the slope changes, that meansthat there's a second-order interaction. there's a higher-order interactionbetween all these factors. what it also means is that this modelsays, that if we change our current, or our pressure,does the voltage change? no, it doesn't accordingto the model. now one statistician said
“all models are wrong,but some are usefulâ€. so, that's wherewe're at right now. but you can also seesomething else. you can see the unfortunatearea here that says, hey you've got to do moreexperiments there. that's a confidence interval, it doesn't have enough data to giveyou a smaller confidence interval. so this curve could actuallycome down a little bit as long as it’s withinthe confidence interval.
but that's the power ofdesign of experiments: you wouldn't be ableto plot this out if you were to do one factor ata time in a shotgun approach. so again, i changedanother factor here. i decrease the current so you can seethe spread in the confidence interval across all these guys here. so we have a littlebit more work to do. that's the end of a kind of plasma,physics, stability and spectroscopy. i don't know; you feellike keep it going,
or you want a question andanswer session for a little bit? okay, let's move on. monty: let's move on, well, predictions in thermodynamics,like paul was saying, what did you say about models? all models are wrong,some are useful. yeah, all models arewrong, some are useful. i stood up here two yearsago, we spent a lot of money developing and designing safire,
predicting the kind of thermalresponses we get out of this. because we knew we had a lotof energy, of 180 kilowatts. that’s what the design waspredicting at the time, and the thermodynamics model is basedon what's called total heat flux. you heat up the core, okay? and i'll show you apicture of that. well the thermal responseis 120 degrees celsius, but basically weheat up the core and we put an certain amount ofenergy in there that heats up the gas
and other things are starting torespond, but the final response, based on the design, is a 110degree chamber temperature, and the temperature in andaround the core here... i think i can do this, there it is..... would be about 2500degrees celsius. and this also is telling youhow fast the gas is moving. it's moving quite slowly, andthat's what we were predicting. now the people who are working on this,would be guys like dr. lowell morgan,
tommy mello who actuallydevelops the coding for what's calledcomputational fluid dynamics. this is really high-end stuff,it's stuff that we use to develop to do analysis on, rocket engines andjet engines, and so many other things. and we're very goodat what we do. this is how we kindof make a living. however you're going to find outthat our predictions were wrong. so, we did another model and this here,what you're going to look at here, right in this area here,
this is our analysis ofputting in one of our probes and see what the kind ofthermal response that we get, and what the model is telling us is thatthe temperatures of the gas, just off and around thesurface of the anode, should be around 2,300 to2,500 degrees celsius: well within the constraints or you mightsay the operating limits of tungsten, which is what the tips are madeof, our langmuir probe tips. but what really happened, andyou want to watch this video. show you here, what you'relooking at here is the probe tip
and we're going to play this videoand this is a very low-power plasma [laughter] so, where you say,“now you see it, and now you don't.†langmuir probes are about8,000 bucks a pop, and i had to make a telephonecall because we pull it out. before i get into that, i just want to letyou know the actual power at that time was 182 watts, that's a 182watt light bulb imagine, okay? and we're going like,what is going on.
so when we opened up safire,we discovered what was left, and this is what the tip lookedlike after it vaporized. this is just the residual tungsten yousee here, on that kind of nodule. that's what was left of it, and everyonewho knows anything about tungsten, it takes about6,600⺠c to boil it. to vaporize it, youneed more energy, and in thermodynamics, someof you probably already know, there's a time domainassociated with it. how much heat is lostin the system as well.
so, it's not just 6,600 degrees; if you're gonnavaporize it that quick, it would typically point to temperaturesthat are much higher than that, not the 2,300 degreeswe predicted, because you know the tungstenshould have heated up, might have started glowing a littlebit, but it should have lived in there. well, obviously it didn't, and this is what a tip looks likeat the top, before and after. now, the white stuff is alumina
and its melting temperatureis about 3,600 degrees celsius. so, i made a call. actually, i should back up a little bithere because i got a story to tell you. i called a company,a great company. i'm not going tomention who it is. we had gone into greatdetail with them, as to what kind of processwe were going to get. and they said, “we havethe probe for you.†and so we bought two of theprobes and we put the one in
and i showed him, he talked to meand i said, “this is what happened†we showed them what was left of theprobe tip and he came back and said, “your plasma is too hotâ€. i said, â€really, you thinkâ€? i said, â€you guys knew andunderstood the plasma we have, and we went over thiswith you guys in detail†and i'm thinking, “what ami going to tell scott?†then these guys say, “let me knowwhen you like to buy a new oneâ€. so, i called scottand i told him,
â€we just vaporized a langmuir probeand we did it with only 182 watts, and we don't understand what's going onin safire; it shouldn't have done this.†and scott says, â€wow, youknow what that means?†i’m thinking, ijust lost my job. â€yeah it means that ourthermodynamic modeling is wrong.†i'm thinking “i'mout of my jobâ€, and he says,“well, yes, maybe, but what's amazing, it means that you have alot of energy impinging on the probe tip. you might have an effectiveway of boiling waterâ€
and the he said, in hisdeep voice “do it againâ€. i'm going nuts: the (probe) guyjust said, my plasma is too hot. the boss is saying, do it again and i'm thinking i'm gonna have tospend another $8,000 on probes. these things like eight thousand, isaid eight thousand bucks a pop, we got to get controlover this thing. because otherwise you know we're goingto burn through money pretty quick, so we decide to make a new one. bigger, stronger.
