I know the general wisdom seems to be that 'fusion is hard but the payoffs are huge'. I don't really agree with this. We already know enough about plasma physics to start designing fusion reactor that will reach or exceed breakeven (ITER), and it will probably work. So fusion is definitely hard, but we ARE getting there. But is it economical? It's clear by now that any fusion reactor is going to be obscenely expensive. The nature of fusion means that only large reactors are possible; forget small and modular ones. It's also going to produce a lot of neutron radiation, leading to lots and lots of low-to-medium-level nuclear waste. Also, because of this radiation, it's going to be very expensive to maintain and is probably going to require regular replacement of key components. And when it finally comes time to tear it down, decommissioning is also going to be expensive. The much-touted 'fusion fuel is cheap!' line doesn't seem to be that important since fuel is likely to be very little of the regular expense of the reactor.
So, let's tick off the boxes. Nuclear waste, check. Cumbersome size, check. Expensive to build and maintain, check. Remind me why it's better than fission again?
Except Einstein didn't immediately jump to "classical physics is wrong" just to get a kick out of it. Einstein was aware of the experiments that were inconsistent with the classical way of thinking. He correctly realized that relativity was the least improbable theory that fit all observations.
E-cat never produced a single microjoule of energy. E-cat's workings have never been published. E-cat has never been open to scrutiny by the scientific community. The inventor of E-cat has not been up-front or honest about the device's working parameters. This device is based on known physics and engineering.
E-cat is a fraud whereas this is real science. If you continue to insist that this is equivalent to E-cat, the only logical conclusion is that you're a troll.
The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.
Contests aren't the answer, but you have a point that large government-sponsored projects seem to be wasteful. But in the particular case of fusion, the government has actually allocated very little money to fusion energy research so far in relative terms, so there's no way of knowing! Laser fusion was (and is) primarily for nuclear weapons research, with energy being considered as a speculative tertiary side-effect (and a good propaganda technique for easing the public mind) rather than an actual design goal. Same goes for a lot of funded plasma research.
True, but progress in fusion has been so slow that improvements like this are quite welcome. Also, you have to consider that you can often get good improvements simply by scaling up your equipment.
> maybe it's a setup or measurement error, or maybe, just maybe, this is a new effect that hadn't been discovered yet.
Science consists of performing experiments, gathering data, coming up with a set of competing explanations for the observed data, and then conducting more experiments to obtain proof in favor of or against the competing hypotheses.
The key is the 'coming up with explanations' part. Anything that violates conservation of momentum is NOT an explanation. It creates far, far more problems than it solves. If you're even willing to consider it when ANY other option is available indicates that you are biased, not the other way around.
It's only when all other options have been exhausted that you should even think about considering violating conservation of momentum. And if you're at that stage, you are incredibly screwed because now you have to revise ALL of physics, not just your little experiment.
If you think that an honest unbiased scientist should waste even 1% of their time contemplating violation of conservation of momentum, it's you who are being biased and dishonest.
Yes, but that's exactly not what the em drive people did. If they had repeated their experiment in an honest, rigorous, controlled way, they'd have found out that it doesn't work. Instead they came up with some bullshit explanation based on a flawed understanding of relativity.
It's pseudoscience bullshit. It's not even interesting or creative bullshit. It's the cheapest kind of bullshit. Forget it.
Photons _are_ reaction mass. Photons have mass. If you shine a flashlight out of a spaceship you'll get thrust, and this will be accompanied by a corresponding mass loss in your spaceship. It's just that the amount of mass is really, really tiny, and the amount of thrust is proportionally tiny. In fact, it can be proven that a photon drive is the _most_ inefficient possible drive (in power/thrust terms).
I can accept that the EM drive is emitting photons, but the claims of its inventors are that photons are not the main mechanism (and the thrust figures they give are orders of magnitude beyond what photons could produce). Thus it's pseudoscience.
I'd like to tenderly suggest that you're not a physicist, because conservation of momentum is up there with conservation of energy and the speed of light on the list of things that we can say with pretty good confidence are fundamental unbreakable laws.
Did you know that conservation of momentum is just a consequence of translational invariance of space? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... No, of course you didn't, because you're not a physicist. There are plenty of other well-established theories that either depend on conservation of momentum or are a direct result of it. If conservation of momentum were not true, it would break 99.999% of physics. I'm sorry, but I'd rather take established physics over the wild claims of some crank.
