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.
But if it works, close enough.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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
It's just a bit harder to take it seriously when the HTML title of the page is still set to "New Page 1"
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I thought it said Eric Lehnsherr for a second.
Last I heard, Lerner was after about $2 million. $600k to $700k isn't all that, but rather than sulk, give it your best shot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Congratulations, Mr. Lerner. You've been promoted from crackpot to fraud. Here's your paycheck.
It looks like the tech talk is slashdotted, but if memory serves (and I'm not a physicist, so my understanding is fuzzy at best) the idea is that the device (which has some resemblance to a large spark plug) sits in a chamber of has a large electrical current applied and exploits a sequence of unstable states to produce a small ball of plasma where the fusion takes place. The reaction produces X-rays and a directed stream of charged particles. The X-rays are collected by a sort of multilayer onion-like solar panel that converts them to electricity, and the charged particles also get converted directly to electricity. The device can be relatively simple since there's no need for steam turbines. A steady stream of electricity can be produced by repeating the reaction over and over, and storing the output in big capacitors (and part of the resulting energy is used to initiate the next pulse).
the p+B11 reaction [the one described here] forms 3 He nuclei [p+B11=C12 which splits into 3 He4] all the products are charged opening up an extra route of power generation that isn't solely thermal to electrical conversion however the reaction produces about half the energy per reaction of deuterium/tritium reaction and much higher energies to cause significant fusion.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
What is Slashdot's fascination with this guy? Seems like an article pops up every 3 months. As an undergraduate, I had the pleasure *cough* of working with Mr. Lerner when he came to use our plasma focus to do a p-B11 study for JPL. To get the required diborane gas, a nasty toxin, we had to evaporate decaborane, another nasty toxin. In the end, we had a mess to clean up in our chamber and an academic mess when Mr. Lerner embellished (or flatly misrepresented) the results of the experiment in publication. We had to lobby to get our names off the paper, but there's still a few copies of it floating around out there. Plasma focus technology has been around since the 60s (see the works of Mather and Filipov). They make cute neutron and x-ray sources, but not much more practical for fusion power production than these "bubble fusion" designs. I believe there's still a lot to be learned from the plasma focus, and I'm glad that someone is willing to pay for further research. And if we get p-B11 fusion working, that would be a great step forward too. But I wouldn't give this guy a nickel if his head were on fire, let alone $600,000.
when will these scientists give up and let me ruin the planet.
remember kids, if you stop using oil the terrorists win.
Sounds interesting, but I wish they'd named it after something other than a couple of Ford car models. Ford Fusion, Ford Focus, Focus Fusion?
If they'd wanted credibility, they shoulda gone for something like the Yaris Matrix or maybe the Fit Element.
"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.
that damned website reads like an advertisement. I'd like to see a serious proposal.
Burn them! Burn them!
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
The cosmic microwave background is as you would see from a closed universe with a period of expansion as current big bang theories say, but is also as you would see from an infinite, approximately homogeneous universe.
BTW, you can't use wikipedia for the debate between the big bang and electric cosmogonies because the debate between them is not only carried out on wikipedia itself but is carried out on almost purely religious grounds using information removal instead of competitive analysis of gathered information. If you use wikipedia for this you'll just end up believing the least scientific theory.
Haw haw! Yeah, that science thing sure is dumb!
The tokamak could be considered a cousin to this, it's just a matter of switching around where the current and magnetic fields go.
Tokamaks put the magnetic field around the donut and try to compress the plasma containing the current in the donut tighter, never seemed common sense to me to do it that way... The more you put in it, the more the forces involved would fight each other.
I'm glad to see someone put the magnetic field in the donut, and wrap the plasma around it. You've got the natural pinch point in the hole where fusion should occur, and the more current you dump into the plasma - instead of fighting the magnetic field it should make it stronger. Thus it makes the donut tighter, etc. and should behave as a positive feedback system. At least someone's now giving it a good shot, and it shouldn't hurt to try doing it this way around.
Not sure why it'd need the boron in there... Or is the intent to have that absorb any zoomies caused by fusion so it doesn't turn radioactive?
Also if the thing works to some degree and with enough efficiency, not only could it be a power supply - the DOD might be interested in modifying it into the basis of of a directed energy weapon.
-FL
The biggest selling point of p-B11 is that it's aneutronic. But as any chemist will tell you, there's some amount of everything in everything else. You can't realistically get B11 without a little B10 mixed in, which even in the best of realistic circumstances will spew out enough neutrons to drop a human being in a few minutes. It's a lot cleaner than Deuterium-Tritium but it ain't aneutronic and when people find out, you're going to get the same "not in my backyard" public attitude that is strangling fission energy.
