RE: Terry's Test - Two Manifestations of Charge

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

At 10:57 AM 7/5/2005, Tesla list wrote:
> Original poster: "David Thomson" <dwt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Hi Terry,
>
>
> > >Let me put it this way, if there is just one form of charge,
> then there
> > >would be just one color and thickness of spark, but of varying
>
> > >intensity.

Not necessarily.  The light from a spark comes from two sources: 1) thermal 
incandescence, which is fairly broad spectrum, and would probably appear 
white (corresponding to a temperature of around 6000K-7000K); 2) ionization 
of the air, where you see the emission spectra of nitrogen and oxygen, 
which would, I think, appear purple.

It would be trivial to tell with a spectroscope, since one will have a 
classic black-body type spectrum, and the other will have lines.  The line 
spectra will be slightly broadened from the thermal effects too (this is 
one way measure the temperature of various parts of the spark channel)


I think the phenomenology is all covered fairly well in Cobine's book 
"Gaseous Conductors".


> >
> > ???  I don't get that...  Looks like just simple basic field
> > theory stuff to me...  I see nothing that is not explained
> > easily and perfectly well by the 150 - 200 year old laws of
> > electricity as told by Ampere, Maxwell, and Kirchhoff in the
> > early to mid 1800's...
>
> How do you explain the difference in color of the sparks?  One is
> purple, the other is bright white.  If there is just one
> manifestation of charge, shouldn't you be able to get a bright
> purple, or thin white spark?

Not necessarily.  If you have enough energy to get the bright purple, 
you'll probably heat the air enough to get the thermal emission spectrum.

> The fact that there could be electrons between a high potential
> and low potential and manifesting in two very different modes
> seems not to be explained by the above laws.  I don't see
> anything in those equations that would suggest such physical
> appearances.  Yet, you see the different modes for yourself.
>
> > >Do you think you can measure the potential and current of
> those
> > >individual sparks?

Certainly.  It's been done before.  It's not easy.  What you'd really want 
is time synchronized spectroscopy too, to look at the ionization and 
thermal state of the spark.  Bazelyan and Raizer have some streak camera 
results along those lines in their book.  I believe the book by Loeb and 
Meek on Long Air Sparks also has measurements and analysis.  This work was 
done back in the 20s and 30s, but should be applicable.  They didn't have 
the advantage of fast waveform recorders like we do now, though.


> > You really should do it on a 3-D simulator, but nobody here
> > has the super computer to handle that stuff...  Some like
> > E-Tesla could fake that and work, but not easily in this
> case...
>
> I think we should not calculate the answers, but measure them.
> Once we have actual measurements, then we can verify whether the
> present equations calculate the data or not.  Also, unless there
> is some way to prove that both the sparks have the same
> characteristics, we need to understand why the different
> appearances.

This sort of distinction is the difference between the classic hypothesis, 
experiment style of science and observational science.  Both work.