Reply To: Peak Oil from Truth Out

[Di Vita]

Newbie, you wrote: “This is the common mistake […] linear”

On the contrary, physicists are the first ones who mistrust excess of simplification, because they are doomed to simplify everything. On his very first lesson, Arago used to tell his pupils : “Sirs, you want to scientists. Scientists are observers, Please, observe!” Then he stepped away from the classroom. After a while, he came back to his amazed pupils and asked: “What did you observe? Please report!”. Clearly nobody could spell a word, and he was therefore eager to explain that no observation is meaningful if there is no theory to support it, and no theory is possible without simplification. A XVIII-century American would say: ‘no explaination without simplification’; actually, Galileo said (in old Italian): ‘Difalcar l’esperienza’, i.e. ‘make your experience free of all unnecessary things”. The selection of what is ‘unnecessary’ is as arbitrary as your hypotheses; both are to expected to lead to experimentally testable predictions.

“burned through […] energy state” Indeed, some fraction of your filaments gets vaporised, which is scarcely a ‘minimum energy’ state. Even if the vapor cools down, it is not likely to come back to its original filament in any solid form. Your minimum energy state is rather a maximum entropy state.

“And it will have done so by the quickest possible path, given the parameters of its local system.”

Believe it or not, this is perhaps one of the most least understood propositions in physics. Many researchers postulate you are right -look for ‘Maximum Entropy Production Principle’ or ‘MEPP’ in Google. According to MEPP, systems relax to their final state following ‘the quickest path’, i.e. the entropy of the Universe increases during their relaxation in the quickest way, or equivalently with the maximum erate of entropy production. MEPP supporters’ sanctuary is the open-access journal ‘Entropy’. Indeed, the most famous counterexample to MEPP is precisely the filament of a bulb. Back in the XIX century, in fact, Kirchhoff has proven that heat dissipation in a resistor with constant resistivity minimizes the amount of entropy produced per unit time. The simplest example of Kirchhoff’s resistor is the filament of a bulb.
Kirchhoff’s proof relies on Ohm’s law and Maxwell’s equation of electromagnetism, and has therefore nothing in common with the discredited approach of Prigogine, de Groot and Mazur to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, based on Onsager symmetry relationships. As for myself, I believe that MEPP has no general validity. For details, see A. Di Vita, Phys. Rev. E 81, 041137 (2010).

Why does Kirchhoff matter to people interested in Dense Plasma Focus fusion? Because Kirchhoff’s result may be generalised to some Hall-MHD plasmas like the Dense Plasma Focus, leading to filamentary structures which may evolve towards hot spots depending on the electron density – see A. Di Vita Eur. Phys. J. D 54, 451–461 (2009). The paper of mine at the beginning of the present thread, A. Di Vita Eur. Phys. J. D (2013) 67: 191, is an application of these results to the LPPX scenario.

In a nutshell, I think LPPX plasma -as well as other plasmas- show filaments and hot spots precisely because it does NOT follow the ‘quickest path’.

“Neither you or I are dim bulbs, Da Vita.”

You are right. But -as I hope to have shown- we are not even sure of what happens to a dim bulb. There is still a long way, before we are allowed to generalise our conclusions to you and me.