Slashdot Mirror
First Plasma on the Levitated Dipole Experiment
deglr6328 writes "In light of recent, somewhat disappointing news in the world of nuclear fusion research, it is worth noting that there are still reasons to keep up hope that some breakthroughs are yet to be made. At 12:53 pm on the 13th. of this month the Levitated Dipole Experiment achieved its first plasma. The Levitated Dipole Experiment(LDX), built at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a joint project of Columbia University and MIT, is a magnetic confinement fusion research device, that unlike all previous stellarator, reverse-field pinch and tokamak like experiments, uses a superconducting levitated torus to confine its plasma. The LDX's achievement of first plasma is, in a way, about 17 years in the making even though it has only been in construction since 1999. The concept for LDX was first considered by Akira Hasegawa as he was studying the data coming in from the Voyager missions which flew through the (dipole) magnetospheres of the outer planets. He noticed that unlike laboratory confined fusion plasmas which tended to be unstable, difficult to control, and which lost energy quickly, the plasma of a magnetosphere is intrinsically more quiescent, stable and actually reacts favorably (increases its density/temperature) to outside perturbations such as ie. bombardment by a solar storm. A highly informative and interesting video of operations on the day of first shot can be found here. Congratulations to the scientists and engineers who have worked very hard on getting the project to this point and here's looking forward to the possibility that LDX will reveal fundamentally new physics in the arduous quest for clean fusion energy."
The plasma fusion guys seem to have sucked down billions of dollars to build their huge ungainly and ultimately unworkable Rube Goldberg devices.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now. The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
So can we now make a flux capacitor?
Researchers were stunned on Saturday as they discovered that the key component of the new fusion bottle has gone missing. A late-night janitor reported hearing someone say "Mmmmmmm...levitating superconductive plasma donut" shortly before the crucial torus disappeared.
Now we can all keenly anticipate the first episode of Enterprise to mention the almighty superconducting levitated torus that has powered Federation impulse drives all long.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work. Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
is it just me, or does anyone else get a tad nervous when they see 'nuclear fusion' and 'akira' in the same context of an article discussing real world scientific research?
No matter how well it will work. No matter how safe they can make it. No matter how efficient it will be. No matter how clean the process is.
Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse.
Just as they do with nuclear power. Such a horror. Clean energy replacing coal/oil plants spewing hundreds of metric tons of fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere each and every year? Surely it must be evil.
it's nothing like the cool sun like plasma ball they showed in the spiderman 2. No indestructable antimagnetic hands with AI attached to some guy's back and head. I just watched the video and all they showed was some blue light through a looking glass in some ridiculous cylinder. They should take some pointers from the Hollywood producers and start making plasma balls in open space and have people with gigantic robot arms controlling it. Then maybe the will get more funding.
You can't handle the truth.
Yum, video! They should have asked the /. crowd for help. If we can just get a few more people, their molten server would become plasma!
Why wouldn't you live through it, the better question is. What would happen if all the atoms in my entire body phasesd out of existance at the same time? Oh course they would all eventually phase back in, and retain they're states, so, no one would be any wiser....
WOOO I'M THE INVISIBLE MAN (on certain time scales)
Too afraid to RTFA with a summary that long. Brain hurts, must go lie down now.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Columbia University and MIT have decided to join organizations to now be known as UAC ......
[alk]
No, you'd spend the rest of your life with your soul one foot to the right of your body. Maybe that would be handy, I don't know.
So we don't turn the server into plasma, here's a mirror of the video:
http://razor.csbnet.se/First_LDX_Plasma2.mov
Absolutely arrangement is important. If it wasn't, nobody would ever die. But it being important doesn't mean it's the sole distinction between living and non living matter.
I are winner
Wow, that thing puts my blue LEDs to shame!
All rites reversed 2010
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
We have no reason to believe otherwise.