i'll put higher pressure nitrogeninto the core and cool the core and make all of it ceramic towithstand the temperatures. that's going to work, so that's it. that's the new and improved langmuirprobe, much bigger, thicker tip we figured that, since theplasma is so intense, we don't have to worryabout the small wire. we'll put something in thickerand even get some measurements. what really happened... again.
so, i'm going toplay a video here, and this is where we got some seriousquestions and lowell got involved. just watch what happens here: this is a macro lens. everything looks wonderfuland good; we're happy. adiã³s! yes, that’s what we said. well, we’ve lived so far; that'sgood, let's just keep it going.... the motion i can see in the probe, isfrom the forces that are in the plasma
and then it really didsome amazing stuff. so, we were happy,it actually survived but the thermionic emissionswhich we're going to get into, that's what you callthermionic emission. that's not, you might say, the plasma;the plasma has gone out by now, so this is just a radiation. this is like when you lighta tungsten light bulb. this is what you get, so theradiation here just grows immensely. we don't know right nowwhy the color changes,
we know that we're obviouslygetting other emissions in here, probably from the tungsten, and thisis happening in like nanoseconds. so we go from this beautifulviolet color to these colors; we don't know what this stuff isthat's flying around in there. we think it could be copperand/or iron or whatever. we were able to capturesome of these images, but we would have to say that theatmosphere in safire is somewhat hostile. what was interesting is thecrater on the side of the anode. so, we decided, well you know what,let's take a closer look at this thing,
because we were still getting informationback from the tip, which is good news and so this is what tungsten looks likeafter it's been machined with diamonds. it has a kind of a sinteredlook to it, a powdery look, and this is what the tip looked likeafter we pulled it out of the chamber. so, we're seeing some cracking within thealumina a little bit; we weren't too concerned. the bright blue color waskind of interesting, but we had a closerlook at the tip, and we were seeing the grindingmarks from the diamond wheel. we didn't see any physicaldeterioration of the tip,
and that was justgreat news for us. and we thought, okay we've got somethingthat looks like it's going to survive; and we took a look at the alumina andit looks like it will start to melt, so we knew that the temperature was around3,600 degrees, maybe a little hotter, but still in good shape. and then what i did, is i just took my pliers andwe changed the probe up; we just retained and i put mypliers and pull it out, and it crumbled. if you know anything about tungstenit doesn't normally just crumble
and i thought well we you knowwe've got a bit of a problem here so i put it underthe microscope. i looked at it and i said thatdoesn't look like tungsten; comparatively to the two, there'sbeen a huge change in its structure, but not on the outside. the surface on the outside justlooked like it was when we put it in. so, we started takinga closer look at this and it was like, what isall this white stuff. and you can see the fracture in thetungsten is very sharp; it's very clean;
it's not like we've bent itor anything, it just broke. so, we decided and thisone paul got involved; he says, listen i know some guyson the university of toronto; let's get this thing and get somescanning electron microscopy done. so, we did and i'm going overthe material in the tungsten. if you know anything about materials,what you're looking at here, well the black stuff,could be contamination, but the kind of geometricalshapes that you see there, above that other stuff thatlooks like shale, is tungsten.
it looks like it wasgetting melted. that shale isn't howit normally looks, but this is on theinside of the tip. on the outside of the tip itwasn't being affected at all. not at all. when we did the scanning, when we did thesem, it was coming back it was tungsten. the molecular structure, the crystallinestructure, looked just like it should. we looked inside and this is whatwe found, and we found a lot more. so, we took a look at the anode,
that big crater thatwas left on the side. there's some interesting stuff. it was kind of like, okay there's an intenseplasma discharge kind of steel material. so, we thought okay,this is kind of like, you know, it'sreally cool artwork. we didn't see anything that waskind of, you know, too outrageous. we saw this area here and i thought,well let's take a closer look. i don't know why, ijust picked a spot, and i thought what theheck is that nodule
at center of the top of thatmountain that's in the crater here? and this is what the scanningelectron microscopy showed up. now, if you know anything about this,when you have really bright spots in sem, it usually means you have really heavymaterials in there, heavy elements, and they start to emit. so, now i'm going tohead back to paul, and he's going to go through semand tell you what we found. thank you, monty. so, scanningelectron microscopy.
