Follow-up Q09 (researched): a vacancy current from resonant transmutation, the "pump", and Moray's detector crystal

Date: 2026-10-08. Role: STEP F follow-up investigator. Web time: about 3 minutes (Chrome, timer 1791489047 to 1791489230), well under the 20-minute cap; stopped because every item on the open list was checked or found unobtainable online.

Q09 began as hypotheses put to the review (2026-10-07, summarised by the orchestrator in research/2026-10-07-followup-Q09.md; status was "wip" until it was opened on 2026-10-08). That note carried [memory] numbers and open items. This note checks them, keeps what the discussion got right and corrects what it got wrong. The physics reasoning of the discussion (sections 3.1-3.8 of the earlier note) is not repeated here except where a number changed; read the two notes together.

Tags: [read] = the project's own text (file and page); [web] = online, URL given; [calc] = arithmetic done here; [memory] = model knowledge, confidence stated.

The question

Could Moray's resonance "disintegration and transformation" (Isotopes booklet p.25; silver to cadmium, p.23) yield a current (J), since a new cadmium atom is one electron short? Would a vacancy-filling ("siphoning") current differ from conduction current? Related: the self-annealing detector (1968 Air Force proposal), Le Bon's unweighable dissociation, ordinary silver, a "reverse Compton" pump (1968 proposal pp.4-5), the detector crystal (phosphorescent diamonds; phosphorescence "and sometimes other properties"), hidden energy beyond neutrinos, entropy, and how far star models can be trusted.

What was searched

Findings

1. The diamond passage is Le Bon's, and in Le Bon diamond is a radium gauge

• Moray, Radiant Energy ("1926" printing), printed p.54 (scan p.55; the earlier documents cite "p.55", which is the scan page): "They immediately render tuminous by impact bodies capable of phosphores- cence, even when separated from them by aluminum foil. The phosphorescence is very bright in platinocyanide of barium and some kinds of diamonds which are rathe rare, but are capable of phosphorescence." [read: _text radiant-energy-1926, page 55]. Same sentence in Sea of Energy 4th and 5th eds. [read].
• Le Bon, The Evolution of Matter (Legge transl. 1909), Book IV Ch.III ("The Dematerialization of Very Radioactive Substances"): "The phosphorescence is very bright in barium platinocyanide and those kind of diamonds --- rather rare, by-the-by --- which are capable of phosphorescence", with a footnote: "It is this very property which I have taken as a basis for the measurement of the intensity of the various samples of radium I have had occasion to examine. When the tube containing a salt of radium renders a diamond phosphorescent through a thin strip of aluminum, this salt may be regarded as very active. Brazilian diamonds alone --- Cape diamonds never --- are utilizable for this experiment. The first, in fact, are capable of phosphorescence by light and the second are not so. I have proved this by experiments extending to many hundreds of samples" [web: https://www.rexresearch.com/lebonmat/lebonmat.htm, saved copy].
• Moray copies the sentence and drops the footnote. So the one place a Moray text links diamond to radiation detection, the link is Le Bon's: Le Bon used phosphorescent Brazilian diamonds as a radium detector (a gauge of activity), not as an energy converter.
• Every other mention of diamond in the project's Moray corpus [read, grep of all _text/]: (a) Sea of Energy 4th/5th eds. (5th ed. scan p.239): "The wide spaces in diamond, glass, steel, flint or anything else allow 'these bodies smaller than atoms,' as Thomson says, 'to pass through'" (diamond as an example of porous matter, also in the Nuenergy compilation as "Larkin's Theory"); (b) Sea of Energy 5th ed. scan pp.136-137, the son's commentary comparing the device's development time with Tracy Hall's GE diamond press ("almost fifteen years before synthetic diamonds ... were finally put on the market"); (c) the 1990 Foster account below. No Moray document read names diamond as his detector material.