Is there a possibility that conservation of momentum isn't true. Sure. There's also a possibility that if you eat a turd you'd shit out a chicken sandwich. But I guess I'm a 'religious shitreaded fanatic' since I believe it's highly unlikely that that will happen.
It doesn't 'violate' charge conservation. You build up a positive charge as you run. Pretty soon the positive charge becomes so huge that your thruster ceases to work. You can make it work again by neutralizing your charge.
Power sources do not produce electrons. They simply pump electrons around in a circuit. After running this propulsion system for a while you'd need to replenish your electrons from some external source (or eject positive ions to compensate).
> If it is producing enough electrons to move the material it might be possible to harvest those electrons and create a much more efficient solar power array.
Look up 'thermionic converter'. It's already been suggested for use in combination with solar collectors and nuclear power sources. It's pretty inefficient though as you generate a lot of heat in the process. I'm not sure about the heat output of this graphene-based system so I can't comment.
The EM drive is pseudoscientific rubbish. Conservation of momentum is a buzzkill and there's no way around it. As for this discovery, one of two things will happen:
1. They will 'discover' that it uses no reaction mass, in which case it can safely be discredited as pseudoscience.
2. They will discover that there is indeed reaction mass involved. Actually that's what it says there in the article: "Instead, they think the graphene absorbs laser energy and builds up a charge of electrons. Eventually it can't hold any more, and extra electrons are released" If this is confirmed it means that you can't run this for very long because you build up a positive charge and you need to balance this by gaining electrons from somewhere (interstellar gas maybe?) or ejecting positive ions.
If electron ejection is happening then it's really nothing new; we've known that electron guns can propel objects in space. This might lead to new, more efficient ways of using that effect, though. Still, I doubt that the thrust is going to be anywhere near useful for, say, a manned spacecraft. It might be extremely useful for satellites and probes.
It's precisely because it's a contract that it needs laws around it. You can't just put anything you want in a contract, have all parties sign it, and expect everyone to go along with it. If you think you can, you have an extremely childish viewpoint on how these things work and you're probably a libertarian.
Jet engine technology isn't secret or mysterious. Plenty of civilian aircraft have jet engines of similar specs. It's just that jet engines are really, really expensive to buy and even more insanely expensive to maintain. And in an aircraft, if your engine fails you can coast to a stop; in this contraption if your engine fails (and it _will_ fail at some point) you die.
You can find similar information in every year's report, the 2006 report is by no means special. $45 million is a drop in the bucket, and a large part of that would not be needed today since smart meters are widely deployed.
Also, stop changing your argument. Your initial argument was that price doesn't influence demand. You asked for evidence and I provided solid, verifiable evidence of that.
Google "demand response". Too lazy? Ok, google in particular the FERC's "Assessment of Demand Response & Advanced Metering staff report", it's a yearly report on demand response and how it affects consumer demand. Too lazy to do that? Ok, here's the 2006 report: http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staf... Too lazy to read the table of contents? Ok, the stuff you're looking for is in pages 114-117.
> The economy is goods changing hands, and services being performed, for considerations, usually with money as an intermediary.
"money as an intermediary"... so... basically exactly what I said.
Yeah sure, not all transactions in the economy involve money (gee whiz, I never knew that!) but it's kind of cute what you economic nincompoops say and think it makes you sound smart.
Here, let me help you by giving you the dictionary definition: "the management of the resources of a community, country, etc., especially with a view to its productivity. " "Ohhh, right, I'm sorry, I was wrong!"
Except in practice it turns out that these measures _do_ influence power consumption. And the largest power consumers aren't homes anyway. They're large industries, which go through an entirely different system (the wholesale electricity market).
You hear the fossil fuel crowd say this a lot... except in practice it turns out that wind power is actually pretty suited to the long-timescale needs of the grid (more power in winter, etc.) and solar, pumped hydro, and batteries can pretty much cover short-term fluctuations. Yes, you do usually need to install a lot of spare capacity with wind but even so it winds up being cheaper than a lot of other forms of power.
