I am going to go off into a bit of core thought regarding nature and how things are done, or at least seem to be done.
Nature is usually thrifty and goes about doing things in the most efficient manner and utilizes processes which are the least disturbing and most enduring over the long haul.
As has been written for years, it is felt that the stars utilize fusion for their energy output and this process is a rather rare process occuring in a microscopic fraction of a star's mass near the core. It is felt that gravitational confinement fusion is at work in this process.
Nothing new here.
If we really grub at the core of all that is real in the universe, we see that all of man's efforts to create energy is one of making "batteries" designed to down-convert energy from avaialble resources. In only a few cases are we making full use of free energy sources. In most free energy cases, we are taking a higher form of radiant energy and down-converting it to lower forms of heat or electrical energy. Still the energy, itself, is free (sunlight IR, UV etc. Regardless, 100% of all the energy man uses, creates, or down converts is of stellar origin. Period!
I have long believed that there are only only two intrinsic forms of avaialble energy in the universe and they are potential energies, as normally viewed, and they are the result of the very esistance of two things, and two things only. Matter and charge. I further believe that with entropy being what it is the E=mc^2 equation is a unidirectional equation, outside of common stellar interiors and rare energetic nuclear events.
Mass can only be converted to energy and not vice-versa. Certainly not at any economy of conversion save for the few exothermic fusion reactions, which we seem so inept at making happen.
Here is where the deep thinking comes into play.
I feel that all forms of EM radiation and the fiction of magnetism are the result of an energyless void spontaneously filled with CHARGED MATTER of an ancient and unknown form. (perhaps unknowable) With the appearance of mass and charge came two potential energies which are still here and in concert with charge and mass create 100% of all radiant energy and a host of second order effects which our science may think are nascent. I believe they are not.
Among these are, magnetism, magnetic fields, EM radiation from the lowest frquency RF right up through the hardest Gamma radiation. None of these have an original or nascent form within the universe, They are hand-me downs, the result of the unlocking of the cocked hammers of the potential energy guns of Gravity and Electrostatic forces. The ONLY nascent forces. These forces exist by virtue of matter and charge which are also nascent.
It must be remembered that charge is not energy. It is only potential energy when viewed against at least one other charge. It can be kinematicized or go kinetic only when nascent potential energy forces the charges either apart or together. Likewise, mass and its inherent gravitational potential energy connection can only go kinetic when aggregates of bulk matter are attracted. The two forces work at different steps in nature, but between the two, all motion, all magnetism, all radiation has come forth. As these nascent energies are finite, the universe pertpetually spends itself as matter degrades and energy is spent to heat nothing on a universal scale. Almost 100% of all this kinematic effort of spending the potential energies of the nascent charge and mass is created in stars.
What little energy to mass conversion which occurs in the universe is done mostly in stellar cores or in nova or supernova reactions. Nature uses gravity to do all her energy work on the macroscale and electrical forces of charged particles to create the actual radiation which warms and again scatters lesser and lesser amounts of matter out into the void, recocking the gravitational potential energy gun to ever feebler and feebler levels over vast time scales.
So, the only way we might hope to do fusion looks like either a gravitational scheme or an electrostatic one. At least that is the way I see it. Electromagnetic confinement is an "also ran" that nature found wanting due to its secondary nature and paucity of action and even its counteraction to her other great potential energy force, CHARGE. It is like trying to use a cars exhaust to power it. EM is dead matter, and like Humpty-Dumpty man can't put it back together again. Certainly not to his power making advantage.
Fusion is the process of turning energy into matter. To do it well, we must make use of extant cocked potential energy sources. As we don't handle gravity well with quadrillions of tons of mass, the electrostatic connection looks like the only valid, NATURAL path.
Now to ponder on as to how to do this on a scale where it looks like a battery, and to do it not effciently, but for nearly free. It would be nice if we didn't have boil water in our battery anymore either.
Richard Hull
P.S. By a battery, in all the above references, I allude to a more generalized concept of a, localized, if not portable point of generation, of electrical or any other form of energy. Man deals only with batteries in this sense.
Created on Monday, January 29, 2001 6 PM EDT by Richard Hull