2. A detector-pellet account that ties the stone to a diamond press (new lead)

• Bruce Perreault, Radiant Energy Power Generation (Nuenergy, 2001), printed p.30 (scan p.36), quotes "11 April 1990 Arthur Glenn Foster Principal Engineer": "We ... were pursuing 'Project X'. We had a contract to process some of the Moray 'valve,' fine-ground, 'Swedish Stone' into pressed 'detector' pellets. The pellet material was doped with a tiny amount of unpurified radium reduced from U238 yellow cake. The pellets were subjected to a huge number of millibars of pressure by a tetrahedral press used for manufacturing artificial diamonds. This technique was developed and patented by Dr Tracy Hall after he left GE. When a certain critical pressure was reached 'something' in the material 'flashed.' The electric pulse produced was so violent that it burned out the 2000-amp carbon-die heater power supply, blew the main breakers in the building and blew the power line transformer on the outside power pole!" [read: _text zz-Misc-Nuenergy, page 36].
• Source: one account, by a participant, relayed in a compilation by an author who advocates Moray's device (Perreault). Google finds the same text only in other compilations (Slideshare "Radiant energy", Scribd "Cosmic Energy"); no original letter, no date of the pressing, no contract number, no other participant found [web: Google, two queries]. Two results were withheld from the Google page under a legal request (Lumen notice), content unknown. Foster may be the same Foster who relayed Fletcher's account in 1973 (arbiter.md) [inference; not checked].
• What it says about the detector: the material was the "Swedish Stone" itself, ground, radium-doped and pressed; diamond enters only as the press (Hall's tetrahedral press makes diamond at about 5-7 GPa, 1,500-2,000 C [memory, medium]). This fits the 1984 "triboluminescent zinc and radium chloride" note (A04) better than diamond.
• Competing readings (no verdict): (a) the pellet stored energy (charge trapped by radiation, as in A04's stored-luminescence phosphors) and released it under pressure, as the account implies; but the energy a gram-scale pellet can store is joules at most [calc, order of magnitude: a phosphor holding 10^19 traps per cm^3 at about 3 eV each stores about 5 J/cm^3], far below what burns out a 2000 A supply; (b) under pressure and heat the pellet or die became conductive and short-circuited the die heater, so the heater supply's own energy did the damage (a press failure mode, not new energy); (c) both: a pressure-triggered flash initiated a short. Deciding records: Foster's original letter, the press log, the identity of the contractor and the "Project X" group.

3. "And sometimes other properties" is Moray's own addition to Le Bon

• Moray, Radiant Energy printed p.58 (scan p.59): "It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the elements proceeding from this dissociation have an active part in the compounds then formed, which gives to such bodies the capacity for phosphorescence and some- times other properties." [read].
• Le Bon, Evolution of Matter, Book VI Ch.VII ("Intra-Atomic Energy and the Unknown Equilibria of Matter", sec.1 "Intra-Atomic Chemistry"): "It is therefore permissible to suppose that the elements proceeding from this dissociation have an active part in the unknown compounds then formed, which gives to such bodies the capacity for phosphorescence." [web, saved copy].
• Moray's changes in this paragraph: adds "and sometimes other properties"; drops "copper" from Le Bon's activator list ("bismuth, manganese, copper, etc." becomes "bismuth, maganese, etc."); turns Le Bon's "It was my studies of phosphorescence which led me to this hypothesis" and "I have shown" into impersonal statements; turns Le Bon's "too small to be detected by our balances" into "by an analytical balance"; and adds "We have no need to do this artificially because it is being done for us in the cosmos" and "This all proves that the evolution of creation as going on continually." The blue-light/red-light zinc sulphide sentence is Le Bon's nearly word for word.
• So the hypothesis is right that this phrase marks something: it is one of the few places in the copied run where Moray's own words enter, and it hints that he believed doped phosphors had a property beyond light emission. What property he meant is not stated anywhere read. Candidates in modern terms (from the earlier note, [memory, high]): thermoluminescence, photostimulated (infrared) release, photoconductivity, electroluminescence of copper-doped zinc sulphide (Destriau 1936). Note that Moray deleted copper from the list while copper-doped ZnS is the electroluminescent and long-glow phosphor (A04); possibly an OCR or retyping slip, possibly deliberate; unknown.

4. Le Bon's unweighable dissociation, verified

• Le Bon, Book VI Ch.VII: "By reason of the enormous quantity of intra-atomic energy contained in matter, a loss of substance too small to be detected by our balances may be accompanied by a very great liberation of energy." [web]. Moray, printed p.58: "a loss substance too small to be detected by an analytical balance may be.accompanied by a very great liberation of energy" [read]. The Q09 summary of the idea is exact. The earlier note's mass figures (about 48 micrograms a day for 50 kW) follow from m = E/c^2 and stand [calc: 50,000 W x 86,400 s / (3.0 x 10^8 m/s)^2 = 4.8 x 10^-8 kg].