I can't really envision use of this technology in a home or small community without stringent
licensing to curb proliferation, taxation of manufacture, sale, possession and operation thereof
and the mandated remote control and monitoring of the device by the government.
There are also further ramifications to having 5MW or more of electrical power in the hands of an
individual. It could be used as a weapon or it could power improper research. The implications
of this device for our control paradigm get worse and worser as devices like that would see use
in developing countries where the control grid is still loosely meshed. Also it would serve to
empower the projects of rogue elites to defy us.
This is definitely not the kind of development our New World needs to see. This technology runs
counter to all our efforts to build a network of interdependence.
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.
Before you get all up inz:
1) Fast ignition:
ICF is unlikely to ever deliver excess power after conversion efficiencies. NIF uses ~400 MJ to produce ~40 MJ out. Sign me up!
Fast ignition appears to reduce the required input power by about one order of magnitude. Progress in laser diodes appears to offer another. All of a sudden things look very interesting in the ICF world.
2) Magnetized Target Fusion
ICF has high-density (10 times lead -- consider that it started as hydrogen gas) and super-short confinement times. The problem is getting the density. Magnetic approaches have low density (almost vacuum) and long confinement times. The problem is getting the confinement time.
But what about the middle ground between the two? We already know how to confine for "some" time, and compress things "ok". It turns out there's an extremely interesting area of practical design in that grey area between the two extremes, in the performance area we had 20 years ago. MTF attacks that area in an interesting way.
3) Polywell
Let's give Bussard the props the guy deserves. I don't know if the Polywell is any better positioned for success than focus fusion, and I have funny feelings in my gut about all magnetic approaches, but if this guy says it's going to work I'm willing to cut him a whole lot of slack.
Maury
If this generates alpha particles as its "waste product", might that turn out to be a useful side effect? Don't we need a new source of industrial helium anyhow?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
(The Antennae Galaxies Found To Be Closer To Us)
http://digg.com/space/The_Antennae_Galaxies_Found_To_Be_Closer_To_Us
(The "Antennae Galaxies" Fall Into Line)
http://digg.com/space/The_Antennae_Galaxies_Fall_Into_Line
Since many characteristics are not observable directly, they are calculated based upon what we CAN see and estimates of the distance.
In the case of the Antennae Galaxies significantly revising down the distance, dropped it out of the "ultra-luminous" and "abnormally large" club and back into the range of "normal luminosity and size" for the type of object it is.
This makes me wonder whether other objects currently labeled as "far away," "super-massive," "ultra-luminous," etc. are in fact closer than their currently estimated distances? If so, then their luminosities, sizes and masses would need downward revision, just like the Antennae Galaxies. Would this resolve the "they're too big for gravity to hold them together" issue? If they're not as big and have less mass, or speeds involved aren't as great as we think?
Just a thought...
~Michael
"The purpose of science is to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated." ~Dr. Stephen Rorke
1) Does this help my cereal stay crunchy in milk?
[ ] Yes!
[X] No!
If Yes, congratulations, you have made a valid contribution to society!
If No, fuck off, this has no bearing on real life. Get a haircut and a job, hippie.
"Focus Fusion energy is essentially unlimited. The raw materials for hydrogen-boron fuel are exceedingly common. Hydrogen comes from ordinary water and boron from either abundant deposits or from sea-salt. Supplies of boron would be sufficient to maintain overall power consumption ten times the present global level for a billion years."
...
And of course, hydrogen comes naturally out of the water, with no energy consumption
AFAIK, Electric Universe doesn't even have a *hypothesis* to explain the cosmic microwave anisotropy. Which was, by the way, a huge vindication for Big Bang theory, since it was predicted in advance.
By the way -- has anyone else looked up CMEF, his source of funding? Right on the front page, a big pitch for cash:
The Company is privately offering 1,000,000 shares
Centre for Environmental and Energy Resources Sweden AB is raising funds, for demonstrate the scientific feasibility of Hydrogen-Boron fusion and production of net energy by selling shares. Please contact the company at arnold@cmef.eu to discuss investing.
Support a better future
You can help yourself, your country and future generations by supporting us (CMEF). You can assist us by sending a monetary donation. Any assistance you are able to provide will be appreciated. For more information click here
I'd be willing to wager that they don't have the $10m, and might not even have the $600k yet. In fact, their whole website is about how wonderful Focus Fusion and Lerner's work is. So, I mean, acting like you got a grant as though it's some sort of vindication of your technology when it's from what's virtually a fansite isn't exactly fair. It's just some Focus Fusion fans trying to raise money to fund it.
