Efficiency of Fusion

Tim Day writes:
> [can't fuse 4 Hydrogen to get one Helium]

That's what I thought, until I added the mass of 4 Hydrogen atoms
and found it to be greater than the mass of one Helium atom.  THinking
about it, a single hydrogen atom could be converted into a neutron
(neutron = proton + electron), so on paper, you could get a helium
atom from 4 hydrogen atoms.  I doubt it's so in real life.

There are a lot of other things involved (like neutrinos and such)
which I'm no guru on, so could some physics guru take over from here?
And I never expected my result to be the final word.  It was just a
ballpark estimate.

And as for "this thread is silly, Traveller is supposed to be fun":
There are some of us who think that trying to explain Traveller rules
in terms of real life lots of fun.  Oh yeah, if relativity is having
problems explaining jump drives, change relativity.  I'm sure Einstein
never intended relativity to account for *everything* in the universe.
- - --
John H. Kim
[email removed]
[email removed]