If people are going to comment on a video, it is a good idea to watch it first. Anyone who did watch my presentation would have learned four things that many commenters here do not seem to know:
1) Focus fusion is not the same as Dr. Bussard's approach. I contrast the three main approaches to hydrogen-boron fusion--focus fusion is one, the IEC that the late Dr. Bussard worked on is another.
2) There is a quantum effect of very high magnetic fields that reduces the efficiency of heating of electrons by ions but not of ions by electrons. This leads to much lower electron temperatures than ion temperatures, and thus much lower x-ray emission. It does not rely on non-equilibrium plasma.
3) This effect is based on well-established physics and has received experimental confirmation in z-pinches.
4) The reason why the next focus fusion experiment could cost as little as $2 million is because all work with the plasma focus device is very economical. The device can be built for only a few hundred thousand dollars. That is why there are DPF research teams in many developing countries that could not afford a bigger fusion machine.
First I apologize for the disappearance of the paragraphing on my post. The paragraphs were there when I posted it.
I find it depressing and appalling that a PhD physics student would not be familiar with the scientific method and would in fact attack it, as "internic" does. Appeals to authority and the scientific method are incompatible--they are, in fact diametrically opposed methods of learning about the world. This point is central to any debate in science, including this one.
In referring to Aristotle I was in no way comparing myself to Galileo. What I was saying is that in Europe there once was a system in which scientific disputes were resolved by an appeal to authority--Aristotle, the Bible, the Pope. Leonardo, Gallileo, Kepler and others led the scientific revolution which replaced an appeal to authority with an appeal to observation. The whole basis of this revolution was that you did not have to be a designated "authority" to judge scientific truth. Anyone could do it when presented with the proper observations and deductions from them. This was the model that science used for 400 years. Its remarkable results are all around us in the form of successful technology. Without the scientific method, most of us would not today be alive, since our very lives rest on the technology the scientific method gives us.
In the past few decades, in some corners of science, especially cosmology, and theoretical particle physics, there has been a return to the old method of appeal to authority. It is argued that only experts in the field, so designated by other experts in the field, can possibly understand the complexity of, say dark energy and dark matter, and so can alone judge what is truth. It would be a step backward indeed for this authority-based method to infect other fields, like fusion, which could have such a huge effect on people's lives.
What would happen if we adopted such an authority-based model? It would mean that no new idea, one that was fundamentally opposed to what was accepted in the field, would ever be adopted. By definition, it would not be accepted by those "experts" in the field who held contrary views. So scientific progress would quietly die away.
Yet just about all progress comes about because new ideas, backed up by observation, have other thrown the old ideas (generally not without a struggle.)
So of course a physics PhD student, in fact anyone with a basic knowledge of physics can judge for themselves if our fusion work is decent science or crackpot. If you, internic, really can't make that judgment, without appealing to some authority, you don't belong in a physics PhD program.
That is not the same as knowing if the idea is "right". Of course sometimes subtle mistakes or false assumptions enter in that can only be detected by trained physicists--sometimes in the field or sometimes coming from outside. But an idea that has a subtle flaw is NOT crackpot--lot's of ideas have small flaws but still are valid science and may in fact deserve to be experimentally tested.
In this particular field, plasma physics, the phenomena themselves are so complex, the plasma so ingenious at defeating the predictions of nearly all physicists, that ideas cannot be "proven" without experiment. No one, myself included, can KNOW if our focus fusion approach will produce net energy, or if some other approach is better. We can only say that this approach is reasonable within the known laws of physics and is backed up by existing experimental results, something anyone can judge for themselves.
What is needed to KNOW what will work is experimentation. To test 50 ideas like ours (and there may be almost than many good ideas in fusion) might take $100 million or maybe even $200 million dollars. If many of those ideas did not pan out (and they won't) the money is not "wasted'. The whole idea of the scientific enterprise is to test reasonable ideas, based on theory and observation, by experiment. That is the test of where truth lies, not an appeal to autho
I'm replying to some of the hundred-odd posts on this topic.
If you want to determine whether something is decent science or crackpot, there are right and wrong ways to go about it. A lot of these posts appeal to authority to determine if focus fusion is decent science, analyzing who I am, or even who people who talk about focus fusion are or who is on their board of directors. That's not the way to analyze scientific work. If it were, we'd still be back debating what the church says is the correct Aristotelian interpretation of Ptolemy--and we sure would not be doing it by Internet.
