Hey - I'm, a member of the US "wealthy ruling class" and DHS doesn't serve my interests! I think Mozilla acted completely appropriately.
I think our freedom from unlawful seizure, and our freedom of speech is more important than tracking down people swapping stolen entertainment content,or distributing child porn. (assuming that DHS's actions even helped with either of those - something I'm not sure I believe).
Lets see, the elderly people I know use their computers to chat with friends on AOL and watch netflix videos. The one couple I know has used computers for >10 years now, but isn't really clear on what a "file" or "directory" is, and don't know the difference between pictures on their local hard disk and ones on the internet.
Do you really expect them to install flash and java on a linux machine?
I like linux, its good for some types of work, but it requires a level of understanding of computers that a lot of people simply don't have. I've used linux for ~5 years now and am moderately technically literate, but I keep running into problems I can't fix (like a debian machine that hangs when network drives it has mounted through cifs have gone into sleep mode).
We've developed a lot of in-house code here at SLAC. Often we have had better success with the prototype code developed by scientists than with the rigorously written by software engineers. This is because at a research lab the requirements are constantly changing (if we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research), and the design cycle for specify / write / test / debug / deploy is to slow. Having the people directly involved with the experiment writing the code in real time gets better results faster for some types of problems. (for some systems, the standard engineering approach works better and we use it)
We also have the issue of multiple codes that do basically the same thing. My group recently looked into trying to merge the various codes for simulating and tuning accelerators, and we concluded that it would be more effort to merge them than to continue to develop separately. This was for a group of people who were now all in the same group and collaborating - there was no political or career pressure on this.
I think the research environment is fundamentally different from a commercial environment. In many software projects the requirements are continually changing. This is not a result of poor planning by the people requesting the software, but rather the desire to take best advantage of new scientific information as it becomes available. The resulting informal code development is very efficient for the project, but produces code that is difficult to transport to other projects.
The code we write is available to the public, but is un-documented and unsupported, and so mostly useless to others.
The flame temperature is a maximum at near stoichiometric mixture. If you go considerably leaner the flame temperatures drop again. This is used in turbine engines (which run very lean) to keep from melting the turbines. Some pilots (including me) operate piston aircraft engines considerably lean of peak temperatures - it makes the engines more efficient and give better cooling but requires a good fuel distribution system, and might not work well for the wide range of powers required by auto engines. Lean operation also produces less power since you are burning less total fuel.
I don't know if laser ignition significantly improves the ability of engines to run lean, or whether the system will have a good lifetime and reliability.
I didn't see any claim of 60% efficiency. On page 4 first paragraph they claim a 34% improvement for small turbines, 25% for large turbines. Since diesels are already more efficient that turbines (for non-heat recovery turbines), that probably puts this in the same range, maybe a bit better, but not the factor of 3 that was claimed above.
Since internal combustion engines are a multi-hundred billion dollar business, I'm very skeptical about any claim of a 3X improvement, especially one that is basically a variant of an existing technology (the paper cites references from 1986 on detonation engines and the idea may be even older). If they build a working prototype that actually works at 60%, I'll pay attention.
As a side note, remember ther is NOT a carnot engine so it won't get to the "theoretical" efficiency.
It seems like an OK technology to investigate - along with ambient diesel engines, over-expansion engines, and it migth be useful for some applications but I strongly doubt it will revolutiize engines.
Unfortunately science is often taught incorrectly. A lot of people have been taught to believe that science is just a collection of facts that need to be taken on trust. I don't blame people who believe this if that is what they were taught, but it is incorrect.
As several have said, the key to science is that is falsifiable. Maybe not by you personally, but by someone. If it is falsified by one person, others can duplicate that and soon the scientific opinion changes.
Of course not all things that are called science, are in fact science (its often joked that anything with "science" in the name isn't).
Science is not always right - experiments can be mistaken, or occasionally faked. Eventually though the errors are found and science marches forward.
