Personally, as a soi dissant physicist ( nonpracticing Ph.D. , ) I find the proposed mechanism ridiculous. Consider that the center of the sun is at 10 million Kelvin, and is a very poor producer of fusion, which makes sense when you realize it lasts billions of years without burning out. The human body generates more heat per unit mass than the sun.
There are various superlatives to illustrate the extremity of the solar center environment: A pinhead maintained at that temperature would kill a man a mile away with its radiation ( my uncle told me that years ago - never verified it. ) The radiation pressure alone ( i.e. light pressure, which requires extreme conditions even to be detectable ) would explode the earth ( my calculation . )
Also, perhaps more significantly, note that the hydrogen at the solar center is compressed to 50 times the density of water. Solar collpase is being resisted by the degeneracy pressure of the electrons, which are no longer orbiting the protons, but whizzing about in a background "sea" of negative charge. The protons behave as an ideal gas against this background, mostly "colliding" and being repelled by their coulomb repulsion. Only very, very, occasionally do they have the required energy to approach within the fusion reaction cross section.
The bubble rationale has it that the energy is "focused" and nonthermal, but it has to be thermal, or become thermal very quickly, so my judgment is that the bubble collapses will fall many orders of magnitude short of providing the kinetic energy to fuse protons or deuterons. Obviously, the proponents argue otherwise.
From an experimental point of view, we have this: "In the new setup, the researchers dissolved natural uranium in the solution, which produces bubbles through radioactive decay."
What kind of decay did you say? Producing what particles?
Also note the claim that the neutron radiation is a "statistically significant" increase over background. This is the mantra of ESP researchers.
As to the inverse square verification, I would ask how they could verify this if there signal is much smaller than background, as implied by its relegation to the realm of the "statistically significant".
Anyway, just MHO.
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Even more simply, how could a mechanical phenomena produce enough energy to cause fusion? At room temperature and pressure? There is quite a quantum hump to get over that is many orders higher than the amount of energy produced by cavitation.
Uranium-238 decays by alpha emission into thorium-234, which itself decays by beta emission to protactinium-234, which decays by beta emission to uranium-234, and so on. The various decay products, (sometimes referred to as "progeny" or "daughters") form a series starting at uranium-238. After several more alpha and beta decays, the series ends with the stable isotope lead-206.
There are no neutrons involved in the primary decay chain.
I will bet you that there is tritium somewhere in there as well as deuterium.
How energetic are the alpha particles all the way down the Uranium decay chain? Maybe what we are really seeing has nothing to do with the bubbles, or is a combination of bubble collapse energy coupled with a duterium or tritium recoil from an alpha particle collision?
They didn't say there was a lot of fusion, just some, that they could pull out of the background noise, and you can start looking for some pretty unlikely events at that level.
I'm just watching the story. Not a physicist.
The forces in the bubble collapse are strong enough to produce light. I find that interesting. A weak indicator relative to what's required for fusion.
If, as it sounds, you are arguing that unless given "sun-level" condtions, fusion is impossible, regardless of scale, then how do you rationalize the Farnsworth Fusor?
Ok, I read all that so let's cut to the chase... Is the Sun going to burn out soon and should we all buy gold?