PRACTICAL fusion device by Princeton physicist suppressed

[BeAChooser]

Let's not even talk about 1 million dead Iraqis

Yeah, let's not since that's a completely bogus claim.

 

[BenBurch]

Yeah, let's not since that's a completely bogus claim.

Oh, that's right, the real number is zero.

 

[Cuddles]

HOWEVER, I do not expect we can deploy any significant number of these plants before 2050 or so, and so I believe we need to plan for ITER not working, and invest in about 10,000 conventional 500 MW PWR fission power plants. Even with fusion coming on line, these plants will still be economically viable to run to their design lifetimes; Fusion will NOT be cheap, especially at first.

This is a good point, and it's not just the cost that is the problem. Even the most optimistic predictions, assuming ITER works perfectly, allow around 10 years for work on ITER and other research, one or more prototype power plants after that with the first comercial plants only being built around 2050 or later. We're going to need a lot more power before then. Even in the best case scenario, fusion is a long term solution, not an immediate one.

In a subsequent post, you refer to the power vs. radius function, stated by Bussard, as an "assumption". I say baloney. As long as we're not quibbling about whether or not it's the 7.00 power dependence of 6.86 power dependence, the impression that I got is that these were sound theoretical calculations, based on accepted theory.

I could be completely wrong, but I wouldn't take some anonymous poster's word on a message board for it, any more than you should take Bussard's claim as gospel. The people who are qualified to evaluate these claims are physicists who have actually studied the matter.

Like me. Try the Wiki article for some basic information. The fact is, Bussard made a lot of assumptions, and many of them just aren't supported by the evidence. Some of them may turn out to be true, but most people don't think so. Try this:
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf

Bussard said otherwise (wrt predicting a reliable decision point; this doesn't mean he gave a specific date, but he did give a specific dollar figure, and you can extrapolate a reasonable guess for a time upper bound from that). Again, who is fit to determine whether he or you are correct? Answer: physicists who have studied the matter, and who have whatever other requisite background knowledge may be required.

Yes, Bussard said otherwise. Very few people agree with him, for the reasons I have give. If (big if) all his assumptions are correct, then building a reactor the size he said would work. If any of his assumptions fail, especially with respect to bremmstralung and thermalisation of ions, then it won't. Even in the best case, it is still not much different than other approaches since they all know what they need to do to reach break even, they just haven't got there yet. And again, I am a physicist who has studied the matter.

Nobody has definitively answered the chicken or egg question (of course, it's ill-posed), and neither can anybody definitively make a statement such as you have. You completely ignored the difference in funding level, not to mention the years of research.

What statement can't I make? That tokamaks are currently the most advanced? Sure I can. They have achieved the highest fusion rates out of any approach. There is no question about that. Whether they are the best approach remains to be seen, but there's no point trying to argue that they're not the most advanced. I'll ignore your "years of research" comment since other approaches were being researched before tokamaks were invented.

As for funding, the reason they have more funding is exactly as I have said - they are the most advanced. When the Russians first invented the tokamak they achieved temperatures orders of magnitude higher than had been managed before. They were focussed on because of that and have stayed ahead of everything else ever since. No conspiracy, just common sense. It's exactly the same as silicon chips. Silicon may not be the best approach, but it was the best when it was invented and has stayed ahead because of that.

Solving our energy problems is so important, I am all for funding all approaches, full tilt. It's not just a question of how much oil is left, but of what military action is required to have access to that oil, and the threat that poses to world peace. Just recently, Hugo Chavez threatened to cut off Venezuelan oil to the US...

Sure, but you have to bear in mind that there just isn't enough time or money to research everything equally. On the one hand, you have fairly established technology that will almost certainly give results, even though it might not be the best. On the other hand, you have an unproven technology that has had various exaggerated claims made about it that aren't supported by the fusion and plasma physics community. Research is being done on both, and on many other approaches as well, but it would be foolish to waste money on the one with the least promise.

