The Fundamental Atomic Model
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Fundamental Atomic Model |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Sean Ray Torrebadell |
| Keywords | Neutron, nuclear, nucleus, neutron core, nuclear hydrogen, lone pairs, beta decay |
| Published | 2012 |
| No. of pages | 23 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The Fundamental Theory requires neutrons to accumulate within the center of the nucleus, in a highly organized manner, a dense 'neutron core'. Repulsive protons must remain as far apart from one another as their nucleonic bond with neutrons of the core allow, forming a 'protonic shell'. Electrons should orbit the individual protonic ligands of a structured nucleus, forming 'nuclear hydrogen'. These, in turn, can form 'nuclear covalent bonds', nuclear H2, which we identify as 'lone pairs' of electrons. The electronic shroud of electrons, therefore, consists of electrons that are localized around the nucleus, in geometrically fixed positions, in degenerate shells, because they are bound to and interacting on a one to one basis with the protons of a structured nucleus. Not only does this picturesque model superimpose itself over the known empirical facts, it explains why one combination of protons and neutrons is stable and abundant, while another is not. Neutron B-decay ratios of unstable nuclei are used to 'prove' that structured nuclei do exist, in the geometrical manner prescribed.
Overview
Sean Torrebadell's paper is an attempt to replace the statistical picture of the atom with a mechanical one in which every particle has a definite place. It is an application of his wider "Fundamental Theory", and its single generative assumption is that the neutron is not an elementary particle but a proton and an antiproton spinning around one another. Everything else follows from that. Because a neutron so composed has twice the "strong force pull" of a proton — which Torrebadell defines not as an exchange force but as the inward flow of aether into a particle's fundamental components — neutrons should accumulate at the centre of the nucleus in a dense, geometrically ordered neutron core. Mutually repelling protons stand off from the core as far as their bonds to it permit, forming a protonic shell. Each such proton binds one electron: "nuclear hydrogen". Two nuclear hydrogens forced together form a "nuclear covalent bond", nuclear H2, which Torrebadell identifies with the chemist's non-bonding lone pair.
The motivating complaint is stated as a failure of mainstream physics to give a mechanism rather than a description. Charge is a label, not an explanation — "we really don't know what charge is in the first place". The nucleon picture treats protons and neutrons as interchangeable and so forbids a structured nucleus by construction. Quantum theory, he argues, "is in no way, shape, or form, a mechanical model", and therefore evades any obligation to say how repulsive electrons localise in fixed regions, how two of them pair as a lone pair, or how a proton buried in a nucleus maintains a one-to-one bond with a particular electron. His answer is Thomson's: protons and electrons must mix, and must interact one to one, "because the laws of electrodynamics require it to be so". The test he offers is not spectroscopic but statistical — reproducing the branching ratios of beta decay from nuclear geometry.
The model
The composite neutron and the core
The neutron's substructure is taken as the evidence base; the objection Torrebadell anticipates is that his scheme requires the decay of a baryon, the antiproton, which the standard framework forbids. Neutrons in the core do not simply pile up: they continue to interact "along the plane of their electric fields", spinning in phase so that at the closest approach a positive component of one faces a negative component of the other moving contrary to it, creating a local minimum of field pressure. They stay apart because each component already has enough internal spin motion to escape the inward pull of a single protonic component, and moving contrary they have "twice the relative motion necessary". The result is an oscillatory, electrostatic-like equilibrium; symmetry makes the oscillation harmonic and so more stable. As neutron number grows, the core condenses from planar into three-dimensional shapes — trigonal, trigonal bipyramidal, and then the "very stable 6N octahedral core", which he treats as a closed shell after which the protonic shell geometry shifts from trigonal to tetrahedral logic.
Protonic ligands, electrons and bonds
When an antiproton in a core neutron decays, the surviving proton escapes the core, is decelerated by the inward flow, and comes to rest at an apex where it is intermittently exposed to the positive and negative components of the spinning core neutron — the nucleonic bond. Electrons are then captured not by the nucleus as a whole but by individual protonic ligands. For free hydrogen the electron traces open loops around the proton; near a nucleus the increased pressure closes the loops, holding the electron density on the outside of the nucleus in a localised region. Localisation is therefore "not due to their individual wave nature" but to the geometry of the nucleus beneath.