The right way is to look at the scientific work and ask--does it make sense, and does it follow the scientific method? Sometimes that's difficult if the work is only presented in technical journals. But in this case, our work is both available in technical form (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0401126) and in layman's terms (www.focusfusion.org). Look at this work and judge for yourselves. If you're also interested in the Big Bang controversy, you can judge the layman's version at www.bigbangneverhappened.org or get more technical information from the download articles accessible there. (The July 2 cover story of New Scientist is a good introduction, too.)
People on this list who call me a crackpot or less complimentary names have the simple obligation to point to some specific scientific errors that they perceive in my work. Otherwise they are not engaging in any sort of scientific debate and deserve to be ignored.
A couple of basic historical facts need correcting. NASA did not cut off our funding because they were dissatisfied with our results. The whole program that was funding our work and many others, Advanced Propulsion Technologies, was zeroed out by the administration. More or less simultaneously all NASA programs that fund any form of fusion were also terminated. So this had nothing to do with our work in particular, but did indicate a general hostility towards fusion by the administration.
Also, it would be wrong to describe focus fusion as that controversial among fusion scientists. (Unlike my cosmology work, which is controversial). Many fusion scientists think that this work, along with other alternative fusion approaches, deserves funding. But scientists don't make decisions on what is funded, administrators do. I've been at conferences of top fusion researchers in which practically not a single one supported the ITER project or thought that it could work. Yet that is the project that, for political reasons, gets all the funding.
Finally, I want to address two technical points that seem to come up frequently. First, the safety of the focus fusion derives in part from the extremely tiny amount of fuel that is burned in each shot. The speck that is raised to several billion degrees is only a few microns to tens of microns across. So even when all the fuel, or nearly all, is burned, the yield will be only about 20 or 30 kilojoules--the energy a 100 W light bulb burns in a few minutes. It is only by pulsing the device a thousand times a second do you get 20 MW out of it.
The much-cited PhD thesis from '95 that sought to prove that all advanced fuels like hydrogen-boron are impossible makes a number of assumptions that are not true in all cases. In particular, the thesis ignores the magnetic effect that decreases x-ray emission at the very high magnetic fields attainable in the plasma focus. The effect has been known for 30 years and is widely applied in the study of neutron stars, so it is also not controversial. But it greatly improves the prospects of getting net energy from hydrogen boron.
Anyway, I urge every one to look at the material we present at www.focusfusion.org and judge it for yourself. Don't rely on "authority". That's not the scientific way.
Eric Lerner
Slashdot Mirror
If people are going to comment on a video, it is a good idea to watch it first. Anyone who did watch my presentation would have learned four things that many commenters here do not seem to know:
1) Focus fusion is not the same as Dr. Bussard's approach. I contrast the three main approaches to hydrogen-boron fusion--focus fusion is one, the IEC that the late Dr. Bussard worked on is another.
2) There is a quantum effect of very high magnetic fields that reduces the efficiency of heating of electrons by ions but not of ions by electrons. This leads to much lower electron temperatures than ion temperatures, and thus much lower x-ray emission. It does not rely on non-equilibrium plasma.
3) This effect is based on well-established physics and has received experimental confirmation in z-pinches.
4) The reason why the next focus fusion experiment could cost as little as $2 million is because all work with the plasma focus device is very economical. The device can be built for only a few hundred thousand dollars. That is why there are DPF research teams in many developing countries that could not afford a bigger fusion machine.
Eric Lerner
First I apologize for the disappearance of the paragraphing on my post. The paragraphs were there when I posted it.
I find it depressing and appalling that a PhD physics student would not be familiar with the scientific method and would in fact attack it, as "internic" does. Appeals to authority and the scientific method are incompatible--they are, in fact diametrically opposed methods of learning about the world. This point is central to any debate in science, including this one.
In referring to Aristotle I was in no way comparing myself to Galileo. What I was saying is that in Europe there once was a system in which scientific disputes were resolved by an appeal to authority--Aristotle, the Bible, the Pope. Leonardo, Gallileo, Kepler and others led the scientific revolution which replaced an appeal to authority with an appeal to observation. The whole basis of this revolution was that you did not have to be a designated "authority" to judge scientific truth. Anyone could do it when presented with the proper observations and deductions from them. This was the model that science used for 400 years. Its remarkable results are all around us in the form of successful technology. Without the scientific method, most of us would not today be alive, since our very lives rest on the technology the scientific method gives us.
In the past few decades, in some corners of science, especially cosmology, and theoretical particle physics, there has been a return to the old method of appeal to authority. It is argued that only experts in the field, so designated by other experts in the field, can possibly understand the complexity of, say dark energy and dark matter, and so can alone judge what is truth. It would be a step backward indeed for this authority-based method to infect other fields, like fusion, which could have such a huge effect on people's lives.