Science is not at odds with religion or philosophy, it is different: In an ideal world philosophy tells you what to do, religion tells you why, and science tells you how.
Unless you are planning a to build a LOT of really big star ships, fuel cost isn't likely to be a big issue. Uranium is something like $50/Kg, so 10,000 tons (suitable for a comfortable sized spacecraft is only $50M, pretty insignificant.
Mining uranium at your destination might be a big issue - not clear at that tech level how difficult it would be to mine metallic asteroids for fissionable materials.
Fusion would provide a higher specific impulse than fission - in theory. Due to the large weight of the laser systems and the fuel tanks though, it isn't clear that in a practical design a fission rocket wouldn't be better
Its pretty easy to imagine a fission rocket that used it's fuel pretty efficiently, then used the waste products as reaction mass in an ion drive. . (you might even be able to use the fuel as a structural material before you burn it)
If you are willing to use a solar system based drive laser you can do even better. A soft X-ray laser (say 1 KeV) only needs a 100nm thick sail but has far fewer diffraction problems than a optical launch laser.
Con artists can be REALLY good. If she was in contact with him for a long time, he probably really believed her, really loved her. When he found out that this person he trusted was in trouble, he did what he could to help.
People have lost millions over love. The have murdered, committed espionage, and started wars over love.
Need to remember that he was probably not very internet savvy or the scam would not have gotten past the first email.
As far as a dumb move by a person in love, this isn't at all out there.
Hard is a relative term, there are lots of things that have been done but are still difficult. The first satellite launch was 50 years ago but private companies still have difficulty doing this without using old expensive technology.
The difficulty of testing sub-systems in a realistic environment means that the designs need to be very conservative (expensive).
I think it is an interesting challenge and it might just be possible, but I don't think it will be easy. My bet is that no one will make it, but I would be very happy to be proven wrong.
The original description of a Free Electron Laser by John Madey (in the 70s I think) was entirely quantum-mechanical. This description while correct, is also very complicated (I've been working on FELs on and off since the mid 1980s and I'm afraid all I can do is suggest that you read the papers - I don't understand them). I know that if you look at the electron in the combined field of the undulator and the propagating radiation, a QM description looks just like stimulated emission. I know this is a cop-out on my part, but I really don't understand the physics.
The reason I (and most FEL people) don't understand the quantum description is that there is a much simpler classical description (by Colson?) that predicts the same results for all existing FELs. (for a very high energy FEL you would need a quantum description, but no existing or planned machines operate in the regime). This classical description (which it sounds like you have heard ) is used for essentially all FEL work.
BTW: there isn't a conservation of momentum problem because the electrons are interacting with the strong undulator field and that can absorb momentum (and transfer it to the physical magnets). The energy comes from the initial kinetic energy of the electrons which slow down (or more precisely lose energy, since they are ultra-relativistic) during the interaction.
In a classical sense, the input radiation causes the electrons to bunch, an those bunches can then emit coherently. For small amounts of bunching this process is linear and looks just like the gain from stimulated emission.
Sorry I can't give a better physics description - I should make another try at the original papers.
This has been a bit of a problem. The LCLS is 30X shorter wavelength, and maybe 100X higher power (depending on how you measure) than any previous X-ray laser but its really difficult to describe that without using all sorts of qualifiers. The single shot virus imaging (applicable to a wide range of nanometer scale objects) is far beyond the capabilities of any other system but again the need to apply all sorts of qualifiers makes it sound somewhat weak.
Note - in claiming high power I'm not counting the non-published bomb-pumped laser work done by the military. There is a great deal of controversy over whether that worked - I've spoken to people on the project who have strongly hinted at either YES or NO, but the work is classified so there is no way to tell whether it worked, or if so, what sort of performance was seen.
In a conventional laser you have a laser rod and mirrors. You charge the rod and it starts to emit spontaneous light. That light is reflected from the mirrors and passes through the rod many times, gaining energy from spontaneous emission each time. Eventually you extract the available energy in the rod and a partially coherent beam is emitted from one of the partially transparent mirrors.
