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College Freshman Builds Fusion Reactor
Aiua writes "The Deseret Morning News is reporting that a Utah State University freshman has built a nuclear fusion reactor and compares how the student is similar to Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of the television and designer of the plans for a fusion reactor)."
Is his name Dexter by any chance?
Philo T. Farnsworth? Is he any relation to Hubert Farnsworth, inventor of the smelloscope?
Mr. Fusion! I wonder if he had any help from Doc and Marty?
Jerry Fletcher,
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obviously this kid has created the reactor in order to forward his terrorist agenda of underming U.S. society by blowing up SCO
.
why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?
That kid obviously has waaaay too much time on his hands. I can't imagine doing that my freshman year.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Boy, it seems as though Utah has invented yet another way to do fusion... didn't a pair of scientists from Utah already invent fusion once before? What were their names? Pons and Fleischman?
Oh yeah, I forgot... that line of investigation went cold.
On the other hand, wouldn't the FBI be looking hard at him now that has built something like this?
Check out Fusor.net.
Yawn.
...Building it would get him older college chicks?
$5 says this is proven to be a clever hoax soon.
You think this wouldn't be all over the papers?
What I love is how the article is completely free of those "fact" things. All I see is a tv screen with some molecules on it. I wrote a program that put molecules on a tv screen when I was a freshman too.
I don't know. If its real, that's excellent. But my BS-o-meter is screaming.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
... this puts new meaning into the words Freshman 15, 15 minutes of fame, 15 megawatts of Power, 15 years of trying to top this, 15 attempts at suicide, 15 divorces.
I mean, it's cool he could do this and all, but there's already 30 of these around the country, they don't produce any excess energy, other than that from what will soon be hundreds of little slash.fingers merrily typing away... Misleading intro to this story - I was all set for some kind of great breakthrough, and instead I get the equivalent of a SCO press staement - a story, some hot air, but nothing of real substance. Or am I missing some greater consequence of this?
I guess he's supposed to be a smarty (even though the article says he followed someone else's instructions on how to build the reactor), but I sure hope he knows what he's doing so his classmates won't have to deal with growing extra legs and stuff...
No, it's not cold fusion. It's been around for a long time, and it's been mentioned here before. See the wikipedia entry at:
_ Fu sor
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch
This thing has a vaccum pump attatched to it, I wonder why?
Either way, that would be one part you could omit if this were launched into space. Could anyone familiar with how this thing works tell me if it would run in space?
He got second place in a science competition? It makes me wonder what project won first place. An advanced prototype of a nuclear fission weapon using kitchen grease as fissionable material? How manay days is it until April 1st?
"Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. "
I guess we have a new winner for what to do with AOL CDs.
Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs.
Write a successful NSF grant proposal to do it.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
He isn't a die hard nerd that sits around reading books all day, getting straight A's, and spending time doing various things the stereotypical nerd would do. It goes to show that we need to understand that people don't all see things the same, learn the same, and fit in the same model we believe works so well. This college student is more a mechanic than any typical scientist.
I point all this to intellectual property. He was fortunately able to obtain most of his material cheaply and easily, but what about most hobbyists that want to fidle with new technology? Where do they get the money for new tools, machines, etc? If we applied an open source model to intellectual property and treated ideas not as property, but as what they really are, then we could accelerate scientific and technological progress greatly. What this college student did is quite amazing. The thing he built is only found in top notch institutions. I just think we need more plagiarism prevention, not patents. Btw, I'm sorry for being somewhat off-topic, but I feel that there is an important lesson to be learned here.
Question everything.
Good way to win a Darward Award while still living if you ask me...
Blockwars: free, multiplayer, and with new features!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs.
RIAA: "They wouldn't be CD's with pirated music on them would they ??"
Wallace: "No sir, Mr. RIAA-man. But you can have a look yourself. I keep them over there in that nuclear reactor. Fill your boots."