The only clear way to do this is via Focus Fusion, which means one is working with the natural instabilities of Plasma rather than attempting to straightjacket them with massive Magnetic Fields. Nothing more really needs to be said about Focus Fusion from me so I'll just paste what they're saying here:
Focus fusion is the only known method that can achieve hydrogen-boron fusion. It also has other advantages over tokamak based deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. Focus fusion reactors will be much less expensive for the same amount of power. Tokamak reactors generate electricity by boiling water for a steam powered generator (high energy neutrons provide the heat.) This is the same method that coal power plants use. The only difference is the heat source. In a coal power plant the steam generator is the most expensive part of the plant so replacing the heat source will not result in a lot of savings. Also, this method of generating electricity is limited by the fundamental efficiency limits of heat engines. Focus fusion reactors do not require a heat engine. They generate electricity directly. After all, electricity is just moving charged particles. The particle decelerators in a focus fusion reactor merely transfer the electricity of charged particle beams into a wire. This process does not face the efficiency limits of heat engines.
A focus fusion reactor should be able to economically generate power in quantities as small as 20MW from a power plant the size of a two car garage. This means they will be useful for powering individual villages in the third world where regional electricity grids are not as well developed. And in developed nations focus fusion power can be generated near where it will be used to reduce transmission losses and can be owned by the communities it serves to reduce dependence on speculative energy markets.
If there are any financiers out there who have the backbone to do what is right in this world and do what is right for mankind, I urge you to fund this research to banish forever the specter of Fossil Fuel shortages and associated ecological damage and begin a new era in Human History.
We don't have to buy out tritium from people
who hate us. That's a benefit right there.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.
No we wouldn't. Nobody is going to throw money at trying to do in practice something which doesn't work in theory. There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
Paper and pencils don't cost much. Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible, and you can bet they'll get money.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
Do you have a source for that? Besides which, that isn't relevant. There is a huge difference between showing something is possible and showing that it is not impossible.
Feynman himself also made a lot of good statements about pseudoscience. Perhaps you should read them? Unlike you, I provide a reference.
Tritium is a byproduct of the process. The neutron flux from the reactor would need to be blocked by a moderator like lithium. This produces tritium.
I must admire your long term view though. I had never considered the possibility of running out of hydrogen in the solar system.
Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion does not and never has worked -- the excess heat the observed was an artifact from their calorimetery equipment caused by the fact that neither of them knew how to properly use it....and the pseudoscientists have been running with the idea since.
Show me an independantly verifiable cold fusion experiment that gives a positive result, and _then_ it might be worth funding. Until then, so-called "hot" fusion is the way to go.
Got mead?
For those unfortunate slashdot readers of lesser ISP fortitude, slashdot is proud to offer the following descriptive video summery.
...
Brought to you by The Undergraduate Research Assistants Pool - a statistically significant proportion of particle physicists agree, only Undergraduate Research Assistants can stand up to the kind of abuse a particle physicist demands.
[TITLE SEQUENCE]
[lively tour of facility]
[8 minutes of reality-show-finally like filler including:
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with female research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant in blue hard hat]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with Physicist]
[clip montage of scientific equipment]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant in blue hard hat]
]
[nasa tv style clip of scientists congratulating each other over inscrutable data on distant CRT's during and after triumphant success]
[replay of triumphant success, this time with wholly satisfying video of glowing blue science goodness]
[obligatory fade out to historical prospective text that scrolls by too quickly]
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming
Makes one wonder if his thesis will be invoked at some point in this new endeavor.
Meanwhile I was working on chronological developments in Biblical Hebrews and their applicability to dating disputed texts in the Pentateuch. Reeeeeeeal useful stuff.
- Is there some substance in the universe we should be using OTHER than hydrogen? I mean, it is the most abundant element in the universe.
- Solar power is a good point, but not workable any time in the forseeable future to meet humanity's energy needs. You could cover entire deserts with modern solar stuff, at astronomical cost, and not come near to meeting our current energy demand.
- We, as humans, want to be able to go place that are inhospitable to us.. place where the sun don't shine. The bottom of the ocean, deep space, the polar regions. Solar power won't help there.
"Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse."
The bile spewed by supposedly intelligent people when it comes to atomic energy is simply staggering. Greenies don't object to nuclear power on principle - the problem is safe transport and storage of fuel and waste. Take away that problem (as future fusion reactors could do, correct?) and I'm all for it.
Enjoy your karma, whore.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Many people fail to realise that the 'laws of entropy' aren't laws, they're statements of statistical likelihoods. Entryopy can spontaneously decrease, its just incredibly incredibly incredibly unlikely to do so by any statistically significant amount. ... jump one foot to the left.
But in this case entropy isnt realy relevent.