BTW, I heard a talk by a guy form the Princeton Plasma Lab a few years ago. He claimed that the tokamak R&D is hitting milestones as a function of dollars pretty well. The reason it's taking so long is because of cuts to funding, going back to (I think) President Reagan's administration.

The main reason it's taking so long is that there's a lot of complex physics and engineering. Building and testing things takes time. As I said in my reply to BenBurch above, even if we have everything right, it will still take something like 30 years to get comercial power, and up until now we certainly didn't have everything right. Bear in mind that America isn't everything. Tokamaks were invented in Russia, they've been built and tested all over the world and ITER is being built in Europe. Sure, American funding would be nice as well, but we seem to manage fairly well without it.

 

[Cuddles]

1) the tokamak at the Princeton lab hit and passed the break-even point long ago

No it didn't. TFTR achieved Q = 0.3 and the best. Several proposed upgrades should theoretically have managed to get Q >= 1, but were never implemented. http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0741-3335/39/12B/008/p71b07.pdf?request-id=oocq2Qnb3BGS__bw2wi7Kg

Edit: As I noted earlier, the JT-60 reactor in Japan is the only reactor that has even achieved the conditions necessary for break-even, but they did so using a D-H fuel mix, which is harder to fuse than D-T.

 

[sol invictus]

No it didn't. TFTR achieved Q = 0.3 and the best. Several proposed upgrades should theoretically have managed to get Q >= 1, but were never implemented. http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0741-3335/39/12B/008/p71b07.pdf?request-id=oocq2Qnb3BGS__bw2wi7Kg

Not according to a senior staff physicist there I spent several hours talking to recently. I was quite surprised to hear that, so I made him repeat it twice to be sure I understood him correctly: "Can you get more energy out than you put in? - Yes, but not for long.". He emphasized that the problem is not achieving break-even, but rather stabilizing the plasma.

Do you know how Q is defined? Maybe it's an average over some amount of time?

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

That question sounds like it would be prone to miscommunication to me. If you initiate any fusion at all you're going to get out more energy than you put in. Not necessarily recoverable energy though.

 

[BeAChooser]

Oh, that's right, the real number is zero.

Now, of course, I've never suggested any such thing. That would be just as ridiculous as claiming a million have died since our invasion.

 

[Aepervius]

I think what metamars means is that the spacecraft accelerates at 1g (that is, 32 ft/s²) for half the journey, then turns around and decelerates at 1g for the other half of the journey. This means for the duration of the trip the crew would feel as if it was under normal Earth gravity.

I assume he meant the ship would depart from orbit, not the Earth's surface.

56,000,000 km is the shortest distance from earth to mars. Using only newtonian mechanic :
An acceleration of 1g, is an acceleration of 10 m.s-2.
After a time t, starting at speed=0 t=0 distance=0 you reach the speed v=g*t and the distance d=0.5*g*t^2. So assuming we accelerate 1/2 of the way, we will reach the 28,000,000 km after t=(d*2/g)^0,5~75000 seconds or roughly 21 hours. At that point we would have a speed of v=750,000 ms-1 or v=750 km s-1 or 1/400 of c light speed.

So we have now 21 h of constant acceleration and 21 h of deceleration.

The force needed to accelerate a 1 Kg of ship at g would be 10 N. The same Kg of ship accelerated then decelerated would then expand an an energy of force*distance=10 N*56,000,000,000 (1/2 accelerate + 1/2 decelerate)=5,6 E 11 N.m or Joule.
Admiting you come back, that is roughly 1E12 Joule.

Knowing that 1 joule = 6.1e18 eV and knowing fusion occurs at roughly from 2 to 20 MeV, that means using a ballpark of 10 MeV per fusion you would need at least 3,4.E+23 fusions. Or nearly 1 Mole. Going back to our numbers , we would need sustained fusion for 42 hours at a rate of 1/250000 mole per seconds (~.1E18 per second) and generate an energy of 3,8 million joule per seconds.

