  We have recently shown that the cosmic ray energy distributions as detected
on earthbound, low flying balloon or high flying satellite detectors can be
computed by employing the heats of evaporation of high energy particles from
astrophysical sources. In this manner, the experimentally well known power law
exponents of the cosmic ray energy distribution have been theoretically
computed as 2.701178 for the case of ideal Bose statistics, 3.000000 for the
case of ideal Boltzmann statistics and 3.151374 for the case of ideal Fermi
statistics. By "ideal" we mean virtually zero mass (i.e. ultra-relativistic)
and noninteracting. These results are in excellent agreement with the
experimental indices of 2.7 with a shift to 3.1 at the high energy ~ PeV "knee"
in the energy distribution. Our purpose here is to discuss the nature of cosmic
ray power law exponents obtained by employing conventional thermal quantum
field theoretical models such as quantum chromodynamics to the cosmic ray
sources in a thermodynamic scheme wherein gamma and zeta function regulation is
employed. The key reason for the surprising accuracy of the ideal boson and
ideal fermion cases resides in the asymptotic freedom or equivalently the
Feynman "parton" structure of the ultra-high energy tails of spectral
functions.