If you want every partical in your body to simultaneously 'jump' one foot to the left. All you have to do is
Sigs are for wimps. I am proud to be one.
Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
Oh yeah? Sure there is! Everyone knows that subatomic particles use the metric system not English measurements, and a displacment of of 3.048 E14 just isn't a round enough number to be likely.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?"
Don't be silly. The phenomenon of life is merely the VERY complex arragngement of atoms, and nothing more.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
>If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.[emphasis added]
[...]There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
[...]Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible,
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Suppose the variation in Mercury's orbit had been dismissed as observational error or some drag effect of the solar atmosphere? Or that the odd lines and steps observed in hot-body spectra were dismissed as some filtering effect of the atmosphere or the spectrographic apparatus. They didn't fit within a Newtonian universe, after all.
Enough diverse experiments that involve packing deuterium nuclei together in a metal crystal lattice (whether by electrolysis or high pressure) have showed odd results to be worth pursuing further. Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
-- Alastair
Perhaps I miscalculated in thinking that slashdot would be a good place to submit this news to. I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than, judging from comments here, it clearly is, and who would be a group which would enjoy hearing detailed news of an albeit small step toward a possible clean and infinite energy source of the future. Here we are ~150 posts in, and most are along the lines of "why are we wasting our time on this", "cold fusion is being suppressed", "it'll never work, we're wasting money", "ugh, too much reading" and all manner of other pseudoscientifically inclined rubbish. It's not merely that these posts exist that's depressing, it's that it's being MODDED UP.
Is this truly the state of disaffection and ignorance that exists in the general public (and this is slashdot!) today toward fundamental scientific research and technological achievement? I simply can not imagine that this is actually the case and I stronly hope that what is seen here is not merely a product of intellectual laziness but is, instead, a result of a deep failure on the part of the scientific community to excite and educate the public about its pursuits. At least I HOPE this is the case, then perhaps something might be done to remedy the situation.
Though, a small part of me suspects that this is not the case and that in the ever richer and more comfortable "west" we truly are slowly but surely slipping down a slope of scientific indifference and even hostility; and that subsequent generations may curse our graves for allowing a wide margin of the public to consistently indulge in such shameful, wilfull ignorance.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
In the case of LDX, however, tritium is completely unnecessary for operation, as it makes use of the Deuterium-Deuterium reaction.
And there's a lot of Deuterium in the oceans. I believe the estimate is that we could run our entire civilization off of the Deuterium present in just the first centimeter of the oceans for one or more years. And we'd put most of that water back, so you don't even have to worry about the oceans being taken away from all the little fishies. :-)
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Well then you're going to have to explain to me why you don't think the laws of physics "as we know it" is a sufficient model for fusion. It certainly has provided us with relatively good models of the Sun, as well as predicted the Hydrogen bomb, and it also has shown to work with tokomak fusion.
Newtonian physics did not correctly predict the orbit of Mercury. There was no real reason to assume it should.
However, Newtonian physics did correctly predict,for instance, the motion of billard balls.
Now say someone walks along and says billard balls don't work at all in the way Newtonian physics says they do. Yet noone is able to make the billard balls act that way. Would that grounds for abandoning Newtonian physics as a model of billard balls? Abandon for what?
There is no alternative theory which allows cold fusion. If there was, people would be testing it.
In the same way that physics "as we know it" 150 years ago provided an accurate model for billiard balls, we have every reason to believe physics "as we know it" today provides an accurate model for fusion.
It is not the final model and it is probably not an accurate model for say, the inside of black holes and for sub-subatomic particles and the large-scale forces in the universe.
Nope. You're the only one.
Who is this Asimov of whom you speak? An author, no doubt, guessing from context. Did he write anything else, or is he just a one-hit wonder?
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/shk val.htm
Just about every power plant uses steam to power turbines, thus this accident could have happened at any of them.
Only types that don't use steam that I can think of off the top of my head is wind and hydroelectric. Most solar plants use mirrors to direct the light to a central point, using the collected light to make steam...
A better link would be Don't Mix Uranium in a Bucket
This was not a power plant accident, but a processing accident where the workers were, in my opinion, darwin award candidates. "Let's bypass safety procedures and rather than using the machine provided and doing it in small batches (to keep the uranium from going critical), we'll hurry it up by dumping it in a bucket and stirring it!"