there's also an additionaltechnique on here: energy dispersive spectroscopy and what i'll do is i'llshow you a quick slide on where that energy dispersivespectroscopy comes in. i should have had a slide on thescanning electron microscope as well, but if you picture just a regularoptical microscope that you can find. you look through the top and itgoes through a series of lenses; the light comes up from the bottom,through your sample and you can see it. and really the way sem works, is that youreplace your eye with an electron source,
an electron gun that gets shotthrough a series of magnetic lenses, which then hits your sample, which ismounted and again this happens in a vacuum, and then a detectoris off to the side to detect the electrons ibounce off your sample. so, not only do you get a secondary electronimage if you will, an emitted image, but you also get other stuffcoming off of that as well. so, if you have the right detectorsin your electron microscope, you can detect other things. and in this case, energydispersive microscopy,
is where the beamhits the material and more of the inner coreelectrons get excited, and then relax backand emit the x-rays. so, you see these characteristic x-rays,it’s just a depiction of an atom, that electron gets excited, getsbumped off and then relaxes down and emits thatcharacteristic x-ray. so, each elementhas a fingerprint, much like spectroscopy thatmichael was speaking about. it's another techniqueto look at elemental
quantities in materialsin an electron microscope. so, clean iron: this isjust the iron anode. we're going to look at both the ironanode, as well as the tungsten tip here. so, what do you getfrom clean iron? you get a slide here;this is the probe tip. you can adjust that to be a line graph, oran area; you can integrate over an area. in this case, we were just looking to seewhat was there, so we did the probe tip. and you can see thatthe composition, the oxygen comes from surfaceoxygen absorbed on it.
you have your siliconand manganese as well, which are impurities in youriron, but mostly iron. you can see there:almost 98% iron. and you get that from thesecharacteristic x-ray energies. these energies are inkilo electron volts, and again each atom, each element has acharacteristic series of frequencies that it will emit at certainelectron impingement energy levels. so, another clean iron spectrum. we did a series of these, just to look,kind of get a feel for the average here.
in this case, there's a lot of oxygen onthis one, which is not too surprising. sometimes you getlots of oxygen. so, going back to monty'soriginal optical spectroscope: here you can see this nodule; and the secondary electron imagehere, you can see this lighting up. it can either beheavier, it can also be something that doesn'tconduct electrons very well; so it brightens a lot. it can emit electrons;it charges.
so what monty did actually, montydid all this microscopy here. he put the probe actuallyon that nodule first. and what did we see? we see some of these other elements here,namely aluminum and oxygen, a lot more oxygen, so that's kind of in linewith aluminum oxide. it could be somethingfrom the probe. it could be something, some dust particlefrom the probe that's embedded in there. but there's also theseother amounts in there. we saw manganese before.
there’s titanium,there's also cerium. cerium might be an impurityfrom that probe housing. but then, when you increaseyour magnification and you go look at the morphologyof the crater around this material, it gets a little bit unusual,in that we are finding barium, significant amounts of barium. we also saw the othermaterials as well, that you would associate withthe alumina from the probe tip, but it's also dispersedin that crater.
but, nonetheless a lot of elementsthere that weren't originally there. now, in the same way we canlook at the tungsten probe tip and we look at theclean probe tip: the aluminum, the silicon,probably from the housing, right? it’s got alumina aroundthe actual metal. we also detect sodiumand potassium. i put in a question mark, becausethat could come from contamination; it could come from whateverthe preparation was. and then we have ytterbium (yb).
that was also a shoulderpeak on a few of these. so, it might be peak overlap, or it couldbe real; we need higher resolution. then we start to see some otherelements here, such as cobalt, tin. copper is probably from the cathode, butthis is the inside of the tungsten probe. so, it could be contamination, or itcould be there from other mechanisms. we don't know, we gotto do more experiments. electron microscopyis very selective: i spent many years doingelectron microscopy and you can find anything you want in yoursample, to make your professors happy.
not that i did that, buti was very careful, because that's exactlywhat they taught me. they taught me, listen you don't just takea few pictures, you got to take a lot. you got to go through it, so that you'rerepresenting your sample honestly. and that's somethingthat we did: we looked at alot of parts of this. we still need todo more experiments; one set of experimentsis never enough, especially when you'redoing elemental analysis.
so, obviously, we needsome more verification and we got to think of where theseimpurities could come from. but looking backat this micrograph you see that this areahere is sintered. and as a reminder,like monty said, the melting point oftungsten is around 3,600⺠c - well, melting really. boiling is 6,600 right, yeah. now, our anode wasonly at 1,000 c.