5. Silver and cadmium numbers, verified

From the Wikipedia isotope tables [web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_silver ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_cadmium], with Q-values computed from the listed atomic masses (1 u = 931,494 keV) [calc]:

6. Bound-state beta decay, verified

• "Though neutral 163Dy is stable, fully ionized 163Dy66+ undergoes beta- decay into the K and L shells with a half-life of 47 days"; first observed 1992 by Jung et al. at GSI Darmstadt [web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay#Bound-state_%CE%B2%E2%88%92_decay]. The same section also lists bare 205Tl81+ (291 d).
• Bare 187Re75+: T1/2 = 32.9 +/- 2.0 yr (Bosch et al. 1996), against about 42 x 10^9 yr for the neutral atom [web: Google snippets of Faestermann 2015, arXiv; Hellenica World copy of the Wikipedia article]. Earlier note's "about 33 years" and "about 42 billion years": right.
• The bound-state Q-value is Q(bound) = Q(neutral) - (difference of total ionization energies) + (binding energy of the shell the electron lands in) [web, same Wikipedia section]. For 109Ag -> 109Cd, Q(neutral) = -215 keV and cadmium's K-shell binding is about 27 keV [memory, high], so even bare silver cannot decay this way: the earlier conclusion stands.

7. Moseley's 1913 radium cell: a correction on where the voltage was

• Abstract (free on the publisher's page) [web: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1913.0045]: the aim was to measure beta-particle energies by charging the source positive; "more than a million volts would be necessary to stop the fastest beta-particles"; "the source of beta-radiation was 20 millicuries or more of purified radium emanation contained in a thin bulb ... of about 1 cm. diameter. The bulb, which was just thick enough to stop all alpha-radiation, was supported by a fine silica rod ... inside an exhausted glass flask ... of 1 litre capacity"; bulb and flask silvered; "The potential gained by the bulb was measured" with an attracted-disc electrometer; "high potentials were readily obtained, but the attempt to attain to a million volts failed through the difficulties of insulation".
• Figures: "high voltage of 150kV, with a current equal to 0.01nA" [web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery, citing secondary sources]; 150,000 V also on famousscientists.org and an IAEA post [web: Google snippets]. The full paper (where these figures should be) was not reached (the PDF link returns a bot-check page to scripts). Status: 150 kV is consistent across secondary sources; not yet read in the primary paper.
• Power [calc]: 150,000 V x 1 x 10^-11 A = 1.5 microwatts. A useful scale for the Q09 vacancy current: this classic "direct charge" cell made a near-ideal current source at very high voltage but microwatt power, from 20 mCi of radon.
• The Wikipedia article contradicts itself in a later paragraph ("The charged alpha particles from the radium created a flow of electricity"); the abstract shows the bulb stopped the alphas, so the current was beta particles.

8. Solar and cosmological checks, verified

• Planck 2018 results VI: "Neff = 2.99 +/- 0.17, in agreement with the Standard Model prediction Neff = 3.046" (with baryon acoustic oscillation data; 2.89 +/- 0.19 from the CMB alone) [web: arXiv 1807.06209 and A&A 2020 snippets via Google]. Earlier note's 2.99 +/- 0.17 vs "3.04": right (3.046 in Planck's wording).
• Borexino 2018 (Nature 562, 505): solar luminosity from neutrinos L = (3.89 +0.35/-0.42) x 10^33 erg/s, against (3.846 +/- 0.015) x 10^33 erg/s from photons [web: Google snippets of Borexino talks and Zavatarelli 2020, IOP; Agostini et al. 2018 manuscript at unige.iris.cineca.it]. That is agreement within about +9/-11 per cent: the earlier note's "within about 10%" is right.
• Borexino 2020: first direct observation of CNO-cycle neutrinos; CNO is "of the order of 1%" of the Sun's energy, the pp chain about 99% [web: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15115].
• Helioseismology: "The sound speeds of solar models that include element diffusion agree with helioseismological measurements to a rms discrepancy of better than 0.2% throughout" most of the Sun (Bahcall et al. 1996, arXiv astro-ph/9610250) [web: Google snippet]. The earlier note's "better than about 1%" is right but conservative. Since about 2005, revised (lower) solar heavy-element abundances have worsened the agreement to around 1% below the convection zone (the "solar abundance problem") [memory, medium; not checked this run]. The Q09 caution about stellar models has a live example here.