I hope I did not commit an error anywhere. And that is only for 1 Kg of material...

 

[metamars]

Yeah, let's not since that's a completely bogus claim.

Oh, really?

A fifth of Iraqi households lost at least one family member between March 2003 and August 2007 due to the conflict, said data compiled by London-based Opinion Research Business (ORB) and its research partner in Iraq, the Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS).

The study based its findings on survey work involving the face-to-face questioning of 2414 Iraqi adults aged 18 or above, and the last complete census in Iraq in 1997, which indicated a total of 4.05 million households.

 

[BeAChooser]

A fifth of Iraqi households lost at least one family member between March 2003 and August 2007 due to the conflict,

Oh really? Where are the mass graves? Where are the death certificates? Where are the images or videos of this slaughter? Do you honestly think those who want us out of Iraq have no cameras and no motivation to use such images? Do you honestly think every journalist in Iraq has simply missed such a carnage?

 

[sol invictus]

Oh, really?

Yeah, sounds about right. The best estimates are that 2-4 million Vietnamese were killed during five or so years of that war. Many - probably most - of those casualties resulted directly or indirectly from the American air war. Seymour Hirsch did an analysis of the air war in Iraq, and the amount of bombs the Americans have been dropping is really staggering. It's not reported much in the media for some reason, but he pieced the numbers together from publicly available information supplied by the military. It's are comparable to Vietnam, and the Iraq war has been going on for nearly five years now.

And then of course there are all the sectarian killings... not to mention all the children that died or were stunted before the war even started by all those years of sanctions.

 

[metamars]

Like me. Try the Wiki article for some basic information. The fact is, Bussard made a lot of assumptions, and many of them just aren't supported by the evidence. Some of them may turn out to be true, but most people don't think so. Try this:
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf

Thanks, that dissertation looks very interesting. Unfortunately, at 300 pp., and given how I am "over the hill" in my physics knowledge, it'll take a long time to get to this. (Years, I mean.)

Yes, Bussard said otherwise. Very few people agree with him, for the reasons I have give. If (big if) all his assumptions are correct, then building a reactor the size he said would work. If any of his assumptions fail, especially with respect to bremmstralung and thermalisation of ions, then it won't. Even in the best case, it is still not much different than other approaches since they all know what they need to do to reach break even, they just haven't got there yet. And again, I am a physicist who has studied the matter.

Would you briefly explain what Bussard's assumptions are wrt bremmstralung, and why must fusion physicists wouldn't agree with him? Also, does this explain most of the difference (in Bussard's estimation) between the 7th and 5th power dependencies? I would assume that a large part of going from 7th power -> 5th power has to do with cooling the (superconducting?) magnets. Is this correct?

What statement can't I make? That tokamaks are currently the most advanced? Sure I can. They have achieved the highest fusion rates out of any approach. There is no question about that. Whether they are the best approach remains to be seen, but there's no point trying to argue that they're not the most advanced.

No. What I tried to say is that, relative to the amount of money spent, Bussard seems to have made far, far more progress than tokamaks. Furthermore, he seems closer to a viable demo scale project than tokamaks. (If not true today, it still seems like it was true when the Navy shut him down.)

Of course, I am using his own opinion, I haven't been following tokamaks closely, and even if I had, I'm not a fusion physicist, and thus scrutinizing their claims would be a problem.

I'll ignore your "years of research" comment since other approaches were being researched before tokamaks were invented.

Yes, but the polyhedral device came after tokamaks, and what sort of progress did they make? Hasn't the polyhedral device left the Farnsworth type devices in the dust?

As for funding, the reason they have more funding is exactly as I have said - they are the most advanced. When the Russians first invented the tokamak they achieved temperatures orders of magnitude higher than had been managed before. They were focussed on because of that and have stayed ahead of everything else ever since.