It should be noted that more people die each year in coal mining/transportation accidents. But since these deaths happen so regularly, they're not reported in the news. It's like the fact that flying is safer than driving, but people pay lots of attention to plane crashes, because they're unusual.
I should be noted that the BBC makes some scary statements, like more than 300,000 people in the surrounding area were placed in danger. Other articles point out "Hundreds evacuated", which makes me think that the BBC is exagerating in their statement. Like most industrial accidents, the dilution needed to reach that many people would render it mostly harmless. The workers were harmed because they were right there.
Anytime industry gets big enough, accidents will happen occasionally. Especially with the universe conspiring to come up with bigger fools...
I don't read AC A human right
IANANP, BIWARPFMEAC*. I'd like to elaborate a little bit on this point:
Fission occurs when a heavy radioactive nucleus (in the control rods) absorbs a neutron and splits into two smaller nuclei and a few extra neutrons. These new neutrons can be absorbed by other heavy nucli, and more fission occurs.
Now most of the neutrons released move too fast to be absorbed by a nucleus; instead, they just bounce off. In order for a sustainable reaction to take place, a material - called the moderator - is required to slow down the neutrons so that they can be absorbed.
Most modern** nuclear reactors are pressure-water reactors. This means that they use water as both a coolant and as a moderator. If the water excapes, then the reaction fissles out.
However, Chernobyl was initially designed with a solid moderator built into the reactor vessel. (I think it was graphite, if I remember correctly.) It used water purely as a coolant. So when the coolant leaked, the reactor kept on fissing atoms and the reaction got out of control (although not fast enough for a thermonuclear reaction).
That wasn't the only problem. The reactor's personal paniced and tried to send the control rods in too quickly. While the control rods were halfway in, neutrons bounced into the bottom of the reactor and formed a critical amount for a chain reaction. At the same time, the heat of the reaction and loss of pressure from the origional malfunction turned the leftover water into steam pockets also in the bottom of the reactor. Soon after, an explosion ruptured the reaction vessel.
Perhaps the primary cause of the accident (and of TMI) was the confusing interface to the equipment! Some devices used red lights to signify emergency conditions, while others used green or another color. Instruments were hard to read and slow to respond. An ergonomical failure contributed to the accident.
Today, most control rooms have learned from the mistakes at TMI and Chernobyl. They are easier and more consistant to use. However, even more improvements are possible with new designs. It is a pity that nobody will allow the old workhorses ot be retired.
* I am not a nuclear physicist, but I wrote a research paper for my Engineering Analysis class.
** "Modern Nuclear Reactor" is somewhat of an oxymoron. Due to NIMBY feelings among the general public, most commercial nuclear reactors are old (60s-70s era) and modern designs are never given a chance despite the improvements in efficiency, safety, and (less) waste production. :-(
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than
The lack of serious comments might in part be due to skepticisim. I'm coming from more of a medical perspective, but I'm sure in all fields that getting 'too' excited about promising initial results is a sure way to spend a huge amount of time severly let down. Aside from that, as the AC below mentioned, it's Saturday. I think many reading are doing so as a quick fix, rather than getting ready for serious reading.
And for someone lacking in background on this, such as myself, it looks like a significant amount of reading to get the background needed to really appreciate this. You provided ten different links, some of which themselves require additional reading to first determine which links there need to be read in order to grasp their significance to the topic. The general information link on the Stellarator page didn't even work. Yes, I just proceeded to look up Stellarator on wikipedia. But I'm also blessed with an abundance of free time today. That said, I know it is difficult to properly gauage the amount of background information any group is going to have. Assume too little and it can come off as insulting 'plasma is a really hot thing, and would burn you if you tried to eat it!', too much and the audience might wind up too intimidated and just crack jokes instead of doing a little background reasearch in order to catch up. Also, while slashdot does have a scientific nature, it's 'very' heavily skewed to computer science. The further away from that, the more the main audience is going to be out of the area they have the most confidence speaking about. Many people won't speak up if they find themselves in a topic where their lack of knowledge is very apparent.
That said, I hope you don't become too disheartened. While I came to this with very little understanding of the topic, I found a preliminary read of some of the information quite interesting and intend to look further into it. And if I am, I'm sure many others who are as ignorent of physics as myself will be doing so as well. We'll probaly just not comment, as there's little someone in our situation could really add to the discusion.