Now imagine that rather than use mirrors, you used a lot of rods is series. The effect would be the same, spontaneous emission from the first rod would be amplified in the downstream rods until it saturated. The light emitted would be very similar to the light from the rod and mirror system.
The LCLS (and other SASE FELs) work the same way - there are many undulators (33 for us) and the X-rays from the first undulator are amplified as they travel through the later undulators. The LCLS has 20-30 exponential gain lengths so the amplification finally saturates.
You are right that it is not longitudinally coherent, but that is true of many lasers. Various techniques are used in conventional lasers to make they fully coherent. Similar tricks (seeding) will be added to the LCLS in the near future. We will probably do the first tests of seeded longitudinally coherent operation later this year.
Also, when we run with very short pulses (few femtoseconds) the beam is nearly longitudinally coherent (due to transform limit).
No, they are destroyed. The X-ray pulse is short enough (10s of femtoseconds) that an image is collected before the virus (or other target) has time to explode. This is the big advantage of the LCLS over conventional X-ray sources.
I think there are two different parts of science education: facts and methods. While the practice of science involves (by definition) using the scientific method, there is also value to be had from learning the "facts" known to science. Here I use "facts" rather than "theories" because relative to the popular definitions, they are "facts".
The fact that energy is conserved and perpetual motion is impossible is valuable information even though deriving this and performing the appropriate experiments in a high-school level science class would be very difficult.
The evidence supporting evolution is valuable even though trying to conduct an "experiment" that could in principal "disprove" it is rather tricky It is useful to teach that the basic idea of evolution is well supported, but that there are many details still not settled. The only way I can think of to disprove this is to look for evolutionary look-ahead in the fossil record where a species changes to adapt to a changing environment BEFORE the change occurs. Very difficult to estimate the statistics on this type of experiment.
Climate change is in a different category. There the evidence is much murkier. The majority of scientists believe that human generated greenhouse gases will have an significant effect on climate, but there is still disagreement as to the magnitude of this effect. Experimental data is limited and correcting for other influences is very difficult (tough to repeat an experiment with only 1 planet). Once again an experiment that would "disprove" climate change is not easy to construct.
Unfortunately it is inefficient to produce anti-protons for very fundamental reasons. Protons are composites of quarks and there is a low probability of creating one in a collision. I seem to remember the best theoretical efficiency is less than 1e-4, and practical sources are FAR worse.
If you only make positrons, there is no practical way to store large mases. You would really need to make anti-hydrogen, then (somehow - no idea) levitate it magnetically. The efficiency for anti-hydrogen production is spectacularly small.
You can do nuclear without an orion drive. A more conventional nuclear reactor could then power some high ISP engine (like an ION drive). The specific impulse is still no where near antimatter, but could probably get you to ~5% C.
Human parallax only works well up to a few meters. In "good" movies (those that contain exploding spaceships, erupting volcanoes and tens of thousands of Mongols charging on horseback - or preferably all 3 ) the action is at a large enough distance that the 3D effect vanishes. If you try to turn a spaceship battle into a 3d effect, you wind up with inch-long spaceships fighting for control of your nose.
The only movies were 3D might be useful would be porn flicks where presumably you might want to be close to the action.
The Chinese are probably happy to get technical information and parts from any US secret aircraft - as we would be to get theirs. They might have learned something useful, but the technology on the F117 is so old that it probably wasn't very useful.
Its difficult to know the status and capabilities of the new J20, but China does have a lot of smart engineers so it should probably be taken seriously.
There isn't any known physics to exploit to allow cold fusion, with the exception of muon catalyzed fusion (more on that later). This isn't the same as saying its impossible, but it makes it very unlikely. There is just no known way to overcome the Columb barrier except with kinetic energy or extreme pressure. The kinetic energy would either require high temperatures (hot fusion), or some sort of particle beam. The fusion cross sections are so low that particle beam fusion doesn't generate net energy - the incident particles lose too much energy in random collisions for each time fusion happens. Fusion induced by high pressure would require near neutron-star conditions, much more difficult to achieve than hot fusion.
