Confession

I have decidde to come out of closet and confess something, which might deeply upset my readers. I have never been able to understand how atoms can ionize in electrolyte! The voltages/electric fields are quite too small to give for electrons or ions energies allows ionization by collisions with atoms. It is of course quite possible that I have not understood something totally trivial, which is perfectly clear for every normal first year student. This is indeed my personal problem: I have seen no-one to suffer from it. Perhaps colleagues are right: I am a miserable crackpot who despite efforts lasting 40 years has not been able to understand basics of electrolytes.

I try to explain my personal problem. For instance, in air the dielectric breakdown by ionization occurs for electric field, which is about 3V/micrometer. The mean free path of electron in air is 68 nm and more than 1/100 of the distance of about 10 micrometers - cell size by the way - needed to generate voltage of order 10 V needed to ionize an atom. For hydrogen atom the ionization energy is 13.6 eV. In electrolyte the mean free path is much shorter and and the voltage is much weaker. According to my humble and probably dumb mind, the charge simply cannot accelerate to the needed ionization energy.

Despite horrible feelings of fear in my stomach about becoming decapitized by angry colleagues I dare to conclude that new physics is needed and that this physics is essential also for strange phenomenon of "cold fusion" assigned with electrons and for the strange fact that in living matter ions play key role.

Even worse, I dare to propose that TGD provides a solution to the problem. TGD forces to generalize the notion of field and for instance magnetic field is replaced with flux tubes and flux sheets serving as basic building bricks of the space-time surface having extremely complex topology even in macroscopic length scales. The flux tubes would serve as kind of super-conducting wires along which charged particles can flow without dissipation and accelerate to the needed ionization energies in cell size scale about 10 micrometers.

It is now done! What a relief! Honesty is painful but it is the best option! Let jury decide!

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

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