Oh don't give me your logic and facts, everyone knows wind turbines have a huge impact on the atmosphere but billions of tons of carbon dioxide doesn't affect the atmosphere at all
Slashdot Mirror
I know the general wisdom seems to be that 'fusion is hard but the payoffs are huge'. I don't really agree with this. We already know enough about plasma physics to start designing fusion reactor that will reach or exceed breakeven (ITER), and it will probably work. So fusion is definitely hard, but we ARE getting there. But is it economical? It's clear by now that any fusion reactor is going to be obscenely expensive. The nature of fusion means that only large reactors are possible; forget small and modular ones. It's also going to produce a lot of neutron radiation, leading to lots and lots of low-to-medium-level nuclear waste. Also, because of this radiation, it's going to be very expensive to maintain and is probably going to require regular replacement of key components. And when it finally comes time to tear it down, decommissioning is also going to be expensive. The much-touted 'fusion fuel is cheap!' line doesn't seem to be that important since fuel is likely to be very little of the regular expense of the reactor.
So, let's tick off the boxes. Nuclear waste, check. Cumbersome size, check. Expensive to build and maintain, check. Remind me why it's better than fission again?
Except Einstein didn't immediately jump to "classical physics is wrong" just to get a kick out of it. Einstein was aware of the experiments that were inconsistent with the classical way of thinking. He correctly realized that relativity was the least improbable theory that fit all observations.
You're insane comparing this with E-cat.
E-cat never produced a single microjoule of energy. E-cat's workings have never been published. E-cat has never been open to scrutiny by the scientific community. The inventor of E-cat has not been up-front or honest about the device's working parameters. This device is based on known physics and engineering.
E-cat is a fraud whereas this is real science. If you continue to insist that this is equivalent to E-cat, the only logical conclusion is that you're a troll.
The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.
Contests aren't the answer, but you have a point that large government-sponsored projects seem to be wasteful. But in the particular case of fusion, the government has actually allocated very little money to fusion energy research so far in relative terms, so there's no way of knowing! Laser fusion was (and is) primarily for nuclear weapons research, with energy being considered as a speculative tertiary side-effect (and a good propaganda technique for easing the public mind) rather than an actual design goal. Same goes for a lot of funded plasma research.
True, but progress in fusion has been so slow that improvements like this are quite welcome. Also, you have to consider that you can often get good improvements simply by scaling up your equipment.
Nope, this is real science, for a change.
Physics IS our understanding of the Universe. "Our understanding of physics" means something completely different.
> maybe it's a setup or measurement error, or maybe, just maybe, this is a new effect that hadn't been discovered yet.
Science consists of performing experiments, gathering data, coming up with a set of competing explanations for the observed data, and then conducting more experiments to obtain proof in favor of or against the competing hypotheses.
The key is the 'coming up with explanations' part. Anything that violates conservation of momentum is NOT an explanation. It creates far, far more problems than it solves. If you're even willing to consider it when ANY other option is available indicates that you are biased, not the other way around.
It's only when all other options have been exhausted that you should even think about considering violating conservation of momentum. And if you're at that stage, you are incredibly screwed because now you have to revise ALL of physics, not just your little experiment.
If you think that an honest unbiased scientist should waste even 1% of their time contemplating violation of conservation of momentum, it's you who are being biased and dishonest.
Yes, but that's exactly not what the em drive people did. If they had repeated their experiment in an honest, rigorous, controlled way, they'd have found out that it doesn't work. Instead they came up with some bullshit explanation based on a flawed understanding of relativity.
It's pseudoscience bullshit. It's not even interesting or creative bullshit. It's the cheapest kind of bullshit. Forget it.
Photons _are_ reaction mass. Photons have mass. If you shine a flashlight out of a spaceship you'll get thrust, and this will be accompanied by a corresponding mass loss in your spaceship. It's just that the amount of mass is really, really tiny, and the amount of thrust is proportionally tiny. In fact, it can be proven that a photon drive is the _most_ inefficient possible drive (in power/thrust terms).
I can accept that the EM drive is emitting photons, but the claims of its inventors are that photons are not the main mechanism (and the thrust figures they give are orders of magnitude beyond what photons could produce). Thus it's pseudoscience.
I'd like to tenderly suggest that you're not a physicist, because conservation of momentum is up there with conservation of energy and the speed of light on the list of things that we can say with pretty good confidence are fundamental unbreakable laws.
Did you know that conservation of momentum is just a consequence of translational invariance of space? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... No, of course you didn't, because you're not a physicist. There are plenty of other well-established theories that either depend on conservation of momentum or are a direct result of it. If conservation of momentum were not true, it would break 99.999% of physics. I'm sorry, but I'd rather take established physics over the wild claims of some crank.