I in part agree with your view of the moderation. I loaded the comments up hoping for additional clarification by people knowledgable on the subject, and instead most of the moderation was for funnies. I wouldn't be too disdainful of the cold fusion moderation though. Personally, I'm grateful it was moderated up just because it also brought the conflicting replies to my attention as well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
What people need to realizing is that you learn a lot more by being wrong than you do by being right, but I suppose if somebody put the science propaganda back on TV (Kennedy, Sputnik, Cold War, et cetera) people would be much more (sheepishly) excited. It really doesn't help that instead of being at "war" with a scientific rival, we're fighting cavemen with US-made automatic weapons. Instead of being excited about a scientific arms race, we're excited about an eminent police state, and all I have to say is "God help the US, I'm moving to Japan."
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
After producing two rings at the opposite end of a vacuum tube, they were guided by a magnetic field until they collided. At collision they repelled each other, and then were compressed. The rings heated up and stayed stable for 30 microseconds under compression ( which by plasma standards is a long time). The funding was cut off in 1978 because the concept was too far from the mainstream.
In 1999 John Brandenburg received a grant from NASA to move the experiment from Miami to Lanham MD (near NASA Goddard). He moved it and reassembled it, but never received an money to operate it. It stands gathering dust.
Right now, Paul Koloc is doing something similar in his garage, producing ball lightning ( a stable plasma structure that has been documented since Roman times). His project, Plasmak, has received some sbir funding. For more details on the Plasmak, look here.
From reading the white paper, I do not think the Trisops plasma is the same configuration as in the levitated dipole experiment. I do not have a clear idea of the structure of the Plasmak.
I list the Trisops papers below for anyone who wants to follow up.
Daniel R. Wells, Paul Edward Ziajka, and Jack L. Tunstall. Hydrodynamic confinement of thermonuclear plasmas TRISOPS VIII (plasma liner confinement). Fusion Tech., 9:83, 1986.
Winston H. Bostick and Daniel R. Wells. Azimuthal magnetic field in the conical theta pinch. Phys. Fluids, 6(9):1325, 1963.
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
E.g. Global warming not caused by so-called greenhouse gases, but by waste heat generated by inefficient energy (esp. electricity) utilization..
Every day or two, the earth receives as much thermal energy from the sun as humans have harnessed in all of history. Any conceivable waste heat generated by humans would be an insignificant drop in the bucket.
Where we do have a measurable affect on the earth's temperature is changing the reflectivity of the ground so that the earth absorbs more of the massive solar influx, adding pollution to the atmosphere to change its transparency and cloud cover, and adding greenhouse gasses which slow the radiation of solar energy back to outer space. All of these effects work by throttling the balance between the unimaginably large amounts of solar energy that arrive and depart from the planet each day. Our puny addition of waste heat is lost in the noise.
And the reason money gets wasted on fusion is that the program is on continual life-support due to being cronically underfunded. Sure, if you pay the absolute minimum you can get away with over a long time, you can spend an impressive sum without getting very far. The vast numbers of americans who struggle with credit-card debt could tell you as much. It says nothing about the value of the program.
At the end of the day, we need fusion if our civilization is going to survive. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out in a relatively short timescale. Fission is nice, but there isn't really all that much in the way of fuels sitting around on Earth, so we'd just run into the same problem. Alternative energy sources like wind and ground-based solar are stopgaps at best, and are ultimately limited in the amount of power obtainable from them. even if you could create a closed system which supplies our needs for today, the 2nd Law says there will always be losses and wastage, and the end is that we all live in little thatch huts. If we haven't nuked each other out of existence earlier than that.
Bottom line, if we don't get fusion working in 50 years or so (and we probably will, at the rate we're going), you're going to see the nastiest wars over diminishing oil supplies you've ever seen, followed by population collapse, and if we're not lucky, the collapse of whatever passes for civilization these days.
If we fall now, there won't be any second chance for our descendants in a few hundred years --they won't have the easy access to oil that we enjoyed. We'll be back to pre-industrial days, with whatever tiny bits of tech we can hang onto and keep running with 'renewable' energy sources until it all breaks and can't be replaced because the assembly plant doesn't run.
So yeah, I think fusion is important.