9. Weber's neutrino claim: tested, not confirmed (correction)

• Franklin 2010 [web, PDF above]: Weber (1984 onward) assumed an infinitely stiff crystal, so neutrinos would scatter coherently with a rate proportional to N^2 (N about Avogadro's number), and reported torsion-balance forces on sapphire crystals; Smith (1987) noted that conventional coherent scattering "predicts a coherent neutrino force which is 23 orders of magnitude smaller than the force calculated (and apparently observed) by Weber"; Aharonov et al. (1987) found the force should scale with N, not N^2.
• Tests: Franson and Jacobs, "Null Result for Enhanced Neutrino Scattering in Crystals", Phys. Rev. A 46, 2235 (1992); an Eöt-Wash test with silicon; Luo et al. (1995), no diurnal force above 8.1 x 10^-8 dyn; Feng et al. (2006): "a null result for the diurnal force with a noise level of 3.8 x 10^-14 N, which is 526 times smaller than the predicted value of Weber's theory" [web: Franklin 2010]. Franklin counts four tests in about 20 years and notes the hypothesis is "still alive" in a 2008 Romanian analysis (Apostol).
• So "never confirmed" in A09 understated it: four experiments looked and found nothing at the predicted level. Coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering of the conventional kind (cross-section growing with the square of the neutron number of one nucleus, not of the whole crystal) was observed by COHERENT in 2017 [memory, high; not checked this run].

10. Items not re-checked (left as [memory] in the earlier note)

• Solar neutrino flux about 6.5 x 10^10 per cm^2 per s and about 30 W/m^2 (about 2% of sunlight's 1,361 W/m^2) [memory, high]; background dose about 10^-7 Gy/h; cosmic-ray energy density about 1 eV/cm^3; dark matter about 27% and dark energy about 68% [memory, high]; Destriau 1936. None of these changes the answer by a factor that matters (the gaps are 10^13 and 10^21).

Reasoning: what the evidence does to the answer

1. The vacancy current. The charge bookkeeping is right and the device exists (Moseley 1913). The verified Moseley numbers show what such a current looks like: very high voltage, tiny current, microwatts from 20 mCi. The physics of the discussion stands: a current made by charge-changing nuclear events is a near-ideal current source and, in a spherical cell, has no magnetic field; its power cannot exceed the nuclear energy released, so useful output means ionizing radiation of at least the same power. Ordinary silver cannot start the change itself: the cheapest step is 215 keV uphill (109Ag to 109Cd), through the weak interaction; stripping silver bare does not help (section 6).
2. The fuel. Le Bon's idea is quoted exactly and its quantitative core (mass too small to weigh) is right by E = mc^2. What would reveal it is assay and radiation, not weighing.
3. The detector crystal. The Q09 hypothesis was diamond. The record says: diamond in Moray's text is Le Bon's radium gauge (Brazilian stones only), copied without Le Bon's footnote; no Moray document names diamond as his detector; the one account of a Moray "detector" being made describes ground "Swedish Stone" doped with radium and pressed in a diamond press. The "other properties" phrase is Moray's own insertion into Le Bon's phosphorescence paragraph, so he did think doped phosphors did more than glow; the passage names no property.
4. The pump and the hidden reservoir. Unchanged in substance; the stellar checks are now sourced (neutrino luminosity within about 10% of photon luminosity; sound speed within 0.2% for the 1990s models, about 1% after the abundance revision; N_eff 2.99 +/- 0.17). The best known attempt to make a crystal absorb neutrinos far more strongly (Weber) was tested four times with null results. A hidden channel stays bounded (a few per cent of the Sun's output), not excluded.