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
p
And
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
I can see the second.. but the first!?!?!?
http://www.sciserv.org/isef/results/grnd2003.as
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I was once an ISEF finalist/winner. "Second place" is a designation given to a substantial number of projects at the International fair. There are like 5-10 blue (first), 10-30 red (second), etc. The biggest winners are in a seperate catagory -- things like the, "BLAH T. BLAH SCIENCE AWARD" that includes a trip to Japan, or a trip to see the Nobel ceremonies, etc etc. Interestingly, building a project like this is really only a certain level of merit at a real science fair (like ISEF). I used to build devices like that -- and get awards like second place. The real thing the judges are looking for is scientific/research content. For instance, the kid may have built this and got it to work, but did he improve on the design? did he measure the efficiency of the system? did he use the device to study some effect X, Y, or Z? This may sound crazy, but at that level the high school students are expected to perform at the level of grad student researchers. The winning doesn't really matter, though -- the kid got a postiive experience that will stay with him for the rest of his life...!
Scientists have built PLENTY that work. But they do not produce more energy than it takes to maintain the reaction. This one does not, either.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Unfortunately, Wallace's IEC, like every other IEC ever built, doesn't get even close to break-even. Their primary utility is, as the article mentions, as a neutron source (and in fact that's what they're usually used for). There are some folks that are hopeful they can find a way to improve the efficiency of IEC fusion and exceed break-even (Robert Bussard, of Bussard ram-jet fame, for example), but no one's managed to actually demonstrate a working, energy-generating IEC yet.
Is that the next generation nintendo?
This is no hoax, its an effect that has been known for many decades. It's just that no one, not even this guy have found a way to produce excess energy from it (as in producing more energy that it consumes in triggering the fusion)
... but they'd just be an inefficient curiosity too.
This clever guy just happened to do it himself.
Its no big deal, no huge discovery, just an interesting scientific device. - Something to make the ignorant masses wonder how there couldnt be enough power to meet the US's demands during the big black out when we mastered fusion energy years ago.
The tinkerer deserves a pat on the back for making it work, however he deserves no prizes. He merely repeated well known science rather than doing something new.
Heck, I'd be growing diamonds in my back yard if I could afford to buy the super huge vintage world war 2 press at an industrial site down the road from me
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
I haven't RTFA'd it yet, but lets renember that making a fusion reactior is a lot different than making a fusion reactor that can generate more energy than is used to prime it. The former we've been doing for years, the latter - making one that outputs more energy than is put into it is the real trick.
Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of the television... )
The inventor of television is not necessarily Farnsworth -- there are several scientists with good claims on the title (including John Logie Baird, after whom the Logie television awards are named).
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Please, this is just bs. First off anybody can build one of these, schematics and tips and even a forum on getting help from others can be found at www.fusor.net . And this guys wins a science fair for no original thought. I guess the judges didn't know how to use google.
A good fusor reference with some close-up pictures of a working device is available here.
...this is a lot better effort by a kid (and a great read, too). I mean - this guy's doctoral thesis got classified Top Secret, etc... *and* he got to hang out with The Big Guys of Nuclear Physics and Weapons Making... http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D068803351 2/thebrowsersbookwA/102-5759479-8637704
Like I said, I am not denigrating the kids work or his obvious smarts and the way he applied them - what I am getting at is the story title "here" was misleading. If the device was a Tesla coil, the headline would've claimed "Young Inventor Tames Lightning!"...
The Bush Administration announced a military attack on Utah in order to destroy an incipient WMD program....
I'VE BEEN LOOKING ALL OVER FOR THAT!
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
" if you RTFA you'll see that it isn't actually a fusion reactor or reaction at all. What it is is a deuterium ion plasma generator."
... ion plas*cough*aarghph*cough* for a fusion reactor? Hey Rob, what kind of Mickey Mouse show are you runnin' here?
Errr, yeah; what kind of stupid bastard mistakes a deu... deuterium
*darts eyes back and forth*
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Neutron generator tubes, that rely on deuterium-tritium fusion to generate neutrons, have been available for decades.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
... he will never *ever* get laid. Ever. Period.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Actually, there were sevral other winners in the physics catagory alone. from: http://www.sciserv.org/isef/results/grnd2003.asp
Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000
PH029 Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500
PH005 The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles
Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040 Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field
Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
PH046 Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus
Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
PH054 Electron-Phonon Interactions in Carbon Nanotubes
Edward Joesph Su, 18, William G. Enloe High School, Raleigh, North Carolina
It says that there are about 30 such reactors around. The special thing about this one is, that is was made from scrap parts. Please understand that there's really not all that much fusion happening here, definiteley not enough to get any energy output from it, you have to put energy in to heat the stuff up.