And you don't think that the reason that they are the most advanced is because they have the most funding? Aren't both these statements, in fact, true?

From http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3622/is_199707/ai_n8762556

After peaking at about $600 million (in 1995 dollars) in the late 1970s, the annual U.S. fusion budget has declined to $232 million this year. As a result, fusion researchers had to abandon many worthwhile efforts. Concentrating on the tokamak configuration has paid off in terms of scientific advancement, but it has substantially narrowed the scientific and institutional bases of the U.S. fusion program. Several experimental facilities intended to explore alternative magnetic-confinement concepts were shut down prematurely. The fusion technology program was reduced drastically. The broader objectives and the schedule associated with the former goal of practical fusion energy have recently been delayed, replaced by the more limited objective of exploring the underlying science.

In 1995, alone, the total fusion budget in the US was $600 million. I don't know what percentage was for tokamak, but probably most of it was. Clearly, tokamaks have been vastly better supported than the polyhedral devices.

No conspiracy, just common sense. It's exactly the same as silicon chips. Silicon may not be the best approach, but it was the best when it was invented and has stayed ahead because of that.

There are more options here than conspiracy and common sense. There's groupthink and bureaucratic inertia, e.g. I've read both Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with Physics, and know only too well how even presumably rational people behave quite tribally.



Some interesting info I ran into just now:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html

The following links are to scanned images of a legislative proposal sent by Robert W. Bussard, one of the founders of the US fusion energy program, to Congress suggesting that the fusion energy program be replaced by a system of prize awards for timely achievement of specific technical milestones.

Dr. Bussard's cover letter contains some historically very important disclosures concerning the founding of the United States government's fusion energy program - in particular this excerpt:

The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.

Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.

From

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/28609695/m/134001733831

To answer your questions posed under the Hawking topic ...

I worked for Dr. Bussard for about 5 and a half years.

Dr. Nicholas A. Krall has been working with Dr. Bussard on this essentially from the start. His reputation as a theoretical plasma physicist is on par with Bussard's as a designer.

If I had 200 million and enough left over to live on comfortably, this thing would be funded already.

Bussard's approach is essentially a "perfect Hirsch/Farnsworth Fusor". It is a spherical convergent focus electrodynamic particle accelerator. It doesn't work on maxwellianized heat, it works by raising ions to fusion velocity and focussing them on a central convergence point. Ions not making fusion collisions recirculate, and those making elastic non-fusion collisions have their energy re-equalized by a collisional phenomenon that occurs near the outside of the potential well. The result is long ion lifetime at high kinetic energy.

I have a little Hirsch/Farnsworth fusor that puts out 3000 fusions per second at 18 kV on DD. At 12.5 kV, the highest drive voltage WB-6 was run at, most fusors put out so little you have to beat the counting statistics to death to even detect the output, but WB-6 actually put out (for about a quarter of a millisecond at a time) a screaming load of neutrons. Yesterday I read a report that noted that one of the tests was actually run at 5 kV and produced a neutron count (26000 fusions per count) in the 1/4 millisecond or so that the deep potential well existed. Realizing that the statistical significance of one count is +/- 100%, it still floored me. NOBODY does DD fusion at detectable levels at 5 keV. The reason it could happen is that the machine naturally produces head-on collisions at fusion energies in the region around the central convergence point.

I'm not at all worried by the fact WB-6 was a pulsed machine. I built and ran the smaller WB-3, which was perfectly capable of running essentially continuously at about 1/2 of the WB-6 parameters. Correctly built, larger machines should be able to run continuously.

The scaling formulas for output tend to go up as B^4R^3, and gain goes up at B^4R. Bussard expects B to scale with R, which is probably a gross under-estimate once you get into the superconductingmagnets he intends to use. WB-6 ran most of its successful tests below 0.1 T. The scaleup he wants to do for p-B11 is from R of 0.15 meters (WB-6) to R of 2 meters. ITER recently tested one of their magnets at 13 T, and I think 25-30 T is achievable. If his output scaling is correct, even scaling up WB-6 to the larger sizes and fields suggests the thing is going to run, and WB-6 was almost certainly not running in an optimal fashion.