so, we have some temperaturedisparities here. we also have sinteringof the material; we have stress fractureshere, along the grain boundaries and we have this weird sintered kind ofexplosion from the inside of the matrix. so, again: impurities maybe? calcium, aluminum could arisefrom alumina materials. as far as we know there is no barium,cerium, titanium in the chamber. you look at all thematerials that go in; the next step is looking at theprocessing of the materials we use.
maybe there are impurities in theprocessing of materials that we use. highly likely not, because a lotof these materials are very pure. so we know what’s in the chamber,we know there are impurities. what we see in this analysis, we seesomething that is not accounted for. now i'll go out on a limb here, imean there's a lot of data out there, and take it for face value in the lowenergy nuclear reaction (lenr) community that has done a number ofstudies on transmutation. a lot of the craters that they observe andthat they see transmutation occurring in, have the same kindof characteristics.
they actually come out fromthe lattice of the material. now they work a lot with palladiumand platinum and noble metals that are highlyloaded with hydrogen. so, they load thesethings up with hydrogen and then they observe these reactions thatoccur over time, and they're very minute. very small changes in the overallconcentration of materials. nonetheless they are real, becausethey can pinpoint these craters, they can analyze the materials they’re in,and they see these changes happening. so, these are just a few selectpapers, recent ones that came out
with some transmutation reports. commercial enterprises haverepeated this as well. mitsubishi, and recently toyotareplicated mitsubishi studies here with some oftheir r&d investment, seeing that there's transmutationin certain complexes. so, validation of results. as i said, one dataset isn't enough, especially when you're dealingwith certain kinds of reactions. at the university of torontoi am going to follow up,
using laser ablation-inductivelycoupled mass spectrometry. so, that's pretty much the sem. but now instead of just doing a probe andlooking at the x-ray energies coming off you're actually going to laserablate, or laser vaporize materials that are in certain areasthat you highlight, that is then analyzed with a mass spectrometer,a very accurate mass spectrometer. so, this is a technique that the toyotafolks used to validate mitsubishi's results and will hopefully eventually return,and do augmented studies on, not only the anode but possiblyother parts of the reactor.
we're about to pausenow again, if we want. yeah, go ahead, yeah, sure, you need the microphone,you need the microphone. “we know that in the sun will happen,in the nuclear reaction that happen is, hydrogen the mainfuel in the top, and reach a million degreesin the solar corona. so, what do you aim, what temperature do you aimto reach in the container. what kind of container?
is it going to be amagnetic container, like the one that they use,or are trying to use now? we were actually going totalk about that, because the temperatures that we're seeingright now, there are two responses. and why i was talking aboutthe thermodynamics, is because right now, standardthermodynamics cannot answer for why we'regetting some of these, for what you would see, for whatwe call, “thermal responsesâ€. so, think of yourmicrowave at home.
in fact, the energy you are putting in thereisn’t thermal, like a convection oven, but you can still heat upmaterials that are in there. so, the kind of energies thatwe're going to be getting into, we're going to be talkingabout this very shortly, would be analogous tothat kind of thing. so temperature,... ... that's a whole discussion andwe can get into what temperature is in the context of plasma physics,which isn't, you might say, standard, thermal or black body radiationkind of responses that you got.
so, the temperatures thatwe're seeing here, would be looks like (they are) orders ofmagnitude beyond what we predicted, in layman's terms. but in real terms it's not a thermaltemperature in that context. we're going to begetting into this. okay, another question? well presumably, you were going to useyour probe to test different things, but then your probegot destroyed.
does that mean you'vebeen kind of sidetracked into to figuring out what'sgoing on to the probe, before you get on to what you'regoing to use the probe for? well, obviously, you haveto look at the failure mode to determine what it is you'regoing to be doing next. and we're already lookingat that, so we take a look at the actual time componentthat it took in order for this to happen. so, the amount of time it took forthe probe to see this much damage, is about 15-20 seconds,
which if anybody who knows anythingabout tig (tungsten inert gas) welding, that's not a very long time, because normally some of the arcsthat you get in tig welders, and this is type oftungsten we're using, you could weld for half anhour, or maybe even an hour, before you have to takethe tip out and grind it. but we weren't seeing anydeterioration on the tip. this is internal. we got big questions here; thisshouldn't be happening in that context.
so, those temperatures, insome of the tig welding, the arc itself canreach 19,000 degrees. so, [we could be seeing], the responses thatwe're getting here are an indication of much higher temperatures. so now, what does that mean? well, we did get the tipand in we did get it out. and it was in one piece, andwe were still getting data. so, what we have to do now, is comeup with a way to get a controller that, as we move it down through thosedouble layers, and back out again,
we can collect the data and bias the probequickly, we are talking milliseconds, and grab that data and get the heckout of dodge before she gets smoked. okay, that's what we have to do,and that's not going to be easy, because you get into floating potentials,and other types of technologies, which to do that, there’sgoing to be some challenges. one more? yeah, okay maybe one more. it might be a quick question,may not be long one. it's really quick.