Tritium is rare, in the sense that it makes up 1 ppm of the hydrogen in the oceans. This has however proven to be a self-sustaining solar-powered equilibrium, ie. sea water will always reorganize itself to contain 1/1000 deuterium and 1/1000000 tritium. Which means we would have to use more power than the amount of solar power absorbed by the earth's entire ocean before we would even begin to see "squandered resources". So "artificial" fusion energy is in fact indirect solar energy.
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
> The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily.
Not all of quantum physics can/has been seen. For example tachyon particles.
>mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe.
Yet do we discount what mathematics is saying just because we can't experiment it in some lab?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Don't feel too bad. Most Slashdotters are out on the town on a Saturday night; it's just the losers who are still posting. As for the moderators - no-one understands how it ends up being what it is, but the leading theory is that most moderators are under the influence of some pretty serious drugs while moderating.
Seriously though, congratulations on first plasma. I visited LDX about 8 months ago and you've certainly made much progress since then. However, you might want to make it clear that this doesn't mean that fusion is just around the corner. As far as I understand, the LDX concept is a bit of a dark horse; keeping the superconducting magnet cold in the presence of the plasma is challenging, no? I know they talk about a refrigerator, but that has never been demonstrated...
Anyway, I look forward to hearing about the plasma properties and confinement...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
I'd say its more that mathematics is just mathematics until it touches on some other field. It'd be meaningless to take some random branch of mathematics and say 'this corresponds to our universe'. Rather, mathematics is a set of tools such that given something that does follow some particular rule, we can figure out what that rule implies in a rigorous manner. The Banach-Tarski paradox, for instance, fails to occur physically because no particle can actually be a geometric point, so the size of the cut object is significant, whereas in the abstract geometry of solids and surfaces, that limit does not exist. Without reference to some measurable phenomenon, mathematics just tells us what could be, not what is.
As for tachyons, I believe thats more of a relativistic 'missing object', and one where you basically say 'hey, what does it imply if I pick a mass/energy as having this strange value...' as opposed to something demanded by the theory which simply hasn't been observed. The 'search for the Higgs boson' thing might be a better case, but then, if we don't find it even though we're looking where it should be found, we have to conclude that the theory that implies it is wrong, not that it exists but we're just unable to measure it.
Not everyone does think it would be good. Amory Lovins once said what he would think if a truly cheap, abundant and clean source of power was discovered. He said it would be a disaster.
His problem was not with the energy source itself, but with what he thought it would be put to use doing. His preference was to limit what mankind could do with it by going for only relatively limited sources of power.
I strongly disagree with him, as you could make the same point about advanced medicine leading to biowar agents. Giving up what we've learned about antibiotics and containing epidemics because that information can be (and has been) misused seems misguided to me.
But, there certainly are people who feel that way.
There are larger numbers who are willing to accept the existing level of technology, but are very nervous about further discoveries.
Again, I personally feel this is misguided. We've largely made our Faustian bargain with technology, and going back or stagnating now would lead to truly massive suffering when the current pyramid game of our fuel sources run out.
I see more advanced power sources as a possible way for the masses of the third world to raise their standard of living greatly without the massive environmental impact that more primitive power sources would bring. We can argue about what sources to use (any of several might work), but trying to bring China and India to even a fraction of the per capita energy availability of the west with coal, for example, will have a huge impact.
there have been numerous advancements in transport which have made the relocation of nuclear waste less dangerous than the floating ecological disasters in wait we call oil tankers. a quick google search reveals as much, i invite you to do some research.
that said, there are granite statues littering washington, dc which emit more radiation than the yucca mountain storage facility's (where the US puts all their nuclear waste) radiation levels or that it is even allowed to come close to. in addition to this, as has already been pointed out, current coal burning spews radiation into the atmosphere an order of magnitude greater than the combined effect of any and all nuclear mishaps.
it was only a few months ago when James Lovelock, patron saint of the greenies, jumped ship with the backwards logic of greenpeace et al and himself stated that nuclear energy is the only real and present solution available to us to save ourselves from the eco-disaster to come from our current and past energy production means. it is greenies who cling tightly to the far off dreams of pure energy production that are now the greatest danger. the energy industry wants to move to nuclear, we *need* to move to nuclear. antiqueted and baseless fears that halt implementation of modern, safe, and more effecient nuclear technology are holding the human race back from making real progress towards keeping us and the environment productive to our survival stable enough to have the time to develop the fabled pure energy technologies of green dreams.