A covalent bond is redefined as "the intermittent coulombic force of attraction between the protonic ligand of one nucleus, and the electron orbiting the protonic ligand of another", with only one electron between the two protons at any instant, giving a fluctuating (+)(−)(+) alignment; the anti-bonding state arises when both electrons swing to the outside and expose the two protons. Bond strength depends on how closely matched the two electron orbital speeds are. Nuclear H2 is covalently inert because one electron is always on the outside, blocking further bonding by electron–electron interference; the number and density of lone pairs is then "directly related to electronegativity". Hydrogen bonding follows from the rotation of charge around free molecular hydrogen, which alternately shields and exposes its proton, and the same rotation lets hydrogen bridge two nuclides, as in FHF− or solid BeH2.
Torrebadell also proposes that free hydrogen exists in "preferred" (aligned) and "diminished" (anti-aligned) electron states, with the preferred dominating through weak-field interference, and suggests the observed 3:1 ortho/para ratio may in fact be measuring the proportion of these two states rather than a nuclear spin isomerism.
Rules of nuclear stability
The paper's central claim is that this geometry predicts which nuclides exist. Twelve a priori rules are given, of which the operative ones are: the symmetry of the neutron core must match that of the protonic shell; an extra neutron is stable if shielded by a proton and symmetrically placed, and decays otherwise; a protonic ligand whose binding core neutron is missing undergoes electron capture; a lone pair whose binding neutron is missing collapses with β+ decay; and "a degenerate neutron core, or a core with full symmetry is always more stable".
Applied case by case: He-3 is the only stable nuclide with more protons than neutrons because a neutron is fully stabilised only when situated between two protons. No arrangement of two protons around three neutrons is symmetric, so He-5 cannot exist. Li-5 loses a proton to leave He-4, and in Li-8 a condensed trigonal bipyramid leaves axial neutrons unshielded. Be-8 splits homogeneously into two alpha particles because, as the top and bottom neutron pairs condense, a proton of one and an antiproton of another superimpose on the same axis with contrary spins, producing magnetic repulsion — "the force is electromagnetic in nature". Hence no stable nuclide of mass 5 or 8. The tetrahedral 6N-core sequence carbon to neon is then read off as the progressive conversion of the four bonding sites into lone pairs: N has three, O two, F one, and Ne none — the noble state. The diminishing tetrahedral bond angle from carbon to oxygen is attributed to the crowding effect of the lone pairs. C-14's long half-life is put down to its two excess neutrons being symmetric and shielded, with a prediction that "subjecting C14 to a torrent of particles should cause its half-life to diminish significantly".
Magic numbers are demoted throughout: "the 'magic numbers' themselves are a mathematical coincidence, a weak reflection of the underlying stability of certain nuclei", the truly stable nuclei being those with symmetrically complete cores and shells. He also argues that abundance is a better index of stability than bombardment, since bombardment measures how well a nucleus stays together when struck rather than when formed.
The beta-decay ratio argument
The paper's evidential centrepiece is a combinatorial analysis of β− branching ratios. The reasoning is that an artificially produced unstable nuclide is made by adding neutrons to a stable core; a neutron may strike any of the eight octahedral faces, occupied or not; a strike on a shielded neutron knocks it to a new position, cascading; and the resulting distribution over neutron environments (labelled AA, A/B, C by shielding class) should reproduce the observed distribution of decay energies. For F-21 he obtains a theoretical 28.57 : 63.39 : 8.04 against an observed 29 : 63 : 8, and states that a square planar F-19 would not have matched, so "collision analysis can also be used as a tool to confirm nuclear structures". For F-22 the computed ratio initially "threw me for a loop" until he renormalised to a total of 84 rather than 100, on the reasoning that not all F-21 nuclides survive long enough to participate, giving 61.89 : 14.81 : 7.29 against 62 : 15 : 7. For Ne-23 a cascade calculation over one, two and three steps gives 67.08 : 32.06 out of 99.14 against an observed 67 : 32 out of 99, which he takes as showing that Ne-22 must be square biplane rather than tetrahedral. He claims the method works "for all nuclide decays involving B- decay" in this range of elements, and notes that where the model allows only one decaying neutron environment, only one decay energy is in fact observed.
Torrebadell is explicit about what he has not done: "I have not attempted, at this time, to use the equations of electrodynamics to see if composite spinning neutrons, and the mutual repulsion of protons, can support the idea of what is basically an oscillating and yet electrostatic protonic shell", pleading the difficulty of building a mathematical apparatus "when it has not been conclusively shown that a strong force exists". He acknowledges the theory "is more philosophical in nature" and that it "requires more evidence, or validation, before it could ever become accepted".