as a control, did you lookat the probe by sem before? i know you looked after,but did you look before? yeah, we have one shot ofthe probe tip in there; the standard tungsten,like i showed. no, i see tungsten; we didn't show thegraph, but we did do it. yeah, we use different typesof tungsten you can get, with thorium and a bunch of othertypes of elements that are in there. though this was justa pure tungsten tip.
so, i mean 99.5%or 99.9% tungsten. so, now we're going to get into themeasurement of the plasma and double layers. data that we were able to getfrom the probes once we got them to a place we could use them. so, we found quite by accident what appeared to be a small voltagedrop, just off the surface of the anode and according to our researchobjectives, we were supposed to find. but it wasn't much at all. we saw initially about a 30 voltdrop, just off the surface,
but it got us to thinking that maybethe probe tip is just too long. and so, these arethe double layers, and this is not scaled properly, but just to showyou how it works. so the tungsten tip that you seethere, between the two red marks, is the length of the tipthat's exposed to the plasma. and that's actually what picks upthe electrical characteristics of the plasma that'smeasuring it. so, as you can see right herebetween the two red lines
there's a few doublelayers that are in there. and what happensin effect is that, because the tip is long and it'smeasuring a few double layers, we think what we get is more of anaverage of what the voltage is. it's measuring across those. so, we decided well let'sjust shorten it down. and so, we did, and when we did, basically,this is what we saw: and the voltage drop herewas almost 300 volts.
it was 270 volts, i thinkor something wasn't it? and the distance was0.03 millimeters. it's really thin, okay? but it's a verypowerful double layer. so, we've done the test a number of times andwe validated this particular measurement; this sharp voltage drop. the actual curve coming off ofthe back, can vary a little bit, but the sharp voltagedrop that you see here, is typical of all the plotswe're seeing in safire.
so, we can confidentlysay today, in fact there is a sharp voltagedrop that dr. donald scott predicted and that is in factwhat we're seeing here. and it's pretty big. so, with that, this is wheremichael is going to take over, because he was doingsome analysis on this and this is getting intohis area of expertise. you get all the fun stuff. i do.
so, we can look at globalproperties of the plasma, the discharge,electrical properties, or we can also look at properties ata particular point in the plasma. so, what monty just talkedthrough with the langmuir probe, that's because we're trying to get measurementsat particular points in the plasma. but it's also worthwhileknowing and analyzing what's going on with adischarge as a whole. so, here's plots of current andvoltage across the whole discharge and you can see in the bottomsome pictures of what's going on
in the chamber at that point. so, at point a, we have apretty quiet discharge, with a few anode tufts on there. then we crank up the current. what happens? the plasma responds by increasingthe voltage drop across the plasma, and by creating a lot moreof those little tufts, and actually eventuallysending them into motion. then at point b you can seethat red line shoot up again.
that's because we crankedthe current knob; so, we pushed more currentthrough the plasma. and in response, you can see the voltagegoes up again across the plasma, and we create a lot of double layers;six or seven double layers there. that wiggle in the blue line,we don't know what that is yet. that's not our power supply,so to be looked at later; and i'm not actually going to talk muchabout what happened at the end there. we had a big release of energy, but i can'ttalk much about what was going on there. okay, then you can also look atthe resistance across the chamber
and the power consumed by, ortransformed by the discharge. so, the green line is the resistanceacross the whole discharge, and the black line is thepower consumed or transformed and it's those same regimes,same a, b, c and d. so, the first thing that happened,when you created all the little tufts: that green line drops way down. that's the resistanceof the plasma. it goes way down, whenthose tufts are created and there's that initialincrease in the power consumed.
