Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:46:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com>
--- Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
Just put a magnet in your water bottle and you're ready to sell "ortho-water bottles", since the magnetic field will make the ortho polarization energetically favored. Slap a little sermon on the side about statistical thermodynamics and the magical incantation "exp(-uH/kT)", and it might even become trendy. "Refrigerate for higher polarization", that sort of thing.
This is good marketing. It combines magnets with "structured water". Now throw in homeopathy too.
Homeopathy? Wow, that's even more twisted than I could think of... :-)
You could even sell "after-market ortho-water bottle adapters" (aka magnets), to tape onto existing water bottles.
No, no, no, disposibles are where the money is.
Right, disposable magnets! Even better. (See? Don't ever let anybody tell you peer review doesn't work.)
Strangely enough, spin-polarized hydrogen has occasionally been mentioned as a very dense energy storage mechanism. Its instability makes it more of a bomb than a gas tank, alas.
This is electron spin, not nuclear spin. Hydrogen atoms with opposite electron spin can bind to form a molecule, whereas atoms with the same spin cannot. So by polarizing a gas of atoms, giving them all the same spin, you keep them in a high energy state.
I know; I was joking. A bit of Googling ressurects the fact that it was Tom Greytak and Dan Kleppner at MIT who were doing this back in the 80's: http://web.mit.edu/physics/greytak-kleppner/ -- Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> http://alum.mit.edu/www/sgr/ ICQ: 52-377-390