Corrections to earlier documents

1. research/2026-10-07-followup-Q09.md, section 3.1, and A09 "known" item 1 (Moseley): the note says beta electrons crossed to "an outer sphere, which charged to about 150 kV". In Moseley's paper the potential measured was that of the central radium-emanation bulb (the source charges positive as electrons leave it); the outer silvered flask was the collector. Evidence: abstract, Proc. R. Soc. A 88, 471 (1913): "The potential gained by the bulb was measured". The 150 kV and 0.01 nA figures are from secondary sources (Wikipedia, Atomic battery); the primary paper was not read.
2. A09 "inferred" (Weber) and the earlier note section 3.5: "Joseph Weber's 1980s claim ... was never confirmed" should read: tested in at least four experiments (Franson and Jacobs 1992; Eöt-Wash; Luo et al. 1995; Feng et al. 2006) with null results; Feng et al. put the limit 526 times below Weber's prediction (Franklin 2010).
3. Earlier note section 3.2, "silver-108m, about 440 years": right on the half-life (439 y) but 108mAg decays mainly (91.3%) by electron capture to palladium-108, not to cadmium. The 109Cd-109Ag gap is 215 keV to three figures (the note says 214).
4. Earlier note sections 2 and 3.6, A09 "open" item 1 and the Q09 question text ("Radiant Energy p. 55" for the diamonds): the diamond sentence is on printed p.54 (scan p.55) of the "1926" printing. The "other properties" passage is printed p.58 (scan p.59), as cited.
5. Earlier note section 2 ("Reads like Le Bon; not yet checked") and A09 "open" item 1 ("Pp. 58-59: Le Bon's, see A11"): confirmed that the phosphorescence paragraph is Le Bon's (Evolution of Matter, Book VI Ch.VII sec.1), but "and sometimes other properties" is not in Le Bon: it is Moray's addition (with other changes listed in section 3). A11 matched the folded-cylinder paragraph on p.59 to Le Bon's experimental part; this run matches the phosphorescence paragraph on p.58 to Book VI Ch.VII. The earlier note's table heading "(Radiant Energy pp. 58-59 ...)" and its line "Le Bon's 'other properties'" in A09 "inferred" item 1 should say "Moray's 'other properties' (added to Le Bon's text)".
6. Earlier note section 3.6 ("Nothing in the project files shows Moray used diamond"): still true for diamond as a detector material, but the project files do contain an account (Foster 1990, in Perreault 2001 p.30) of Moray "detector" pellets made of radium-doped "Swedish Stone" pressed in a Tracy Hall diamond press. Not mentioned in the earlier note, the arbiter or the primer.
7. Earlier note section 3.8 ("helioseismology: interior sound speed matches the model to better than about 1%"): correct but conservative; the sourced figure is better than 0.2% rms for the 1990s standard models (Bahcall et al. 1996), worsened to about 1% after the 2005-2009 abundance revision [memory, medium].

Open

• Moseley's full 1913 paper (Proc. R. Soc. A 88, 471-476) for the 150 kV and current figures (Royal Society PDF in a browser, or the Internet Archive volume).
• Foster's 1990 original (letter or posting) and any record of "Project X" and the pressing contractor; whether this Foster is the one in the Fletcher correspondence.
• What Moray meant by "other properties": his notebooks (held by the family, per earlier runs) or the Mahurin material.
• Whether Le Bon's phosphorescent Brazilian diamonds were the boron-bearing type (type IIb, the only conducting natural diamonds) [memory, low]; Le Bon's memoir on phosphorescence would show what he tested.
• Unchanged decisive tests: radiation survey of a running device; assay of electrodes for new elements; gamma spectroscopy of surviving tubes and the Perreault pieces.

Sources

• Moray, Radiant Energy ("1926" printing), printed pp.54, 58 (scan pp.55, 59) [read].
• Moray, Isotopes in Ionic Recovery of U3O8, pp.23-25 [read, via A08].
• Moray and Taylor, Air Force Systems Command proposal, 7 Aug 1968, pp.1, 4-5 [read, via the earlier note].
• Moray, ed. J. E. Moray, The Sea of Energy, 5th ed. (1978), scan pp.136-137, 239 [read].
• Perreault, Radiant Energy Power Generation (Nuenergy, 2001), printed p.30: Foster 1990 [read].
• Le Bon, The Evolution of Matter (1909 transl.), Book IV Ch.III; Book VI Ch.VII sec.1. https://www.rexresearch.com/lebonmat/lebonmat.htm
• Moseley, Proc. R. Soc. A 88, 471 (1913). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1913.0045
• Wikipedia: Isotopes of silver; Isotopes of cadmium; Beta decay (bound-state section); Atomic battery.
• Planck Collaboration, Planck 2018 results VI. https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06209
• Borexino, Nature 562, 505 (2018) (luminosity figures via snippets); Nature 587, 577 (2020), https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15115 ; https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.09279
• Bahcall et al. 1996, arXiv astro-ph/9610250 (snippet).
• Franklin, Perspectives on Science 18, no. 2 (2010). https://www.colorado.edu/physics/sites/default/files/attached-files/gravitywavesandneutrinos.pdf