To:             phillips@spacesciences.com

Cc:             ron.koczor@msfc.nasa.gov, sng.curator@msfc.nasa.gov, steven.roy@msfc.nasa.gov

Subject:      ISS’s first fundamental discovery?

Date:          Thursday 26 August 2004

 


 

Richard Grugel, a materials scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center, watched his video monitor in disbelief.

A transmission from the International Space Station was playing. The scene: Astronaut Mike Fincke touches

the tip of a soldering iron to a wire wrapped with rosin-core solder. ...
“What a surprise,” says Grugel. “I've never seen anything like it.”...
Meanwhile, Grugel and his colleagues are brainstorming, trying to understand what causes the rosin to twirl.

"We almost have it," Grugel says, but he's not ready to announce a solution yet.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/16aug_solder.htm?list1012484

 

 

Author, Dr Tony Phillips
The Science Directorate
Marshall Space Flight Center
NASA


Dear Dr Phillips,
The solution is now a simple one. The effect, of course, is quantum mechanical in origin and the explanation follows readily from the final theory (Synopsis).

What we see here is the macroscopic manifestation of the effect of the breathing atom.

Briefly, in this final perspective on the nature of things:

  1. Mass and energy are not only equivalent (e = mc^2) but also inseparably coupled as a singular entity; let us call it mass-energy.
  2. Our universe is a voidless continuum in mass-energy where classical matter is the condensed (sub-c) form of mass-energy and classical energy the evaporated (speed-c) form.
  3. The atom breathes (at a frequency that we now only recognize as its frequency of natural vibration); at steady state, it inhales a quantum of mass-energy and exhales an equal quantum; under acceleration, it exhales more than it inhales (which ultimately causes the acceleration), losing mass-energy content; under deceleration, the process reverses.
  4. Higher the medium temperature, higher is this rate of mass-energy, and thereby momentum (p = mc = e/c), transfer between atom and ambient.
  5. The higher rate of momentum transfer results in a higher speed for the atom.
  6. Higher the speed, lower is the mass-energy content of the atom (averaged over its breathing cycle).
  7. As a body of, say, solid matter cools, the (vibrational) speed of constituent atoms drops and net mass-energy (and momentum) is absorbed by the body.
  8. The net influx causes a net attraction (and adherence) of any material around.
  9. The effect would be relatively too feeble for detection in Earth’s gravitational field, but out in the Space Station now – it’s confirmation!

Here, the rosin droplet spontaneously feels a peak attraction toward the spot on the molten solder with the highest cooling rate, which is the point left exposed the longest to the ambient. Moving onto and covering the spot causes insulation of the spot and the highest cooling rate to move to a further point. However, after such a twirl of the rosin, the un-traversed transverse region becomes the most attractive for the same reason; and the rosin blob, naturally, changes course. The cycle repeats. Higher the temperature of the solder, higher is its frequency and cooling rate and faster the twirl of the rosin. (Book sections 7.10 Heat Transfer and 7.11 Latent Heat fully complement the background theory.)

A corollary is seen in your item of May 1, 2003. Squirted onto the hot soldering iron (and kept replenished), the blob of water keeps rolling around that part of the barrel where the cooling rate is highest. (True, the tip length will have an even higher temperature and cooling rate, but its surface is too small to accommodate enough liquid at any one time without it completely evaporating off. This fact is quite evident in the movie of the above solder experiment where the rosin vapor is seen to emanate mostly from a length of wire above the solder blob; which seeming bare length is in fact maintained by the peak evaporative action.) And the reason why “it looked like boiling water on Earth” is due to the simple fact that the attraction here mimics basic gravitational action (Synopsis section 4 Quantum Gravity).

It’ll be an honor to clarify anything further on the above explanation.
Do let us, your ardent readers, know your views as well as those of Dr Grugel and colleagues.
Thank you for your time, and best regards,
Eugene Sittampalam
www.sittampalam.net

 


 

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