Unless he is missing something really important, the thing should work. Most technical criticisms people have mounted of this thing wind up referencing a master's thesis by Todd Rider, and to the best of my knowledge, the points Rider raised have all been addressed. Some were were wrong or not applicable to this machine, one important one the machine itself corrects via a collision mechanism of the ions near the MaGrid, one is insignificant with proper design. The electron loss problem in cusps was essentially correct, but applies only to the HEPS-style machines. The MaGrids (which WB-6 is) are immune to it because they recirculate electrons lost to the cusps. And Rider never said it wouldn't work, he just hoped a way could be found to overcome the problems he felt he had detected.

(emphasis mine)

 

[Cuddles]

Not according to a senior staff physicist there I spent several hours talking to recently. I was quite surprised to hear that, so I made him repeat it twice to be sure I understood him correctly: "Can you get more energy out than you put in? - Yes, but not for long.". He emphasized that the problem is not achieving break-even, but rather stabilizing the plasma.

Do you know how Q is defined? Maybe it's an average over some amount of time?

Q should be simply ratio of fusion power to total input power. I suspect that the figures quoted in the paper I linked to are actually the ratio of fusion power to external beam heating, which will give a higher Q than reality since it discounts various other power requirements such as magnets. I really can't comment on what you've been told, but according to every single official notice, no reactor has ever reached break-even.

Would you briefly explain what Bussard's assumptions are wrt bremmstralung, and why must fusion physicists wouldn't agree with him? Also, does this explain most of the difference (in Bussard's estimation) between the 7th and 5th power dependencies? I would assume that a large part of going from 7th power -> 5th power has to do with cooling the (superconducting?) magnets. Is this correct?

The 7th and 5th powers are different things. Bussard claims a 7th power dependence of fusion power with size and a 5th power dependence on excess energy with size. They are essentially just different ways of saying the same thing.

The bremmstrahlung calculations seem to rest on several assumptions about the distribution of ion and electron energies in the reactor. This is also related to the thermalisation problems, where Bussard said that this would not occur, but I can't find any actual calculations to justify this, he seems to have just asserted it. If this is not true, then any assumptions about energy distributions based on it will also not be true.

One problem that has really struck me on having a closer look is that it seems a common theme in Bussard's work to use almost only himself as a reference. While a certain amount of self-referential work is expected in new, non-mainstream work, this seems to be much worse than normal. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong, but it is one more thing that makes it look suspicious.

No. What I tried to say is that, relative to the amount of money spent, Bussard seems to have made far, far more progress than tokamaks. Furthermore, he seems closer to a viable demo scale project than tokamaks. (If not true today, it still seems like it was true when the Navy shut him down.)

It's really hard to say. Certainly less money has been spent on the polywell. However, it doesn't actually have any solid results. Until it gest results you really can't say he made more progress. Maybe in a couple of decades we will be able to say that he had a much better approach. On the other hand, maybe in a couple of decades we will know that it was a complete waste of money. It's just not possible to say without hindsight.

Yes, but the polyhedral device came after tokamaks, and what sort of progress did they make? Hasn't the polyhedral device left the Farnsworth type devices in the dust?

Well, this all starts brining up semantics about when did research on something actually start. Sure, the polywell is an advance over the Farnsworth fusor, but it is still really just an improvement rather than something new, just as stellerators are a variation of tokamaks. I would say that research on both the polywell and stellerators started in the 60s, even though those particular variations have only been around for a decade or so. In that case, neither has really made any more progress than any other approach.

And you don't think that the reason that they are the most advanced is because they have the most funding? Aren't both these statements, in fact, true?