I'll just make a quick observation that the "Tree Power" guy managed to get funding, too.
Friends! Help! A guinea pig tricked me!
I also need US$ 600k for my research project. It would be for purchasing a pair of sharks. I cannot tell the details in an open forum, but it has something to do with defence. Maybe his plasma jet device could also be used, I have not thought it before yet... So far I stuck with a kind of focused light device... But I've already told too much, I have to finish.
According to our calorimetry tests, frat boys and ugly women had poor lower heating values, and the beer failed to ignite at all.
I had a conversation with Edward Teller back in '96 or '97 about the feasibility of commercial fusion reactors. He didn't think technology would give us a commercially viable reactor until about 2025. There are too many problems to overcome in the meantime.
And I'll go with the word of a man who actually did something in the area of theoretical physics rather than some person with all sorts of wild claims and who writes ludicrous books like "The Big Bang Never Happened." All he proves is there are suckers born every minute!
Eric
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. - Pugh
It produced plasma stable structures which were then compressed. If was de-funded before it could be proven ( or disproven ).
Disclaimer: I worked on it.
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.
...how severely Nikola Tesla would have been shredded herein.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
It is really interesting to know that someone is willing to buy in to Lerner's plan. The rest of plasma physics community world are going to be thrilled by this development. Lately, exciting news concerning discharge based plasma technology are coming rapidly. At Sandia, the refurbised Z machine is up and running, Sandia is teaming up with the Russian to develop some next generation pulse generator using LTD technologies. The Plasma Focus guys in Warsaw are busy in some ICTP Trieste's initiatives on Plasma Focus, even in Singapore and Malaysia, there is a computational symposium on Plasma Focus being held. Not forgetting the Chillean group and also some remnants research groups scattered all over Europe. Definitely, things are not going to be the same. It is also feel good to know that people are looking for alternatives other than the gigantic ITER.
Eric Lerner is described in Wikipedia as "a popular science writer, independent plasma researcher and an advocate of plasma cosmology" - IOW, not actually a scientist, although he may well be knowledgeable; he has a BA in physics.
However, what really makes me think twice about this is the claim that they achieve fusion without any radioactive by-products, "only harmless Helium gas". How does one produce such a precise result in an environment that is "several billion degrees"? At that temperature the atoms will move about a bit, to say the least, and we are not even talking about pure deuterium; there will be highly energetic collisions all over the place, and a large amount of particle radiation will be produced, as far as I can see, and the reactor casing is bound to become radioactive.
This has all the hallmarks of a bogus project that has succceeded in milking some funding out of some gullible soul - in this case CMEF, a Swedish startup.
Once you get the suspicion that this is yet another bogus project, you begin to see signs all over the place: superficially it looks as if they have got some government grant in the US, that Eric Lerner is a scientist, and that the company is some well-established research-company (a search for "Lawrenceville Plasma Physics" on Wikipedia redirects to the article about "Eric Lerner") - IOW, the announcement is deceptive; if this was real, they wouldn't need to deceive.
And then of course there is the claim that "electrons are injected directly into the powergrid" based on some cosmological phenomenon, that is not yet well understood scientifically. In a Superman comic, perhaps, but not in real life. This is simply a flight of fantasy, unbound by the boring, mundane routine of real scientific research.
Unfortunately I've yet to see a single person dismiss the Electric Universe who was also familiar with it. From one of their main sites:
As author and EU theorist Wal Thornhill points out:
"If Arp and others are right and the Big Bang is dead, what does the Cosmic Microwave Background signify? The simplest answer, from the highly successful field of plasma cosmology, is that it represents the natural microwave radiation from electric current filaments in interstellar plasma local to the Sun. Radio astronomers have mapped the interstellar hydrogen filaments by using longer wavelength receivers. The dense thicket formed by those filaments produces a perfect fog of microwave radiation - as if we were located inside a microwave oven. Instead of the Cosmic Microwave Background, it is the Interstellar Microwave Background. That makes sense of the fact that the CMB is too smooth to account for the lumpiness of galaxies and galactic clusters in the universe."
Another mention of the subject is here and several more here with some reading. These took me about 30 seconds to find with a Google search for "+electric-universe +cosmic-microwave". So how hard have you worked to understand something before dismissing it or forming an opinion of it? Skepticism doesn't mean you don't even look into something because you dislike how it sounds or you can't see how the mainstream could be wrong.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The "big bangers" don't mention that for the same reason they don't go around saying the moon is made of cheese.