Greenies don't object to nuclear power on principle - the problem is safe transport and storage of fuel and waste.
Oh, that's just something they say to sound more rational. Now if you compare risks and accidents with conventional fossile fuel transportation such as oil tankers and gas pipes.. Suddenly carting around rather modest amounts of nuclear fuel/waste isn't such a big problem.
Don't forget that the amount of uranium required to produce equivalent energy as coal is less than 1/1000.
As for storage. those "rational" fears are that the containers buried into bedrock (done here in Europe) may be damaged by geological activity sometime in far future. And the waste might come into contact with water supply or return to surface.
All I can say to that is: Radon.
Somehow we can deal with naturally occurring radiation..
FYI, the most complete reference for my research paper was the Ph.D. Thesis for Dr. Alexander Roman Sich when at MIT:
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Check out the phenomena known as emergence. For example, ants find the shortest route to a food source through clever use of their pheromones. Clever in the sense that the system is ingenious, however the ants do not consciously do anything except mark their trails as they randomly run about and follow other pheromone trails. The pheromone path-creation is not programmed into the ants. They just follow a couple of simple rules.
The result is very ingenious: the shortest route will eventually have the strongest pheromones. As the pheromones vaporize over time, the less used paths die away, and the most used paths (which are also shorter as distance equals time spent in this case) will rule.
That's the organizing principle (or at least one of them). Emergence through synergy. Great complexity comes from the interaction of very small agents (particles, molecules, whatever). Check out the authors Holland, Wolfram and Flake, to name just some from the top of my head.
It's like putting a bunch of threads into a bag and rolling them around with your hands in the bags. You end up with knots.
We didn't become humans at once. What happens in micro level also exhibits emergence upwards up to the macro level. Eventually there's a clump called a human. Humans then form societies, come up with culture and build houses which are emergent properties of humans. Houses clump together into cities, and cities into a metropolis, everytime giving birth to new kind of complexity and new kind of things. And so on. We don't have to consciously "build a city". All it takes is for many people to build houses next to a nice river where lots of fish can be found. In time, there will be a city there, although nobody "built the city" per se.
Also, if the "organizing principle" was broken somehow, there would have appeared no intelligent life, and we would not be observing all this, thus we would not know that the organizing principle was broken!
I do not moderate.
Well, not exactly.
You are probably thinking "complex" as in "complicated" rather than "complex" as in "not random". The universe is immensely random. Adding randomness to randomness gives more randomness. Leaving structure (complexity) alone also - eventually - results in more randomness. Left to themselves, things fall apart (except Big Macs, which seem to be able to last for months unchanged when left alone). This is called entropy. Another way of saying "our universe is random and getting randomer" is "our universe has high entropy, and it is increasing". It sounds more scientific, but it means the same thing.
The sand in this philosophical vaseline is that life is not random, it is complex. So in a universe of randomness, how did this complexity arise? It cannot do so by itself. The odds against a pocket of complexity big enough to produce sustainable life arising at random are astronomical or worse - and way, way beyond the statistical boundary (1E50 against) which we call "impossible".
Probably the best illustration is the monkeys and the typewriters. Typing out a play from The Bard at random is an immensly unlikely event. Getting it to happen just once if we coated every presumed planet in the known universe with very small monkeys and typewriters - stacked wall to wall and 1000 deep, even on the oceans - and hitting a billion keys a second is still well past statistically impossible in the 1E17 seconds since the big bang (if there was one). Getting just the title typed out is still statistically impossible.
We're much more complex than a sonnet. Many invidual cellular mechanisms take more than a play's worth of DNA to specify. Each.
So where did all of that complexity come from?
It is an article of faith among many scientists that it arose from randomness. Since we are a very long way from even coming up with reasonable postulates for the huge number of miracles involved in getting from a random cloud of hydrogen to the average SlashDot denizen, it has to be taken on faith. Heretics are only academically burned at the stake - as in they are refused publication in popular journals - but the principle is identical.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Isn't the main problem with the plasmak(tm) concept that it's (tm)?
The trademarking really makes it look like questionable science.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If this is the case, then Palladium is not acting as a catalyst.
Catalysts are, by definition, not consumed as part of the reactions they help enable.