It's probably all really simple: every once in a while a deuterium core will tunnel into another deuterium core and cling to it (the actual process to get to He is probably a bit more complicated). That's fusion happening, only the odds are very bad. Create deuterium plasma, cage it with electromagnetic fields to apply some pressure and raise the energy high enough so the odds will get better. Aparently they get it to a few neutrons per minute (they measure 4 per minute).
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
But if -you- RTFA, you would note, he -did- actually acheive fusion in the thing. Albeit, only a few molecules a minute, way to low to ever be used as a power source, but the device -did- fuse Deuterium ions. Which does have the side effect of generating the neutron radiation, which is negligable, as the article mentiones, no more than airline passengers are exposed to (being up there with a little less atmospheric cover).
Atrox
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
As someone who participated in this science fair. I spent much of my time working in labs, contacting professionals, ensuring safety in the lab, as well as thorough and detailed demonstration of the development of such research. My endeavor lasted three years, with much frustration in recieving materials, gathering funding (mostly personal), as well as balancing an accelerated education with my projects.
While his project is surprisingly complex and I am sure safe and well thought out, it is quite difficult to demonstrate such an accomplishment in a concise and easily acceptable form. There are limitations given to contestants involving time to present, space, and strict rules regarding what projects are allowed to be running during the interview and booth judging.
As far as who has actually won first place in the physics section of the fair, following is a list of the overall, first and second place winners, as taken from the intel science fair website:
Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner
PH053
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000
PH029
Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You?
Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053
Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow
Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500
PH005
The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles
Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040
Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field
Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
PH046
Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus
Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
PH054
Electron-Phonon Interactions in Carbon Nanotubes
Edward Joesph Su, 18, William G. Enloe High School, Raleigh, North Carolina
OBLIVION!-
maybe because you refuse to look? yes, cold fusion got a bad rap and may very well be a crock of... non-fusing stuff. but there are smart people who disagree:
quotes cribbed (using Copy-n-Paste[TM]) from the wired magazine article on cold fusion
give it a read.
2 1337 4 u!
Considering they figured this stuff out on slide rules in the '40s and '50s, it can't be that hard.
This reminds me of an old Bloom County strip where Oliver Wendell Jones built a nuclear bomb for his class science project. The teacher asked him where he got the fissionable material and he said he scraped all the glowing stuff off thousands of watch dials...
"Attention students! Fire drill!"
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No, it isn't. If you just put enough U-235 together in the same place, it'll go BOOM all on its own.
A fusion bomb is just a fission bomb surrounding a dense deuterium/tritium core. Typically spherical to provide an even "squeeze" on the D/T mix. Blast plates push the plutonium together (of which the ciritcal mass is already widely known). It goes boom, crushing the D/T core with force beyond that found even in the sun. The core has nowhere to go, so it immediately fuses a good portion of its mass. The resulting secondary blast is even bigger than the fission explosion and gives us a really big boom.
"They found a neutron detector in an Idaho Falls scrap metal yard. Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. They found a broken turbo molecular pump lying forgotten at Deseret Industries." Did they find this stuff next to the broken particle accelerators? Or maybe under the old cray supercomputers?
also, things get easier with the more cocain you snort. snort enough cocain and you'll think you can build just about anything.
bite my glorious golden ass.
It actually is pretty hard to make an implosion-type bomb work. They didn't work out the designs using slide rules, but actually cobbled together what was a hell of a lot of computing power for the day. I don't remember if they actually built any general-purpose electronic computers, but at least some of the work was done by large teams of workers using single purpose calculating machines. One machine would could add, another multiply, etc. and the system was "programmed" by coming up with a specific order in which IBM cards containing the information being processed were run through the system. Richard Feynman discussed a lot about this system in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Admittedly the average mobile phone these days probably had enough processing power to do those calculations, but the Nobel Prize winning minds in charge of the project had a lot more to do with its success than the raw processing power.
FWIW, you can learn far more than you ever wanted to know about nuclear weapons by reading the Nuclear Weapons Archive. When you understand everything in there, you can start thinking about building bombs.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No, it isn't. If you just put enough U-235 together in the same place, it'll go BOOM all on its own.
If you don't put together just right, it will just melt and vaporize. "Right" means with sub-millisecond timing.