There is no reason to think that chemistry should affect fusion - the electron density close to the nucleus just isn't affected that much by external chemistry.
Muon catalyzed fusion does work (you can use negative muons to cause the fusion of low temperature hydrogen atoms), but the energy released by the fusion is less than what is required to create the muons (counting the number of fusions catalyzed in a muon lifetime, and the probability of the muons getting "stuck" to the helium nuclei). Its really tantalizing because the numbers aren't that far from break even, but people have been looking at this since 1957 and there just doesn't seem to be any way to make this work.
For the original article here - they provided no claim of what physics is going on, and no diagram of their apparatus. The apparatus is large enough to have a hidden energy source to fool the tests. I am also made suspicious by the very careful description of the measurement of the heat released (not required when the output is >10X the input) which looks like a distraction from the other huge unknowns in the problem. (for example a flowmeter is a much more accurate method than a scale to measure the hydrogen use).
I'd love to believe there is a simple practical clean energy source, but this looks a lot like a fraud to me.
Science does figure in a lot of TV shows and movies, and not infrequently scientists are presented as positive role models. One problem though is that doing real science is very different from the movies - here I'm talking about what scientists do day-to-day, not the technical accuracy. I wonder if this results in some young people becoming discouraged with science early on because it isn't what they expect.
Of course, like most fields, real science doesn't make for a very interesting movie. Real "breakthroughs" are almost always highly technical and can only be understood by experts in the particular field. Combine this with marketing "breakthroughs" which often have almost no technical content and non-experts can be left very confused
Slashdot Mirror
Hey - I'm, a member of the US "wealthy ruling class" and DHS doesn't serve my interests! I think Mozilla acted completely appropriately.
I think our freedom from unlawful seizure, and our freedom of speech is more important than tracking down people swapping stolen entertainment content,or distributing child porn. (assuming that DHS's actions even helped with either of those - something I'm not sure I believe).
step 1: develop practical fusion power
step 2: redevelop lunar capable space program
I DID move to debian. The latest release is pretty easy to configure, and seems to work well
Lets see, the elderly people I know use their computers to chat with friends on AOL and watch netflix videos. The one couple I know has used computers for >10 years now, but isn't really clear on what a "file" or "directory" is, and don't know the difference between pictures on their local hard disk and ones on the internet.
Do you really expect them to install flash and java on a linux machine?
I like linux, its good for some types of work, but it requires a level of understanding of computers that a lot of people simply don't have. I've used linux for ~5 years now and am moderately technically literate, but I keep running into problems I can't fix (like a debian machine that hangs when network drives it has mounted through cifs have gone into sleep mode).
We've developed a lot of in-house code here at SLAC. Often we have had better success with the prototype code developed by scientists than with the rigorously written by software engineers. This is because at a research lab the requirements are constantly changing (if we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research), and the design cycle for specify / write / test / debug / deploy is to slow. Having the people directly involved with the experiment writing the code in real time gets better results faster for some types of problems. (for some systems, the standard engineering approach works better and we use it)
We also have the issue of multiple codes that do basically the same thing. My group recently looked into trying to merge the various codes for simulating and tuning accelerators, and we concluded that it would be more effort to merge them than to continue to develop separately. This was for a group of people who were now all in the same group and collaborating - there was no political or career pressure on this.
I think the research environment is fundamentally different from a commercial environment. In many software projects the requirements are continually changing. This is not a result of poor planning by the people requesting the software, but rather the desire to take best advantage of new scientific information as it becomes available. The resulting informal code development is very efficient for the project, but produces code that is difficult to transport to other projects.
The code we write is available to the public, but is un-documented and unsupported, and so mostly useless to others.
Maybe. Or maybe that's like our paleolithic ancestors looking for piles of animal bones with the meat scraped off as a sign of civilization.