What would happen if we adopted such an authority-based model? It would mean that no new idea, one that was fundamentally opposed to what was accepted in the field, would ever be adopted. By definition, it would not be accepted by those "experts" in the field who held contrary views. So scientific progress would quietly die away.
Yet just about all progress comes about because new ideas, backed up by observation, have other thrown the old ideas (generally not without a struggle.)
So of course a physics PhD student, in fact anyone with a basic knowledge of physics can judge for themselves if our fusion work is decent science or crackpot. If you, internic, really can't make that judgment, without appealing to some authority, you don't belong in a physics PhD program.
That is not the same as knowing if the idea is "right". Of course sometimes subtle mistakes or false assumptions enter in that can only be detected by trained physicists--sometimes in the field or sometimes coming from outside. But an idea that has a subtle flaw is NOT crackpot--lot's of ideas have small flaws but still are valid science and may in fact deserve to be experimentally tested.
In this particular field, plasma physics, the phenomena themselves are so complex, the plasma so ingenious at defeating the predictions of nearly all physicists, that ideas cannot be "proven" without experiment. No one, myself included, can KNOW if our focus fusion approach will produce net energy, or if some other approach is better. We can only say that this approach is reasonable within the known laws of physics and is backed up by existing experimental results, something anyone can judge for themselves.
What is needed to KNOW what will work is experimentation. To test 50 ideas like ours (and there may be almost than many good ideas in fusion) might take $100 million or maybe even $200 million dollars. If many of those ideas did not pan out (and they won't) the money is not "wasted'. The whole idea of the scientific enterprise is to test reasonable ideas, based on theory and observation, by experiment. That is the test of where truth lies, not an appeal to autho
I'm replying to some of the hundred-odd posts on this topic. If you want to determine whether something is decent science or crackpot, there are right and wrong ways to go about it. A lot of these posts appeal to authority to determine if focus fusion is decent science, analyzing who I am, or even who people who talk about focus fusion are or who is on their board of directors. That's not the way to analyze scientific work. If it were, we'd still be back debating what the church says is the correct Aristotelian interpretation of Ptolemy--and we sure would not be doing it by Internet. The right way is to look at the scientific work and ask--does it make sense, and does it follow the scientific method? Sometimes that's difficult if the work is only presented in technical journals. But in this case, our work is both available in technical form (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0401126) and in layman's terms (www.focusfusion.org). Look at this work and judge for yourselves. If you're also interested in the Big Bang controversy, you can judge the layman's version at www.bigbangneverhappened.org or get more technical information from the download articles accessible there. (The July 2 cover story of New Scientist is a good introduction, too.) People on this list who call me a crackpot or less complimentary names have the simple obligation to point to some specific scientific errors that they perceive in my work. Otherwise they are not engaging in any sort of scientific debate and deserve to be ignored. A couple of basic historical facts need correcting. NASA did not cut off our funding because they were dissatisfied with our results. The whole program that was funding our work and many others, Advanced Propulsion Technologies, was zeroed out by the administration. More or less simultaneously all NASA programs that fund any form of fusion were also terminated. So this had nothing to do with our work in particular, but did indicate a general hostility towards fusion by the administration. Also, it would be wrong to describe focus fusion as that controversial among fusion scientists. (Unlike my cosmology work, which is controversial). Many fusion scientists think that this work, along with other alternative fusion approaches, deserves funding. But scientists don't make decisions on what is funded, administrators do. I've been at conferences of top fusion researchers in which practically not a single one supported the ITER project or thought that it could work. Yet that is the project that, for political reasons, gets all the funding. Finally, I want to address two technical points that seem to come up frequently. First, the safety of the focus fusion derives in part from the extremely tiny amount of fuel that is burned in each shot. The speck that is raised to several billion degrees is only a few microns to tens of microns across. So even when all the fuel, or nearly all, is burned, the yield will be only about 20 or 30 kilojoules--the energy a 100 W light bulb burns in a few minutes. It is only by pulsing the device a thousand times a second do you get 20 MW out of it. The much-cited PhD thesis from '95 that sought to prove that all advanced fuels like hydrogen-boron are impossible makes a number of assumptions that are not true in all cases. In particular, the thesis ignores the magnetic effect that decreases x-ray emission at the very high magnetic fields attainable in the plasma focus. The effect has been known for 30 years and is widely applied in the study of neutron stars, so it is also not controversial. But it greatly improves the prospects of getting net energy from hydrogen boron. Anyway, I urge every one to look at the material we present at www.focusfusion.org and judge it for yourself. Don't rely on "authority". That's not the scientific way. Eric Lerner