Some posts are saying that he'll never get laid, while others are commenting something about a 'breeder'. C'mon folks! Which is it?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I said undamaged ;)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You could drink it
You could drink it, but you wouldn't want to drink a lot of it. Heavy water in concentrations of over 50% apparently inhibits mitosis (cell division) and would lead to eventual death if not reduced. The symptons are similar to radiation poisoning/chemo with bone marrow, the stomach lining, and hair growth suffering the most damage since these tissues/process are dependent on high cell division rates.
You would have to ingest fairly significant amounts of D2O over serveral days to do this though. A concentration of 25% heavy water or less is most likely safe.
Son, it all starts when a man loves a woman...
sig?
Farnsworth fusors have been built by the dozens by many amateurs. In fact, anyone with little knowledge of high voltages and some crafty skills can make one. It's nothing more than a chamber which turns deuterium into plasma and a pump to keep it going. Some additionally have a neutron counter. Many believe that pushing the Farnsworth fusor is the precursor to cold fusion, but many more disagree. Nevertheless, this is nothing to be excited about. It would probably be more challanging to put together an erector set.
A blog like any other.
Kinda makes me wonder what ever happened to the teenager than tried to make a nuclear bomb out of smoke alarms. Seriously, it is amazing what you can do with round the house items nowadays.
Come get some....
I think it's mostly a human interest story with a very misleading title. It's sort of like some kid creating a 4 bit microprocessor with a magnifying glass and a soldering iron. He wins the science project, but he didn't do anything really new. The cool factor is there, but ultimately, it doesn't matter too much.
On the other hand, you can't deny the coolness factor. Wish I'd had that sort of support when I was a kid. My mom said I read too much science fiction and told me to go outside and get some exercise.
"It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
You don't even need electricity for that. Just mix beryllium with a good source of alpha particles like radium. Beryllium 9 undergoes an (alpha,n) fusion reaction with an incident alpha particle, generating carbon 12 and a loose neutron.
Beryllium 9 is great because it's essentially two helium nuclei held together by a loose neutron with a very low binding energy (1.66 MeV). It's almost the nuclear equivalent of an alkali metal. You can even pop the thing apart with a gamma ray if you don't want to bother with alpha emitters. For those who worry about berylliosis, boron 11 also works. The (alpha,n) reaction yields nitrogen 14.
This was the setup that Chadwick used for detecting the neutron in 1932. Back then neutrons were referred to as "beryllium radiation" (sort of like how electrons were first called "cathode rays") and were wrongly thought to be some sort of strongly penetrating photons. Chadwick surrounded his beryllium source with wax and measured the energies of the protons that got knocked out by elastic collisions. Wax is a great moderator because it's full of protons, and the neutron slams into a proton in the wax and loses all its energy like a billiard ball. The neutron that emerges from the wax is a slow neutron. Slow neutrons are generally much more useful than fast neutrons because they spend more time in your fissionable material, and there is no Coulomb barrier that they need to overcome so they react with nuclei very easily.
I shouldn't say too much more or else I'll get myself placed on the Bush Administration's new list of 100,000 maniacs. But if you're building a fission bomb, these reactions are really handy because your implosion doesn't last very long and you need to get hold of lots of slow neutrons in a hurry. If you're building a nuclear reactor for power generation, you're under less of a tight schedule and can probably wait a millisecond or two for neutrons from cosmic rays or spontaneous fissions to get your pile going.
No, if you just push a critical mass of decaying stuff together you don't get much of a boom. To get a real boom out of the bomb you have to have VERY precise timining and compression characteristics. Otherwise you basically have a compact HE dirty bomb. If all you want is a realitivly large explosion and some nuclear fallout it's easier to get a load of decaying but not capable of critical mass stuff and place it around a large conventional explosive like say a truck full of kerosene and fertilizer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I actually read quite a bit on these devices a few weeks ago when the cold fusion article came up on /.
One of the things I came across was Fusor, which is essentially a site for people who do this as a hobby.
The most interesting thing I found was a link to the work of a gentleman named Eric Lerner. He actually has a workable, scalable, power-generating reactor. His is based on "dense plasma focus". Thing is, he's already got the thing to 1 billion degrees - and he's going for the big time - the aneutronic p-B11 reaction. That only generates alpha particles - which can be directly converted into electricity. No nasty turbines or steam! Pretty amazing.
Does anyone remember this story?
cribPlease don't read my journal
Good point. I think you've made an excellent foniillcoiunhiiicpcliaicatfin.