The flame temperature is a maximum at near stoichiometric mixture. If you go considerably leaner the flame temperatures drop again. This is used in turbine engines (which run very lean) to keep from melting the turbines. Some pilots (including me) operate piston aircraft engines considerably lean of peak temperatures - it makes the engines more efficient and give better cooling but requires a good fuel distribution system, and might not work well for the wide range of powers required by auto engines. Lean operation also produces less power since you are burning less total fuel.
I don't know if laser ignition significantly improves the ability of engines to run lean, or whether the system will have a good lifetime and reliability.
I read the paper.
I didn't see any claim of 60% efficiency. On page 4 first paragraph they claim a 34% improvement for small turbines, 25% for large turbines. Since diesels are already more efficient that turbines (for non-heat recovery turbines), that probably puts this in the same range, maybe a bit better, but not the factor of 3 that was claimed above.
Since internal combustion engines are a multi-hundred billion dollar business, I'm very skeptical about any claim of a 3X improvement, especially one that is basically a variant of an existing technology (the paper cites references from 1986 on detonation engines and the idea may be even older). If they build a working prototype that actually works at 60%, I'll pay attention.
As a side note, remember ther is NOT a carnot engine so it won't get to the "theoretical" efficiency.
It seems like an OK technology to investigate - along with ambient diesel engines, over-expansion engines, and it migth be useful for some applications but I strongly doubt it will revolutiize engines.
Unfortunately science is often taught incorrectly. A lot of people have been taught to believe that science is just a collection of facts that need to be taken on trust. I don't blame people who believe this if that is what they were taught, but it is incorrect.
As several have said, the key to science is that is falsifiable. Maybe not by you personally, but by someone. If it is falsified by one person, others can duplicate that and soon the scientific opinion changes.
Of course not all things that are called science, are in fact science (its often joked that anything with "science" in the name isn't).
Science is not always right - experiments can be mistaken, or occasionally faked. Eventually though the errors are found and science marches forward.
Science is not at odds with religion or philosophy, it is different: In an ideal world philosophy tells you what to do, religion tells you why, and science tells you how.
--- Joe Frisch
Unless you are planning a to build a LOT of really big star ships, fuel cost isn't likely to be a big issue. Uranium is something like $50/Kg, so 10,000 tons (suitable for a comfortable sized spacecraft is only $50M, pretty insignificant.
Mining uranium at your destination might be a big issue - not clear at that tech level how difficult it would be to mine metallic asteroids for fissionable materials.
--- Joe Frisch
Fusion would provide a higher specific impulse than fission - in theory. Due to the large weight of the laser systems and the fuel tanks though, it isn't clear that in a practical design a fission rocket wouldn't be better
Its pretty easy to imagine a fission rocket that used it's fuel pretty efficiently, then used the waste products as reaction mass in an ion drive. . (you might even be able to use the fuel as a structural material before you burn it)
If you are willing to use a solar system based drive laser you can do even better. A soft X-ray laser (say 1 KeV) only needs a 100nm thick sail but has far fewer diffraction problems than a optical launch laser.
Con artists can be REALLY good. If she was in contact with him for a long time, he probably really believed her, really loved her. When he found out that this person he trusted was in trouble, he did what he could to help.
People have lost millions over love. The have murdered, committed espionage, and started wars over love.
Need to remember that he was probably not very internet savvy or the scam would not have gotten past the first email.
As far as a dumb move by a person in love, this isn't at all out there.
Hard is a relative term, there are lots of things that have been done but are still difficult. The first satellite launch was 50 years ago but private companies still have difficulty doing this without using old expensive technology.
The difficulty of testing sub-systems in a realistic environment means that the designs need to be very conservative (expensive).
I think it is an interesting challenge and it might just be possible, but I don't think it will be easy. My bet is that no one will make it, but I would be very happy to be proven wrong.
I still fly, and almost never hear this.