then, at point b they'vecranked the current more, the resistance goes down even more,as we're creating double layers and the power consumptiongoes way up. so, the plasma is respondingto how we're pushing it and one of the ways, and we can repeatagain and we need to study more, is it responds in ways tolower its resistance and greatly increase the amountof power it can transform. we designed safire to be ableto vary voltage and current independently. this particular run, we werejust varying the current,
but no one knows yet, in a cosmologicalsetting, what the driver is. whether voltage primarily drivesthings, or current drives things, or some combination of them. so, we have built in the flexibilityto control them independently. and this may seemlike basic research, but it is, and it'sso needed because, even though we know double layers areeverywhere, they're over our heads right now, they're in the magnetosphere,they're in solar flares etc., there's not that much known about howto write down the circuit diagram
for double layers in astronomy. there is almost nothingknown about that. so, this researchthat we're doing here is entirely done largely to help givedirection to future astrophysicists, so they know what to look for inmagnetospheres and solar flares etc. and how to interpret what they're seeingin terms of electrical circuitry. this is absolutelyfundamental, what we're doing. so, let's switch then to thepoint measurements, okay, so now we're not talking about theglobal plasma, we're talking about
that point where thelangmuir probe is. and we go up close, the left-handside is close to the anode. the anode actually starts atthe number 1, not at zero, the surface of the anode, and then we moveout to the right and we go out basically tothe end of the chamber. the red x's are the floatingpotential, with our new probe. that means you sticka probe in there, it's going to raise up to a certainelectrical potential on its own,
just from beinginserted in the plasma. we measure that, we move it out and we take measurements,that's the red line. and you can see that it goesfrom 300 volts down to zero. totally makes sense:we had our anode of 300 volts, you move the probe all the way out to theend of the chamber, it goes down to zero. then the fun starts and you can calculate other parameters in theplasma, like the electric field strength. so, electric field strength is
how much your electricalpotential changes with distance. and so, if i had a chamber thathad a 300 volt anode here, and the end of the chamber, which wasa meter away, went down to zero, you would say that the change in theelectric potential is 300 volts per meter. okay, that's how youdescribe electric fields: 300 volts per meter,is the change. but what we found veryclearly from this data, and i'm sorry i didn't labelthe vertical axis better, but that green peak,that's the electric field,
that peak has nothing to dowith those numbers on the left. that green peak is at about 8,000 voltsper meter, not 300 volts per meter, which you might think, if youjust looked at the rough numbers. so, this is great because it's showingus that these discharge plasmas, they have the ability to sustain withinthem, much more intense regimes, much more intensive is goingon than you would ever guess, if you just were stepping back andlooking at your power supply, right? if you look at your powersupply, you would never guess that there was 8,000 volts permeter electric fields in there.
the black line is charge density,so these double layers exist because charge is positive and negativecharges build up next to each other. so, we can see we're starting to be able tomeasure those charge density fluctuations. it's the left hand sidethere, the black line when it gets a little bit closer tothe anode, it drops way, way down. i didn't includeit on this graph. i couldn't get that on therebut just so you know that that black line drops way down, if we get one fraction of amillimeter closer to the anode.
and then the blue one is theresistance of the chamber. so, since we have a designed a doubleprobe also, we didn't show you that one, we can stick thosetwo wires in there and measure the resistance of the plasmaacross that little gap between the two wires and so you can see the resistance is basicallyinfinite, as you get closer to the anode, drops to almost zero, climbs backup, falls back down and that last rise at the end thereof the resistance line, i'm pretty sure, is heading back up toessentially, you know huge, huge numbers. i love this graph.
i'm very proud that wewere able to make this, because you don't often see so manyplasma parameters, all taken together and displayed together and, similarto what i was saying about the overall plasma electricalcharacteristics is so needed for astronomy so you can start makingcircuit diagrams, this sort of ability to see all thesedifferent parameters in the plasma, at the same time,on the same graph, is what we need in order to startdigging into what's going on, what's the physics insideof this plasma here.
and since a lot of these resultswere done pretty recently, more analysis kept coming in theday, we were supposed to submit it. lowell gave me this graph,okay, i'll put this in there, before we hit â€sendâ€, hesends me another graph. okay, i'll putthis one in there. this is the electron temperature in the different areas, that plasma close,we're getting close, to the anode, okay? so it's going up and down; see how, that close to theanode there, it's at 7.
okay, that's electronvolt,7 electronvolt electrons. that's pretty hot forearthly conditions. if i had a jar of 7 electronvolt electrons, and you stuck your thermometer in there,it would read about 81,000 degrees. that would be the effectivecomparable temperature to it. so, we have in safire tens of thousandsof degree fluctuations in temperature taking place over millimeters or centimeters,safely, no one's being hurt, right? not yet, and we can controlit, we can reproduce it, and as we saw with the probes,
we're starting to see howto release that energy. but we'll talk more about that verysoon; about the release of the energy. now, it's important topoint out that the team does have a paper publishedfrom previous work. this was written by lowellmorgan and montgomery childs. it was published in the plasma sourcesscience and technology journal. this looked atprevious discharges, mostly from the point of howmuch light was being emitted. so, a really good analysisby lowell on this one.
one of the mainconclusions from this, we're trying to answer, howdo these double layers form. believe it or not, no one really knowshow these double layers form, okay. it's pretty interesting; lowell's idea was, that the productionof negative ions and electrons, creates instabilitiesin the plasma, which leads then to thesegregation of the charges. if you want, we can certainlyget you this paper, that you can dig intohis analysis on that.
