Slashdot Mirror
Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded
pln2bz writes "Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, has received $600k in funding, and a promise of phased payments of $10 million if scientific feasibility can be demonstrated to productize Lerner's focus fusion energy production device. Unlike the Tokamak, focus fusion does not require the plasma to be stable, does not produce significant amounts of dangerous radiation, directly injects electrons into the power grid without the need for turbines and would only cost around $300k to manufacture a generator. Lerner's inspiration for the technology is based upon an interpretation for astrophysical Herbig-Haro jets that agrees with the Electric Universe explanation."
Has the electric universe theory made any headway in offering a viable alternative to currently accepted cosmology? Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
This is brilliant. $600k isn't a lot to some people, yet there's a tiny sliver of a chance that the guy is on to something. So he gets funding from a private institution who will be absolutely minted in the very unlikely circumstance that he's right. The odd $600k wouldn't even scratch the surface for more traditional avenues of research where the numbers are into the billions, so there's no real loss either.
Plus, the chances of me getting a backer for my "buttered toast and cat" turbine are much improved. Fantastic.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
That tells me his web presence isnt up to snuff.
Is he being paid to design a hip-hop web presence, or a fusion design type?
"there is no hard evidence to support the big bang either."
Not sure what you mean by hard evidence, but um.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation seems to work for most people.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
uhh yeah, this is science. We only call them frauds and crackpots after they fail... Unless they're in direct competition for funding.
From experience, this is a good sign, not a negative one. I chose my doctoral supervisor (among many other criteria) based on how little he tried to sell himself, and let his work speak for itself.
The stereotypical Slashdotter lives in his mother's basement and doesn't shower very often. Even more than other people, they don't want to hear about the mundane details, the real life gotchas, and the hard work.
They want to hear that the experts are wrong, the solution is simple, revolutionary and cheap, and a downtrodden underdog is about to reveal it to the world.
Unfortunately, when the problem really is hard, the only way you can move into the latter category is to, uh, be creative with your evidence.
As always when these discussions come up you hear a bunch of "but what if it works, the benefits would be enormous". The problem with this type of logic is of course that it can be applied to ANY claim which promises great returns, no matter how patently absurd it is. Alchemy, perpetual motion, alternative medicine, intelligent design... etc... If you just promise big enough implications for your "science" and make the explanation sound complicated enough that people don't understand it, you will always have some suckers going "Even if there is just a 0.1% chance it works, the benefits will be a quazillion dollars." This is how these crackpots get their supporters, and as usual they will yell they are being suppressed and compare themselves to Galileo, Einstein or Boltzmann when anybody from the "dogmatic scientific establishment" (i.e anybody who actually has a clue about the subject ) points out it is bullshit.
Oh, and slash dot will give them front page publicity.
The Chilean government has put $600,000 toward this project. At the current rate of oil @ $133 per barrel, Chile has to sell 4511.2 barrels of oil to make their money back. Each day Chile produces 15,100 barrels of oil a day. That is 30% of their daily oil earnings to pay for this. I really don't think this is all that much money to throw at an energy project.
Electrolysis of water
2 x H2O + 1.25 eV => 2 x H2 + 1 x O2
Ionization energy of atomic hydrogen
13.6 eV
Proton-boron fusion
1 x p + 1 11B => 3 x 4He + 8.7 MeV
So you're only off by around 5 orders of magnitude.
The electrolysis is by far the lowest-energy part of the process. The bulk of the energy in fusion research is spent energizing and containing the plasma, and the difficulty of collecting that much energy from your reaction products is the reason that no fusion project so far breaks even.
* Enormous amounts of money handed to favoured engineering contractors
* No viable product
* No discernible progress
Oh wait, you can't say any of those things about the dense plasma focus. Nowhere close to the billions that have been poured into tokamaks, it's a viable product on it's own (as a portable bright X-Ray source), and despite the apparent handicaps of a slightly kooky project leader and miniscule funding, their numbers look just as good, if not better, than ITER. based on some cosmological phenomenon, that is not yet well understood It doesn't even say that in the summary, it says "Lerner's inspiration for the technology".
Kekulé was inspired to discover the structure of benzene by a dream about a snake biting its own tail. It doesn't make his discovery any less valid. IOW, not actually a scientist, although he may well be knowledgeable Mendel discovered the science of genetics but had no idea about the mechanism of inheritance. His work with peas is still used to teach the subject to school children. Mendel was a monk, with no degree in science, but he was no less a scientist. Science is a method of working, not a description of the level of your education. we are not even talking about pure deuterium You are quite correct. We are not talking about ANY deuterium ; this is a proton-boron fusion process. At that temperature the atoms will move about a bit, to say the least
Given the number of questions you are asking that have answers (however biased they may be) in that Google Tech Talk, you probably haven't watched it. Why don't you (and any other people thinking of spouting off) do the man the courtesy of hearing him out?
Or are you "not actually a scientist"? A cornerstone of the scientific method is trying to prove yourself wrong.