The original description of a Free Electron Laser by John Madey (in the 70s I think) was entirely quantum-mechanical. This description while correct, is also very complicated (I've been working on FELs on and off since the mid 1980s and I'm afraid all I can do is suggest that you read the papers - I don't understand them). I know that if you look at the electron in the combined field of the undulator and the propagating radiation, a QM description looks just like stimulated emission. I know this is a cop-out on my part, but I really don't understand the physics.
The reason I (and most FEL people) don't understand the quantum description is that there is a much simpler classical description (by Colson?) that predicts the same results for all existing FELs. (for a very high energy FEL you would need a quantum description, but no existing or planned machines operate in the regime). This classical description (which it sounds like you have heard ) is used for essentially all FEL work.
BTW: there isn't a conservation of momentum problem because the electrons are interacting with the strong undulator field and that can absorb momentum (and transfer it to the physical magnets). The energy comes from the initial kinetic energy of the electrons which slow down (or more precisely lose energy, since they are ultra-relativistic) during the interaction.
In a classical sense, the input radiation causes the electrons to bunch, an those bunches can then emit coherently. For small amounts of bunching this process is linear and looks just like the gain from stimulated emission.
Sorry I can't give a better physics description - I should make another try at the original papers.
--- Joe Frisch
This has been a bit of a problem. The LCLS is 30X shorter wavelength, and maybe 100X higher power (depending on how you measure) than any previous X-ray laser but its really difficult to describe that without using all sorts of qualifiers. The single shot virus imaging (applicable to a wide range of nanometer scale objects) is far beyond the capabilities of any other system but again the need to apply all sorts of qualifiers makes it sound somewhat weak.
Note - in claiming high power I'm not counting the non-published bomb-pumped laser work done by the military. There is a great deal of controversy over whether that worked - I've spoken to people on the project who have strongly hinted at either YES or NO, but the work is classified so there is no way to tell whether it worked, or if so, what sort of performance was seen.
In a conventional laser you have a laser rod and mirrors. You charge the rod and it starts to emit spontaneous light. That light is reflected from the mirrors and passes through the rod many times, gaining energy from spontaneous emission each time. Eventually you extract the available energy in the rod and a partially coherent beam is emitted from one of the partially transparent mirrors.
Now imagine that rather than use mirrors, you used a lot of rods is series. The effect would be the same, spontaneous emission from the first rod would be amplified in the downstream rods until it saturated. The light emitted would be very similar to the light from the rod and mirror system.
The LCLS (and other SASE FELs) work the same way - there are many undulators (33 for us) and the X-rays from the first undulator are amplified as they travel through the later undulators. The LCLS has 20-30 exponential gain lengths so the amplification finally saturates.
You are right that it is not longitudinally coherent, but that is true of many lasers. Various techniques are used in conventional lasers to make they fully coherent. Similar tricks (seeding) will be added to the LCLS in the near future. We will probably do the first tests of seeded longitudinally coherent operation later this year.
Also, when we run with very short pulses (few femtoseconds) the beam is nearly longitudinally coherent (due to transform limit).
---- Joe Frisch
SLAC / LCLS
No, they are destroyed. The X-ray pulse is short enough (10s of femtoseconds) that an image is collected before the virus (or other target) has time to explode. This is the big advantage of the LCLS over conventional X-ray sources.
I think there are two different parts of science education: facts and methods. While the practice of science involves (by definition) using the scientific method, there is also value to be had from learning the "facts" known to science. Here I use "facts" rather than "theories" because relative to the popular definitions, they are "facts".
The fact that energy is conserved and perpetual motion is impossible is valuable information even though deriving this and performing the appropriate experiments in a high-school level science class would be very difficult.
The evidence supporting evolution is valuable even though trying to conduct an "experiment" that could in principal "disprove" it is rather tricky It is useful to teach that the basic idea of evolution is well supported, but that there are many details still not settled. The only way I can think of to disprove this is to look for evolutionary look-ahead in the fossil record where a species changes to adapt to a changing environment BEFORE the change occurs. Very difficult to estimate the statistics on this type of experiment.