This is just more evidence that the Internet is improving our lives. A science project such as this would have been barely imaginablie before the Internet.
It is also probable that the boy's access to information would have been too limited to compelete such a task without the Internet.
If corporations can be prevented from imprisoning this information for their short term profit, progress will be accelerated exponentially. It is essential that communication be kept free. Great discoveries are never made by old scientists (or should I say married scientists?). Therefore, young people need more access to information.
It seems that the monopoly profit model no longer "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Access to all information needs to be guaranteed for the future for progress. Profits are secondary to access.
Finally, if scientists are not tinkerers, what what is their purpose?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
(sound of uncontrolled sobbing)
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
And why this apparently off-topic minor rant? Because we're seeing it here. The ones who probably can't even change a bicycle tire say "Oh that's easy, probably just followed the instruction book", not having the slightest clue about how difficult it is to make something from disparate parts. The ones who have got a clue or have been involved in projects like this have an idea of how difficult it really is, but actually they have no idea of how huge and insuperable the barrier is to 99% of the population - because they themselves are hardwired to know where to start.
It's about disparate rewards. The same level of skill and application this guy showed, applied to basketball or acting, might get him a multimillion dollar income. Why don't we perceive someone who spends hours bouncing a little ball around as being sad and geeky and having too much time on his hands? Why does someone who pretends to be other people, often not very well, get paid so much more than an astronaut or a fighter pilot who does something really, really difficult and dangerous?
Naive ramblings, I guess, but in the conversion of the human race from savannah apes to civilisation, it wasn't the actors and the basketball players that worked out how to bang the rocks together and how to get one stone to stick on top of another.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
In my day we called it a moderator. Why didn't he just use charcoal, coal or graphite?
And another thing, I thought it was John Logie Baird that invented (mechanical) television and Marconi who invented magnetically-scanned television? Maybe in America, everything was invented by Americans independently of the rest of the world?
Stick Men
I would not necessarily call Philo Taylor Farnsworth the inventor of TV. Electronic TV, yes, along with transmission of TV signals (demonstrated in 1927), but Baird was the first to demonstrate a working "television" - a mechanical device, demonstrated in 1925. Farnsworth's used a scanning technique, much different in design to Baird's.
I think Baird was the first to get colour working (in WW2). There were many others too, such as Zworykin (invented similar things, parallel to Farnsworth), Du Mont (invented the CRT), and Nipkow (invented the scanning disk in 1884, the basis for mechanical TVs).
More info here and here.
-- Steve
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
John Logie Baird did invent the TV, and what's more he was one of the last lone scientists in a loft lab doing his own thing. However, his TV is nothing like the modern television (for which the Americans can reasonably claim credit for) it used a spinning disc with slits in it to selectively project an image on to various parts of the screen (the TV camera used the same system in reverse). In effect it was a mechanical TV, cool or what! In the UK dual signals were broadcast up until sometime in the 1940's I believe (don't quote me on that date I don't remember the exact one). Eventually, the signal for Logie Baird's TV system was switched off. One of the major prolems with his system was that the screen size of the TV was limited by the radius of the spinning disc - can you imagine a 36" widescreen version?!
You didn't read the article either. It is fusion. It's just not self-sustained (only generating four neutrons a minute). It's still fusion.
Craig built a neutron modulator
Looks like Mr.Crusher has some competition!
Others thought it was cool, too. Wallace began winning contests -- local, state, national -- culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland. He's now beginning work on a USU physics degree.
Wow, building a nuclear fusion reactor only gets you second place in Intel's science contest? What did the kid who got first place do, find a cure for cancer?
Well, thats a first. Has no-one heard of John Logie Baird?
My web domain.
Words this kid will never hear: "Baby, you make me hotter than a Poisser plasma reaction."
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This guy makes reading equations and calculations a rational exercise and easy! He is the kind of guy we need in Physics, not those who have died and been reincarnated as god!
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Is it just me, or was this a lucky find? I mean, even before 9/11, finding nuclear devices was pretty hard.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
So this kid builds this amazing thing and he wins second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland.