again to remind people, i'mexcited by some of our results, because we're seeing fluctuationsin these parameters, that are comparable to the sort of fluctuationswe need to have to be able to say, yes we're looking at astronomicalquantities here, comparable quantities. we should just take a breath in,before getting into radiation. so everybody breathe. we were talking about the iter,tokamak experiments, you know and see the sheer amount ofmoney that's going into them. and it seems like we're trying to forcenature to do something it doesn't want to do,
with these magnetic confinementfusion experiments. and you know, you put another50 million dollars into it, and then you get much strongermagnetic fields to try, and it still just doesn't work. you can't make the plasma do it and i don't know if you cansee it from the videos, but we're in the labworking on this plasma. we're not actually driving it so hard,we're not forcing nature to do anything. that's certainly how i feel it.
it seems like, we turn it upand then the plasma responds, and everybody's happy, we're notforcing anybody to do anything, right? so, i feel that's one of the things that, itfeels to me like we're on the right track, because it doesn't have that feeling of forcingsomething that nature doesn't want to do. plasmas are certainly dr.morgan's specialty. we said, could you please,take a look at this. take a look at why, whathappened to our tungsten probe. okay, from what you know, canyou please dig into this. so, we spent sometime looking at that.
radiation trapping. so we're going to talkabout that really soon. how to envision that. so, i knew that biology hadcomplicated chemistry. biochemistry, iscomplicated stuff, right? light and life, it has all thesethings and i'm starting to realize: plasma chemistry is really also equallycomplicated, and it makes me wonder about what sort of chemistryis being done on stars. it's really complicated stuff.
so, lowell came back with... right,this is not a result of thermodynamics. traditional temperaturethat melted this probe. you have to look at radiationhydrodynamics which, he explained to us, is really one of the most complicatedareas in applied physics. there's not much that you couldsay is more complicated; it's why livermore and los alamoslabs always have the best computers, because you need supercomputersto do these analyses. i wrote down thisquote from him that â€nuclear weapons have very littleto do with nuclear physics
and a lot to do withradiation hydrogen dynamics†okay, let's talk about radiation trappingand slowing of the speed of light. imagine that this whole roomis the safire chamber, okay. the stage is the anode, and allof us are hydrogen atoms, okay. and being hydrogen atoms, like we said thatevery species of bird has its own song, so we can all talk to each other, for allhydrogen atoms, we can exchange thoughts and tell each other things and exchangephotons and energy, stuff like that; and the anode is up here, and electricalenergy is being pushed out to all of us, fromthe stage here.
okay, so you got thepicture, right? now imagine that thatwhole side of the room, you're now allhelium atoms, okay? to the rest of us, that sideof the room just went dark. we can't see them anymore,we can't hear them anymore, because we are now ondifferent wavelengths. we cannot exchange energywith them anymore. okay, so we'll leavethem for a second. we'll just focus on this side.
electrical energy comesoff of the stage and let's imagine that it gets absorbedby two people on the front row, okay? they hold on to it for awhile, they get excited, they're bubbly, they can'tsit still in their seats; they're getting allkind of pumped up, but they hold onto the energy, hold ontothe excitement for a while; maybe 30 s. while they're holding onto it, two more people on the frontrow get some of this energy. they get all excited,
they can't sit in their seats theycan’t wait to tell somebody something. after about thirty seconds, those firsttwo people finally can turn around and they communicate theirexcitement to somebody behind them. but then that person who gets thatexcitement behind him in the second row, they also have to holdon to it for a while. they can't just turn around andtell the person behind them. so, there's this slowprogression of this excitement. if it were a different scenario,if you weren't hydrogen and i wasn't communicating tothis specific frequency of light,
which i'll mention soon, thenas soon as you got excited, you would just turn around andtalk to the person behind you. as soon as you told, theywould just turn around and tell the nextperson behind them, and that excitement would go out throughthe hall at the speed of light, right out. but that's not what happens. there's a specific resonantfrequency that hydrogen has. it's 122 nanometers;that's pretty hot stuff. that's the level of energy that wesee coming off of solar flares,
coronal loops, things like that. that's how we see thatlevel of intensity. when hydrogen gets that, itholds on to it for a while. in fact, it holds on to itthousands of times longer, than it takes to just exchange theinformation with another hydrogen atom. so it's that particular waythat hydrogen manifests that slows down the speed of light, theprogression of light, by thousands of times, and ends up building a hugeamount of energy in that region. we didn't forgetabout the helium’s.
so, the helium's they don't seeanything going on over here. it's dark, they can'thear anything, and one of you gets the brightidea: let's build a probe and we'll put it acrossthe aisle and we'll see. so it's like a couple of guys gorunning back to the breakout room, they take apart someof ricky's paintings. they get the wood frames, they stick some dried sage that i sawover there on the table in that, and two guys put the probeacross the center aisle
and it touches into thatregion and bursts into flames. ashes fall on the floor. so that's how they know: that look, wecouldn't see it, it wasn't visible to us, but as soon as we put ourprobe in there, it got fried. that's radiation trapping andslowing down the speed of light. that's what we have goingon in our chamber, and that's my.... now you know all about radiationhydrodynamics that you need to know. how'd i do lowell,was that okay?