Is there a possibility that conservation of momentum isn't true. Sure. There's also a possibility that if you eat a turd you'd shit out a chicken sandwich. But I guess I'm a 'religious shitreaded fanatic' since I believe it's highly unlikely that that will happen.
Moron.
It doesn't 'violate' charge conservation. You build up a positive charge as you run. Pretty soon the positive charge becomes so huge that your thruster ceases to work. You can make it work again by neutralizing your charge.
Power sources do not produce electrons. They simply pump electrons around in a circuit. After running this propulsion system for a while you'd need to replenish your electrons from some external source (or eject positive ions to compensate).
> If it is producing enough electrons to move the material it might be possible to harvest those electrons and create a much more efficient solar power array.
Look up 'thermionic converter'. It's already been suggested for use in combination with solar collectors and nuclear power sources. It's pretty inefficient though as you generate a lot of heat in the process. I'm not sure about the heat output of this graphene-based system so I can't comment.
The EM drive is pseudoscientific rubbish. Conservation of momentum is a buzzkill and there's no way around it. As for this discovery, one of two things will happen:
1. They will 'discover' that it uses no reaction mass, in which case it can safely be discredited as pseudoscience.
2. They will discover that there is indeed reaction mass involved. Actually that's what it says there in the article: "Instead, they think the graphene absorbs laser energy and builds up a charge of electrons. Eventually it can't hold any more, and extra electrons are released" If this is confirmed it means that you can't run this for very long because you build up a positive charge and you need to balance this by gaining electrons from somewhere (interstellar gas maybe?) or ejecting positive ions.
If electron ejection is happening then it's really nothing new; we've known that electron guns can propel objects in space. This might lead to new, more efficient ways of using that effect, though. Still, I doubt that the thrust is going to be anywhere near useful for, say, a manned spacecraft. It might be extremely useful for satellites and probes.
Should LaTeX Beamer be banned as well?
It's precisely because it's a contract that it needs laws around it. You can't just put anything you want in a contract, have all parties sign it, and expect everyone to go along with it. If you think you can, you have an extremely childish viewpoint on how these things work and you're probably a libertarian.
Jet engine technology isn't secret or mysterious. Plenty of civilian aircraft have jet engines of similar specs. It's just that jet engines are really, really expensive to buy and even more insanely expensive to maintain. And in an aircraft, if your engine fails you can coast to a stop; in this contraption if your engine fails (and it _will_ fail at some point) you die.
You're completely ignoring the evidence and choosing to hold to your ideology-driven viewpoint. It's worthless continuing this argument.
You can find similar information in every year's report, the 2006 report is by no means special. $45 million is a drop in the bucket, and a large part of that would not be needed today since smart meters are widely deployed.
Also, stop changing your argument. Your initial argument was that price doesn't influence demand. You asked for evidence and I provided solid, verifiable evidence of that.
Google "demand response". Too lazy? Ok, google in particular the FERC's "Assessment of Demand Response & Advanced Metering staff report", it's a yearly report on demand response and how it affects consumer demand. Too lazy to do that? Ok, here's the 2006 report: http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staf... Too lazy to read the table of contents? Ok, the stuff you're looking for is in pages 114-117.
> The economy is goods changing hands, and services being performed, for considerations, usually with money as an intermediary.
"money as an intermediary"... so... basically exactly what I said.
Yeah sure, not all transactions in the economy involve money (gee whiz, I never knew that!) but it's kind of cute what you economic nincompoops say and think it makes you sound smart.
Here, let me help you by giving you the dictionary definition: "the management of the resources of a community, country, etc., especially with a view to its productivity. "
"Ohhh, right, I'm sorry, I was wrong!"
Except in practice it turns out that these measures _do_ influence power consumption. And the largest power consumers aren't homes anyway. They're large industries, which go through an entirely different system (the wholesale electricity market).
You hear the fossil fuel crowd say this a lot... except in practice it turns out that wind power is actually pretty suited to the long-timescale needs of the grid (more power in winter, etc.) and solar, pumped hydro, and batteries can pretty much cover short-term fluctuations. Yes, you do usually need to install a lot of spare capacity with wind but even so it winds up being cheaper than a lot of other forms of power.
Oh don't give me your logic and facts, everyone knows wind turbines have a huge impact on the atmosphere but billions of tons of carbon dioxide doesn't affect the atmosphere at all
It is blatantly obvious yet a lot of people don't seem to get it...