From http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3622/is_199707/ai_n8762556

In 1995, alone, the total fusion budget in the US was $600 million. I don't know what percentage was for tokamak, but probably most of it was. Clearly, tokamaks have been vastly better supported than the polyhedral devices.

I'm not denying that. However, the reason they have been better supported is because they have had better results. Sure, it's a bit of a vicious circle, but what else could be a sensible way to handle it? Something seems to be the best approach, so you give it more money. Since it has more money, it remains the better approach. That's basically what I said in my last post. The reasons why tokamaks are currently the best approach is really of less interest than the fact that they are currently the best approach.

Another point is that I don't believe Bussard's estimates of cost can be realistic. For example, the TFTR was one of the biggest and most successful reactors so far, and ran at around 30MW maximum. Bussard said the machine he wanted to build would run at over 100MW. He also wanted it to be superconducting, which his previous designs weren't. This sort of thing really doesn't come cheap. $1-200 million just doesn't sound anywhere near enough. I'm no finance expert, so I could be wrong, but I suspect this is just another example of exaggeration.

This is, as I have said, what seems to be the main problem with the polywell. It looks like a very interesting idea with definite potential, but the claims made about it and the actual potential just don't seem to match up.

There are more options here than conspiracy and common sense. There's groupthink and bureaucratic inertia, e.g. I've read both Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with Physics, and know only too well how even presumably rational people behave quite tribally.

The reason I've particularly nonsensed (it's a reall word, honest) conspiracies is because that's what the OP was saying, and the thread was initially in the Conspiracy forum. Again, it comes down to limited resources. Governments can't just pump money into everything, they have to pick and choose. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems like the most popular choice for physics funding is nothing at all. However, one particularly telling things about the polywell is that it has not just failed to get the funding it wants from the government, it has also failed to get it from private sources.

Some interesting info I ran into just now:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html

From

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/28609695/m/134001733831

(emphasis mine)

I'd be more convined if he could actually say where the criticisms have been answered, rather than just stating that they have been.

 

[metamars]

Don't forget Focus Fusion. http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php

Indeed.

I just saw the video of Eric Lerner's talk at Google. Very interesting - he compares various fusion technologies, including tokamaks. He's actually beaten out the Princeton tokamak (see 49:00 into the Google video), which has gotten 10,000x as much money.

He also compares his approach to other non-tokamak approaches, including Bussard's. He's beaten ALL of them, even though they've gotten much more money than he ever got.

 

[sol invictus]

There's groupthink and bureaucratic inertia, e.g. I've read both Not Even Wrong and The Trouble with Physics, and know only too well how even presumably rational people behave quite tribally.

You're referring to the authors of those books?

 

[sol invictus]

Q should be simply ratio of fusion power to total input power. I suspect that the figures quoted in the paper I linked to are actually the ratio of fusion power to external beam heating, which will give a higher Q than reality since it discounts various other power requirements such as magnets. I really can't comment on what you've been told, but according to every single official notice, no reactor has ever reached break-even.

Yeah, you're quite right. So I don't understand what he was saying - I'll ask again next time I'm over there, if ever.

 

[metamars]

You're referring to the authors of those books?

No, I'm referring to the string theory community, which was part of the subject of those books. Both authors were critical not only of string theory, but also string theorists.

 

[sol invictus]

No, I'm referring to the string theory community, which was part of the subject of those books. Both authors were critical not only of string theory, but also string theorists.

