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."

Comments

Electric universe

[Verteiron]

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.

Re:Electric universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking. Yep. Contrasting nicely with "dark matter" and "cosmic inflation" which are mainstream science based mainly on conjecture and magical thinking.

Re:Electric universe

[TubeSteak]

Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking. The Chilean Government has put up $600,000 to see if any of that magical thinking can be applied to the real world.

And really, what's with all the cynicism?
At worst, someone else's government wasted some taxpayer dollars on science instead of market distorting business subsidies. At best, we have a revolutionary new source of electricity. Somewhere in the middle is the most likely possibility, namely that some bit of research turns out to be useful and can be applied elsewhere.

Re:Electric universe

[cduffy]

Yeah, and witch-doctors managed to save one or two people when they weren't poisoning dozens. You won't catch me going to one of them instead of an MD, though.

Modern pharma research has done to try to bring useful conclusions off of witch doctors' remedies -- so even if you're going to an MD, you might be getting a (modern, refined, tested, proven) version of something which once was an old wives' tale. Is that an argument for going to an "alternative" physician rather than the MD? Absolutely not! But it is an argument that such alternative approaches may have value, if only as a way of finding interesting things to use an input for the more modern R&D apparatus.

So -- it's useful for experiments based on bad theory to take place, as their results may lead to refinements in good theory.

Re:Electric universe

[c6gunner]

But heaven forbid that any part of a well-established theory be called into question.

I suggest you take some remedial English classes, my friend, since your reading comprehension is atrocious. I quite clearly stated that you are welcome to question evolution. You conveniently ignored that, and went on construct a straw man and complain about everyone picking on you for daring to question the establishment. Poor you.

You didn't, by any chance, have anything to do with that abortion of a film "Expelled", did you?

For the record, as an ID'er (which of course, means that I am a Neanderthal ooga-booga sun worshipper, somewhat below a monkey in intelligence)

No, just silly. I don't think kids are "Neanderthal ooga-booga sun worshippers" for believing that the presents under the Christmas tree were left by a fat man in a red suit who climbed down the chimney, so why would I accuse you of any such thing?

I am rather embarrassed at what passes for science among Creationists these days, particularly when they use material that they just do not understand.

Then you agree with the premise of my comment, and I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. As I said - you're more than welcome to espouse whatever ideas you want - just don't pretend to be using science to prove them when you're clearly relying on faith.

Re:Electric universe

[SoupIsGood Food]

No, they believed in a Creator. "Intelligent Design" is quasi-religious nut-baggery that at once offends scientists and people of faith. Scientists on the one hand because it proposes that "God intended it to be so" is a good enough answer to any given question of sufficient complexity. People of faith on the other, as it diminishes the glory of God and His creation by cramming Him into little gaps in our knowledge and pointing a finger to say "There He is!"

Re:Electric universe

[ghostdoc]

Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.

Not really. The observation is that there doesn't seem to be enough visible matter to explain all this gravity.
Dark Matter is one possible explanation (simply put: well, the matter must be there, we just can't see it).
No-one has yet observed any dark matter, so it is just still a theory.
There are other explanations, including 'Gravity doesn't scale like we thought it did'.

In my opinion, Dark Matter will turn out to be the Luminiferous Ether of the 20th Century.

Exactly the right approach.

[onion2k]

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.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

[TheRaven64]

Exactly my thought. ITER is costing US$ 9.3 billion. This costs 0.006% as much. If it is more than 0.006% as likely to work, then it's probably a good use of money.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

[timeOday]

Is it really enough for him to proceed on? At a big company it costs that much to keep 2 PhD's on a project for 1 year. Presumably this project would also have a large requirement for expensive hardware.

Re: Exactly the right approach.

[Black Parrot]

Exactly my thought. ITER is costing US$ 9.3 billion. This costs 0.006% as much. If it is more than 0.006% as likely to work, then it's probably a good use of money. That reasoning works when you only consider one fringe idea. What happens if you try to fund *all* of them?

Re:Exactly the right approach.

[Anonymous Coward]

Physicists have spent 50+ years trying to confine and stabilize plasmas with negligible progress and with a cost of many billions (or is it trillions over 50 years). Stability, confinement, and plasma just don't seem to go together. Lets not even mention continuous. Success has been only 10 or 15 years away for more than 50 years. The primary results seem to be absorption of Federal funds in huge amounts.

An approach that tries to take advantage of the instabilities instead of fighting them is well worth a few million. Bussard's Polywell device is also worth a few million. These amounts are a drop in the bucket. Even of all they did was expose some interesting physics it would be well worth it. Naturally, the Big-Physics establishment does not like anything that might break their rice bowl.

Re: Exactly the right approach.

[Gibbs-Duhem]

Then you don't purchase ITER and fund 4150 independent projects instead.

IANAPP, but my experience with science in general is that you're better off funding many, many projects to the proof-of-concept phase than funding one proof-of-concept project that we're absolutely sure will eventually cost ~$100B to make actually generating power. That way, we learn a huge amount about plasma physics and can make educated decisions about which projects to fund to completion.

The problem is, right now we know that tokomaks sort of work, but aren't really feasible for power generation. We have *no idea* if all those other systems could be feasible with more work.

Re:New page 1

[Creepy Crawler]

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?

Re:The big bang is "magical thinking too"

[onkelonkel]

"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.

Re:Good technology, bad researcher

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Logical fallacy of investment

[BlueParrot]

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.

Re:Think critically

[Dr_Barnowl]

"electrons are injected directly into the powergrid" That's a piece of whimsy on the part of the submitter, but it's not entirely inaccurate. The reactor is designed to collect power in two ways ; primarily from the energy of the emitted alpha particles, secondarily from an x-ray photon converter (would be a "solar panel" if it was solar rays, I suppose). Neither method involves the usual intervening step of using the heat of reaction products to boil water to run through a turbine, and both could be called a direct injection of electrons.

This has all the hallmarks of a bogus project that has succceeded in milking some funding out of some gullible soul You could say the same of ITER and other tokamak fusion projects ...

  * 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 .. there will be highly energetic collisions all over the place Watch the google video ; the reaction is confined to a tiny plasma toroid, which is how it achieves such a high temperature. The p-B reaction itself just emits alpha particles (otherwise known as helium ions), and plenty of X-rays, which do not persist and are intended to be captured to generate part of the power output.

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.