What won first place, you might ask? According to Intel's page on it, there were in fact 3 winners. One developed a new method for determining the distance of asteroids from Earth, another developed a program that may one day enable a person with muscular disabilities to use brainwaves to control a computer keyboard, and the third set out to solve how to treat cancer patients effectively without destroying their healthy cells.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I have a little experience in this matter, and what really impresses me are the kid's scrounging abilities. A neutron detector in a scrap yard? A turbo-molecular pump from the DI? (FYI, Deseret Industries is the Utah equivalent of the Salvation Army or Goodwill). How in the heck? Jeez, do you know how much money that would have saved when I built ~my~ deuteron collider? I thought I was doing good by scrounging HV supplies out of a junked ion implanter. BTW, the Deseret News got it wrong - the CD's are a neutron MODERATOR not MODULATOR. In my experience, Paraffin Wax is probably better than CD's, and is cheap, but maybe he had too many AOL cd's lying around.
Yes, I built a fusion reactor in college too. Seriously. It's on my resume. Of course, I was a junior by the time I got it built. I didn't want to go with the Farnsworth design though - everyone knows how it underperforms (although it ~could~ be improved). Mine was a beam collider, more similar to the works of Rostoker or Maglich. It produced a LOT more fusion - I had to limit my time near it while it was on, in order to keep my dose down to reasonable levels. Darwin Awards, I know. Seriously, I was careful, and received about a Rad or two in the years I worked on it (more from x-rays than neutrons). Lead is your friend, water and borax too. I wish my college professors had been as supportive as the ones at USU appear to be. They discouraged undergraduate research, thinking we didn't know enough to do anything real (of course, skipping class to go work on FUZZY didn't get on their good side).
Yes, Farnsworth fusors are old news. I still think they are cool - the primary reason big science moves so slow is that it is so big. I don't know why more colleges don't build ones and let their kids play around with them. They're cheap! Get enough people messing with them and maybe something will come of it.
Strangely enough, I grew up in Utah too. Must be something in the water...
Heh - it's the only site I read as religiously as slashdot. :)
There are several physicists that have attempted to grab it all through patents (Miley, Bussard), and there are plenty of people who read the board and never contribute, only leach ideas to add to their own patent filings, but there are a number of people that still openly contribute VERY good ideas.
On the self-sustaining account, a number people doubt it, but I don't... There are some really neat aspects to the fusor, and there are MANY unexplored operating characteristics.
I bet that once we get a few amateur devices with pairs of synchronized wakefield accelerators firing into a reasonably designed virtual inner grid, with some rudimentary magnetic shielding of the grid and geometry optimized for recirculation, I bet we'll start seeing more accounts of self-sustaining reactions. Of course, theres the added problem that at those reaction rates the device had better be buried in a concrete bunker in the backyard...
Raise the grid voltage, change your ion source from deuterium gas to laser vaporized boron, and we can start playing with the mythical p+B11-> 2 beta reaction, and start playing with direct conversion! That's just too cool... I'd be happy to get a few picowatts of DC out of the reactor, that's my personal goal.
Go to your local university and get the funding figures. Average the budgets, endowments, etc. etc. for Humanities and Social Sciences departments in one column and then the same for Sciences and Engineering departments in the other column. Chances are that one is definitely better funded, and it is not the Humanities/Social Sciences column that I'm speaking of.
Another way to check is to compare the stipends/scholarships/etc. given to graduate students in these respective divisions. Again you will typically find that the "hard sciences" are much better funded, much better respected, and even much better understood. Administration tends to favor the fusion project over the Durkhiem coloquium because they know what fusion is.
Note that this has little or no bearing on the public economy, which really favors business (including the business of entertainment) since business makes a point of connecting and communicating with the populace at large in the most user-friendly, attractive ways possible. You will never find a physicist who is as popular as a movie star simply because the physicist does not have a publicist, a career strategist, a hair guy, a make-up guy and a plastic surgeon. News agencies and talk shows do not go around looking under rocks for people to put on their shows, they rely on press releases and phone calls from publicists for the bulk of their stories and/or guests.
Any spare change the physicist encounters will usually go right back into his baby (a.k.a. current project), whatever that happens to be, rather than to making him famous and attractive.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Wow, he changed a tire while in grade school!! Kid must be some kind of genius!
Anyone suspicious that his only other accomplishment was changing a tire? Maybe I'm a pessimist, but it just seems strange he's never won any science fairs anywhere (or even placed), then suddenly builds a fusion reactor? "Craig and his father..." have to wonder how much work his dad put into this project.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The only fusion I was worried about in high school involved a blonde with C cups.
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