I'm not a string theorist, but I know several and I'm very familiar with the state of modern theoretical physics. I'm also acquainted with the authors of both of those books. Woit is a failed physicist that seems to have been embittered by that experience. He criticizes what he is incapable of contributing to. Smolin I have even less regard for - he has his own peculiar brand of quantum gravity, more or less indistinguishable from string theory to the layman, but which has not succeeded in attracting much attention or many students (largely because, unlike string theory, it has failed to make any contributions to anything). His agenda is to attack string theory so as to gain more resources for his sub-field. Both of these authors badly misrepresent the state of the field. For example they pretend that string theorists dominate the establishment. I recall Smolin making some ridiculous claim about the percentage of jobs that go to string theorists. All you have to do is look here to see the truth - there is not a single string theory candidate on any shortlist for any faculty job anywhere in the United States this year. The situation was similar last year, and in previous years there were at most a few. Furthermore both make the absurd claim that students are pressured to study string theory. Nothing could be further from the truth - on the contrary, string theory students have more trouble getting into Ph.D. programs, generally struggle to find funding and advisors, difficulty finding postdocs, and cannot get faculty positions (because there aren't any). Grad students are generally quite tuned in and know all of that, and are explicitly discouraged by their departments from going into theory - and yet many make the choice to study it anyway. Why? Because they think it's the most interesting subject to work on. These are people who could easily go work in finance and earn 5-10 times the salary they make as Ph.D. students and postdocs. Are you really going to second guess them? Isn't it a bit condescending of Smolin and Woit to think they know what's best for the field - better than the people actually doing the work?[\rant] EDIT - sorry, I take it back. There is ONE string theorist on ONE shortlist - a guy that's been bouncing from postdoc to postdoc for maybe 7 years. Groupthink in action? Hmm... And a choice quote from Smolin, just to show you how even-handed and unbiased he is: Smolin adds a moral dimension to his plaint, linking string theory to the physics profession’s “blatant prejudice” against women and blacks. Pondering the cult of empty mathematical virtuosity, he asks, “How many leading theoretical physicists were once insecure, small, pimply boys who got their revenge besting the jocks (who got the girls) in the one place they could—math class?” Do they abuse their pets too?

 

[balrog666]

I'd like to comment more on this, but don't have the time right now.

See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606 for a talk given at Google.

According to a very bright, Princeton educated physicist Robert Bussard, who has successfully created fusion in small, magnetically confined polyhedral devices, all of the physics problems have been solved, and all that is required to solve are engineering problems.

To find out what the benefits are, and why they had to be underfunded to get any government funding, at all, you can just watch the last part starting at 1:00.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Bussard that China or possibly India are likely to develop this before the US. This is tragic, in that Bussard is an American, the patents are owned by an American company, and there's no good reason why the US couldn't lead the way to a very benign ecological future.

Of the two, it is China that is working on "very interesting" tokamak fusion devices, apart from the huge (and, according to Bussard, likely futile) international ITER fusion project, and that "will beat ITER to the punch".

Developing these power plants would allow very rapid space travel. Going to Mars should only take about 4 weeks, and 76 days to Titan, a Saturnian moon.

So, don't be surprised when China not only leaves the US in the dust economically, but furthermore leaves the US still piddling with kerosene fueled rockets while they zoom throughout the solar system on fusion powered systems.

Maybe if we ask them nicely, they will let us hitch a ride.

Finally, Bussard's project got completely defunded a few years ago. He was getting funding from the Navy, "under the radar", but even the chump change he was getting was cut when the Navy's R&D budget got cut by 26%. The money was needed for George Bush's Iraq fiasco.

To find out why he's given up on the US government, including and especially DOE, watch the video. There is definitely a 'conspiracy' of careerism and bureaucracy (if you can call it that - Bussard certainly didn't).

Is there more to it than that?


edited to correct spelling of Bussard's name

How did I miss this thread?

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! We know how fusion works in the sun too - we just have to work out the "engineering problems" to put it to use.


What a load of dog poop!

 

[BeAChooser]

Both of these authors badly misrepresent the state of the field.

Really? Can you name a product we use in our daily lives that has resulted from string theory? Just one product. Can you name one prediction that string theory has successfully made? Has it even made a falsifiable prediction? Can you name any data proving string theory is real? Or is this just another one of your gnomes, sol?