... yeah and you know what's interestingalso is that this whole arrangement is... you could call it electrostatic. we just have a battery, wejust have 300 volts. so it's an electrostaticmachine we have. so we have an electrostatic machine that cantrap photons, high-energy photons. we have an electrostatic machine thatcan slow down the speed of light. we have an electrostaticmachine that can release in an instant very largequantities of energy. and we're controlling it.
we can predict how toget to these regimes. this is a plot of the expectedtemperature the probe tip would get to. and so, you can seeunder certain regimes, which are the left and right axes there, ofhydrogen density and electron temperature, the red area there:10,000 degrees predicted. when that poor probe goesinto the hydrogen section, you could expect that muchenergy to go into the probe, raising it up to about10,000 degrees. now, does that explaineverything we saw?
i don't know, but it certainly is the right wayto start analyzing this problem. monty: a lot going on this year and we were really getting concernedtowards the end of the project, whether or not we wereeven going to do this. we started getting the analysis back, and we sure weregetting really excited. there was actually hope, even thoughthermodynamics can't resolve for these things, radiation hydrodynamics can;plus a lot of other things.
so, we see ourselves as, now thatsafire, i would say, is stable, we can get these stable plasmas, we're now in a place where i wouldsay, with pretty good confidence, that we can start to actually do a number ofexperiments and get really good data back. but these results are,in my view spectacular. the chemistry changes:(we) don't know. we shouldn't have bariumin there, or titanium, no idea where thestuff came from. we can be guessing, butwe should find out.
variations in electron density comparable to thephotosphere, heliosphere and nuclear bombs. those are the only places that we seethese kinds of intense, dense plasmas. that's a lot. and what we're saying here in effect isthat, and what michael was talking about, and the transformation characteristicsof the plasma, the double layers, those double layers, when paul's talkingabout second-order interactions, what we're talking about, it'slike an audio feedback loop that just keeps getting bigger andbigger except that in a double layer it gets to a point that thedouble layer forms,
and the plasma nowbecomes stable. up to that point, electrically youcan see a lot of activity, but when the double layer forms, it goes stable andit it's very robust. so, it'd be like thedouble layer, and i'm going to jump outhere a little bit too, because i think we'rereally at that place, where we have our atmospherein the earth, 350 miles up. conventional science says, it is gravitythat holds our atmosphere here.
but mechanical engineering, i mean, wehave big machines that try to contain, or get vacuums that aren’teven close to space vacuums. what i'm trying to say in effectis that only 300-mile distance, we've got a space vacuum that cansuck your eyeballs out of your house. i mean, out of your head (it hasbeen a long day), out of your head, and yet there's no mechanicaldevice retaining our atmosphere. and what we are seeing, whatwe forgot to mention actually, is we do have a pressuredelta in safire. that's a big deal because i thinklangmuir predicted theoretically,
that we should see this. i mean that's what lowell is.... what we're saying in effect is,when we get a vacuum in a chamber, a gas would fill thisroom, or the chamber, and the pressure in itself wouldbe equal throughout the chamber. but when these double layers form,that's not what's happening. so, we do actually havehigher pressure inside these double layers thanwe do actually have outside, in the greaterpart of the chamber.
so, you actually havea plasma force field that actually can containthese molecules, these gases. that's a big deal. so, the core ofsafire is cooler. the highest temperatures we thoughtwe saw was maybe around 1,000⺠c; and obviously the temperatures,or the effective temperature, or you might say, the response temperatureswe are getting with the probes, are many orders above that. way, way, way above that.
so these are things that we're exploringwith safire and i think that's really it. these questions we are goingto leave on the screen here and i guess we're open forquestions and answers. [applause] other way that's good! eighty-five â€so the temperature of the anoderight now in the hydrogen is 600†â€it has been at 600, even though we hadlike kilowatts going through there.
yeah,that's good.†â€..a lot hotter withthe nitrogen..†shortly after the 2017phoenix conference, the safire team discovered aunique process that initiates and sustains theplasma double layers. this was a major discovery, because it is theseplasma double layers that produce both the extraordinarilyhigh energy densities and the electric field that containsthese energies within the plasma.
this new advancement in plasmascience demonstrates a process, that consistently creates, containsand controls the plasma double layers in stable exothermicplasma reactions. although the energiesand densities are comparable to the sun'sphotosphere and nuclear bombs, the data shows no harmful sideeffects, such as radioactivity. but the science of what is actually happeningat the molecular and atomic levels is not yet fully understood. understanding these reactions,will give valuable insight
into the way the sun'satmosphere functions, and provide the foundation by which theseenergies can be beneficially harnessed this research will be thetop priority of 2018.