The organization actually exists, and is a corporation here in Sweden, which means that when founded it had at least ~$17k in capital. Other than that the company doesn't seem to have made any marks in official records here in sweden.
The CEO, Leif Arnold seems to have the habit of lying (easily provable) to discredit conventional fission energy on blogs here and there.
Not terribly credible
I'm trying really hard to figure out if that was meant to be an intentional parody, or actually intended seriously, and I can't decide which it is.
I think I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt for now, so congratulations on a perfectly pitched piece of parody...
I'm happy to consider the electric universe theory for some behaviours - I don't see a contradiction in admitting some of it makes more sense for a few observed items, but likewise gravity seems a better fit for others.
Any side that degenerates into name-calling and concentrates on the failings of their opponents instead of the benfits of their theory becomes questionable, however.
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / xenogamous.com / transference.org / quantam sufficit ]
http://www.mhall119.com
Gah.
I've seen better pictures of Bigfoot. I'm really glad scientists don't produce my pornography. It'd be like watching a scrambled Spice channel at the Holiday Inn.
Not that I do that, or anything.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Thanks; I'm saving this one.
:)
Regards;
If by "observed," you meant "seen by the reflection or emission of visible light," then you'd be correct. By "dark" we mean "stuff that we can't see by reflection or emission of light".
However, dark matter well observed by its gravity.
The point is, it's a completely different category of thing from inflation. Dark matter is an observation looking for a theory-- nobody said "theory predicts that the universe ought to be full of stuff that we won't be able to see, let's look at galactic rotation curves and expansion maps and lensing and test if the theory's right." Instead it was the opposite: "galactic rotation curves and expansion maps and lensing all tell us there's something out there we can't see, let's find a theory that can explain it."
There are alternative possibilities-- MOND is one, for example, although it's beginning to look like lensing observations are ruling that out. But the key point is that dark matter is observation driven (despite being dark), not theory driven.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You do not understand big bang theory. The universe never expanded beyond its event horizon, that is a ludicrous interpretation. There was no event horizon because there was and is no "outside" that the "black hole" is expanding into.
Just because you do not understand modern physics does not mean it is false.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's the cosmic microwave background radiation that they're trying to explain, not the structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy. A "dense fog" doesn't cut it.
Friends! Help! A guinea pig tricked me!
His theories about the Universe aside, which have no bearing on this project, it's well worth funding people like this, mainly because they think outside of the box.
Check this out. One guy who had a crazy idea in his garage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B8srudAUhE
(using sound waves to extract hydrogen from salt water)
Looks interesting at least, and worth possibly funding to see if anything practical can be done with it.
Often the best ideas come from applying simple technology in ways that aren't usually done. From what I can see, Lerner's design should work. Whether or not it can be made to be economical, though, I doubt it. But it certainly looks to be a lot smaller and more compact, which might lead to some interesting uses where normal power generation isn't feasible(moon base, for instance). If the claim that it has less harmful radiation to deal with is true, or if it rids us of the need for turbines, it would be a big step ahead of the current attempts.(which have cost us billions and still not worked, I might add)
Worth 1/8th the cost of a single M1 Abrams tank? I can think of worse things by far to spend our tax money on.
This seems a bit of a wild card, but the investment seems actually rather small, and if it works the payoff is high.
I don't really have an informed opinion as to how reasonable this is, but consider it as an important test of a non-mainstream theory. As such it seems worth the cost (provided that the report of the results is detailed, honest, and complete). People should report experimental failures as well as successes.
OTOH, it's not my money they're spending...so I can't even claim the right to a report on the results...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'd been drinking rather heavily, and got kicked out of my relative's house. After a few days, I ended up calling the police because I was hallucinating rather vividly. I was committed for observation, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and given sedatives. (apparently the only drugs psychiatrists know exist, besides ritalin, are sedatives) The hallucinations went away after about a week or so, when I'd gone through withdrawl and was eating normally. However, no amount of reason would convince anyone involved that I wasn't hearing voices, and much "unpleasentness" occurred with people that supposedly cared for me trying to chemically lombotomize me.
Then, I saw an episode of House, Forever, where heavy alcohol use caused hallucination though vitamin deficiency, pellagra. In pursuit of scientific truth, I got extremely drunk for ~5 days, without eating much of anything. Results: vivid hallucinations. Cure: Vitamin B3, and hallucination go away.
So, remember when that while House is made to be rather riduculous, it's far more accurate in terms of basic medical science than the field of psychiatry ever will be.
(Also, you might be interested in Hopkinds scientists show hallucinogen in mushroom creates universal "mystical" experience.. Johns Hopkins University.)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.