Climate change is in a different category. There the evidence is much murkier. The majority of scientists believe that human generated greenhouse gases will have an significant effect on climate, but there is still disagreement as to the magnitude of this effect. Experimental data is limited and correcting for other influences is very difficult (tough to repeat an experiment with only 1 planet). Once again an experiment that would "disprove" climate change is not easy to construct.
Unfortunately it is inefficient to produce anti-protons for very fundamental reasons. Protons are composites of quarks and there is a low probability of creating one in a collision. I seem to remember the best theoretical efficiency is less than 1e-4, and practical sources are FAR worse.
If you only make positrons, there is no practical way to store large mases. You would really need to make anti-hydrogen, then (somehow - no idea) levitate it magnetically. The efficiency for anti-hydrogen production is spectacularly small.
You can do nuclear without an orion drive. A more conventional nuclear reactor could then power some high ISP engine (like an ION drive). The specific impulse is still no where near antimatter, but could probably get you to ~5% C.
Human parallax only works well up to a few meters. In "good" movies (those that contain exploding spaceships, erupting volcanoes and tens of thousands of Mongols charging on horseback - or preferably all 3 ) the action is at a large enough distance that the 3D effect vanishes. If you try to turn a spaceship battle into a 3d effect, you wind up with inch-long spaceships fighting for control of your nose.
The only movies were 3D might be useful would be porn flicks where presumably you might want to be close to the action.
The Chinese are probably happy to get technical information and parts from any US secret aircraft - as we would be to get theirs. They might have learned something useful, but the technology on the F117 is so old that it probably wasn't very useful.
Its difficult to know the status and capabilities of the new J20, but China does have a lot of smart engineers so it should probably be taken seriously.
There isn't any known physics to exploit to allow cold fusion, with the exception of muon catalyzed fusion (more on that later). This isn't the same as saying its impossible, but it makes it very unlikely. There is just no known way to overcome the Columb barrier except with kinetic energy or extreme pressure. The kinetic energy would either require high temperatures (hot fusion), or some sort of particle beam. The fusion cross sections are so low that particle beam fusion doesn't generate net energy - the incident particles lose too much energy in random collisions for each time fusion happens. Fusion induced by high pressure would require near neutron-star conditions, much more difficult to achieve than hot fusion.
There is no reason to think that chemistry should affect fusion - the electron density close to the nucleus just isn't affected that much by external chemistry.
Muon catalyzed fusion does work (you can use negative muons to cause the fusion of low temperature hydrogen atoms), but the energy released by the fusion is less than what is required to create the muons (counting the number of fusions catalyzed in a muon lifetime, and the probability of the muons getting "stuck" to the helium nuclei). Its really tantalizing because the numbers aren't that far from break even, but people have been looking at this since 1957 and there just doesn't seem to be any way to make this work.
For the original article here - they provided no claim of what physics is going on, and no diagram of their apparatus. The apparatus is large enough to have a hidden energy source to fool the tests. I am also made suspicious by the very careful description of the measurement of the heat released (not required when the output is >10X the input) which looks like a distraction from the other huge unknowns in the problem. (for example a flowmeter is a much more accurate method than a scale to measure the hydrogen use).
I'd love to believe there is a simple practical clean energy source, but this looks a lot like a fraud to me.
Science does figure in a lot of TV shows and movies, and not infrequently scientists are presented as positive role models. One problem though is that doing real science is very different from the movies - here I'm talking about what scientists do day-to-day, not the technical accuracy. I wonder if this results in some young people becoming discouraged with science early on because it isn't what they expect.
Of course, like most fields, real science doesn't make for a very interesting movie. Real "breakthroughs" are almost always highly technical and can only be understood by experts in the particular field. Combine this with marketing "breakthroughs" which often have almost no technical content and non-experts can be left very confused