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

[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

[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.

[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: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.