Assessment
What is genuinely attractive here is the ambition and the choice of evidence. Torrebadell is right that the questions he raises are real ones that textbooks tend to skate: why one particular combination of Z and N is stable and its neighbour is not, why lone pairs sit where VSEPR says they sit rather than being derived from anything deeper, and why no stable nuclide of mass 5 or 8 exists. He is also right that the pairing of two mutually repelling electrons is usually explained by invoking opposite spin without saying how spin negates repulsion. Choosing branching ratios as the test is a good instinct — they are hard numbers, they were not used to build the model, and a geometric picture that reproduces them would be saying something. The paper is unusually candid about its own limits: it concedes that no equations of electrodynamics have been applied, that the framework is philosophical, that Be-8 fission and the exposure of Deuterium's neutron are problems it has had to construct answers for, and it names the fatal-looking obstacle to its own foundation — that antiproton decay is a forbidden baryon decay — rather than hiding it.
The difficulties, however, are of a kind that the paper cannot answer within its own method. The most serious concerns the beta-decay analysis, which carries the entire evidential weight. Each ratio is obtained by enumerating collision outcomes under assumptions chosen as the calculation proceeds: which positions count as shielded, whether a knocked neutron may resituate anywhere or only into open faces, how many cascade steps to allow, and — in the F-22 case — what the denominator should be. The F-22 fit is achieved only by changing the normalisation from 100 to 84 after the first attempt gave 73.68 : 17.63 : 8.68 against an observed 62 : 15 : 7, and the justification for that change is supplied by the mismatch itself. The Ne-23 fit averages one-, two- and three-step cascades and then observes that a mixture "would contribute". With this many adjustable combinatorial choices and a small number of target ratios, agreement to the reported precision is not strong evidence, and the claim that a square planar arrangement "would not match" is asserted rather than shown by an explicit competing calculation. A convincing version of this argument would fix the rules in advance, apply them blind across many nuclides, and report the failures alongside the successes; the paper reports no failures.
Second, the composite neutron is in direct conflict with established measurement, and not only through baryon number. Deep inelastic scattering of electrons and neutrinos off nucleons resolves three point-like charged constituents with fractional charges and a substantial momentum fraction carried by neutral constituents — the result that made the quark picture unavoidable — and the paper dismisses the quark model rhetorically ("how did the quark model ever get sold?") without addressing that data at all. A proton–antiproton pair also has a rest mass of about 1876 MeV against the neutron's 939.6 MeV, so the model requires a binding energy of roughly half the total rest mass with no account of where it goes; neither the neutron's mass nor its magnetic moment is calculated. The neutron is likewise measured to have zero net charge to better than one part in 1020 and a mean square charge radius that its charge distribution must reproduce, which the composite picture is not tested against.
Third, the electron-structure half of the model does not engage the quantitative successes it needs to displace. The hydrogen spectrum, the Lamb shift, the fine and hyperfine structure and the periodic trends in ionisation energy are all computed to high precision from the quantum treatment; Torrebadell defers atomic spectra to "a future paper", so his model at present predicts no line and no energy. Similarly the bond angles that he presents as an advantage are described qualitatively — the tetrahedral angle "will diminish gradually from Carbon to Oxygen", which is true, but no angle is calculated. That the model "superimposes itself over existing electron shell theory with only minor corrections" is, on the evidence given, a statement that it was constructed to agree, not that it derives the agreement.
Finally, several passages are speculation flagged as such but presented alongside the argument as though of equal standing: that the half-lives of C-14, tritium and Be-10 may vary with bombardment or with chemical bonding, that an electric arc might induce deuterium decay, that "the inconsistent results of cold fusion may be related to the source of deuterium used", and that Be-9 and Be-10 are "pseudo carbon" and therefore toxic. Half-life independence of chemical and physical environment is one of the better-tested regularities in nuclear physics — the small exceptions, such as electron-capture rates in 7Be, are at the fraction-of-a-percent level and are understood — so the suggested tests would be worth running only if the model gave a magnitude, which it does not. Read as a programmatic sketch of what a fully mechanical nuclear model might look like, and as a catalogue of questions the standard account answers only descriptively, the paper has real interest. Read as an established alternative, it is far from the position its concluding rhetoric claims.