Why Net Power is so Hard

It may be difficult to separate "theory" from "application," but let''s see if this helps facilitate the discussion.
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Why Net Power is so Hard

Post by guest »

High I know that it’s been a long time since I posted anything on this board or the old one.

Fusion is easy; we do it all the time now a day’s, some more than others, some for less than others.
Net power fusion on the other hand has been the elusive animal that all people are searching for, if your goal is like almost everyone else, to find the solution to this 50 + year old problem, good luck and good hunting.

While the probability of an amateur researcher coming up with the solution to this problem is not that large, bringing them to practice for the sake of society is another story all together.

To help both professionals and amateurs alike I would like to point out that the flaw with fusion research is rooted in the philosophy and theory called the “scientific method”.

The scientific method is a philosophy and theory it is ancient.

While it has served us well, it shows its limitations with a subject like Fusion for the purpose of generating power.

Here is the problem, the strict interpretation of the scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, when conducting an experiment. The idea is that if you change more than one variable you would not know which of the changed variables was responsible for the results.

The simple fact is that in modern scientific research a more efficient method must be found to guide our research.

Let me expand on the problem, the traditional scientific method also implies that all variables or combinations of factors be tried in order to determine which are productive or none productive.

With a subject like fusion the sample size for such trial and errors would be gigantic and as a result cost restrictive. Actually, the truth is that trial an error using the scientific method is exponential. The possible combinations for any test set can be calculated using the fallowing formula.

N=L^v

N= number of test combinations
L= number of test levels for each variable
V= number of variables

Even worse is the fact that even when you get a positive result, it may be a cruel joke by nature, because both positive and negative results can occur as just statistical randomness a.k.a chance, or fluke.

I hate to point to a problem without a solution, but I just don’t have one.

Still, I believe my point is a legitimate one and while the success for net power fusion does not require a resolution to this problem, it is no less a problem that will continue to creep into more and more modern sophisticated research and development efforts.


Sincerely,

Hector
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Re: Why Net Power is so Hard

Post by guest »

I tend to look at this business as gathering chickens for harvest.
Call it my cowboy past in Oklahoma.
I agree with you the deductive reasoning that has stood for centuries has finally run into a brick wall.
Deductive science starts with the complex and removes details until a simpler structure or mechanism shows.

If it had worked, fusion would be a done deal in the forties.

We simply have nothing that is availible to dismantle.
The sun is out of reach by most means.
We can't set off H-bombs.

The twenty first century techs and scientists must be different in its approach. The new strategy is diametrically opposed to the old one.

The new stategy is to synthesize the desired results by building up in baby steps. Building up instead of tearing down. This is the way of the garage style inventer of the late 19th century. No quantum leaps but small steps in order to find the way. Most of the old hard liners would complain that you are increasing the complexities of fusion this way . But the pristine science people of the twentieth century tend to forget it was the nineteenth century method's data they were leaning on. And you know what ? The search now goes on in silence. One example is the hunt for new high temperature superconductors. Use Quantum Mechanics? No. Call on an Einstein like super genius? No. You go with what works. I found out the hard way how the really smart people did it. One of my instructors build a robot handling system that moves metalurgical samples past instruments.
The samples are put together by machine using all known metals in the periotic table that are commercially availible at Aesar, then analysed. A 2" x 2" wafer holds about 1000 sample mixes! It's just Thomas Edison's New Jersey lab squoze onto a wafer. The nineteenth century method but in minature.! The machine can test about 20000 samples in a day. What we need is a very similar approach for fusion. Build programable power supplies and gas intruments. Record the nuclear events on a pc. Write a program that would run the fusor at many voltages and deuterium loadings . Run the thing for a month... automatically. check the neutron rate in a fusor from 10 kv to 1 Mv. Cool the grid between runs.
Pop a cool one and let the machine work all day all night.
Day after day. Then the operator could take all the data.
and look for anything unexpected.

I feel that is where the gold may be hidden.

Larry Leins
Physics Teacher
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Re: Why Net Power is so Hard

Post by guest »

I'm just a lurker here - interesting goings on!

This notion of automated testing of many combinations of voltages, gas pressures/mixes, cathode/anode temps etc. could be extended with some ideas from AI research and genetic algorithms. One could possible write code that would learn by trial and error which combinations worked best and then take a bunch of the best combinations from round 1 and mix the variables around to see if some "recombination" of those would yield a better result. Pretty much how nature designs new critters that work better than the old ones.
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Re: Why Net Power is so Hard

Post by guest »

I agree that big science has run into a wall. I disagree that adherence to the scientific method is the culprit. If you have attended a university lately, read any papers, and have an open inquisitive mind, what you will notice is that almost everyone is invested in "the system". They cannot think out of the box, they do not do anything new, and they really do not do science. If they did, they would be jeopardizing their career. It is much easier to simply work on some miniscule detail of a theory that no one cares about or can use, because it is easy. The best Ph.D. topics are some small part of theory which most people in the field already know about, but no one has documented, because no one would care! When you present and publish, everybody nods their head, yes that is the way it is, good little doctor.On the other hand, come up with something that says, you guys are all full of crap and watch the arrows fly! Why stick your neck out?

Mice nibbling on the periphery of a great unknown.

I once read a quote about not being too worried about people stealing your ideas, because if they are really good, you will have to force people to accept them, or if it is really good, they might just kill you.

Modern Physics has become a religion, and the pontiffs cannot face the fact that they are spouting crap, because then they would be exposed as frauds. It is like the smug artsy fartsy people with black clothes and little round glasses, who sip cheap wine and tell you with a straight face that a canvas with a big dog turd in the middle is the best work of art in the world, and use lots of stupid phraseology to explain why it is so. After all, they are so smart, and if you can't understand it, well you must be stupid. I say, NO it is a canvas with feces on it, and they are the ones who are stupid. Do we really buy all of this boson, particle exchange, quarks, flavors charms, nonsense? How do these particles know what particles to exchange? What ever happened to cause and effect. These guys are on acid, Einstein knew something was wrong and spent the last part of his life desperately trying to find it. It doesn't make sense because it doesn't make sense, a con game. I digress.

Back to the point, I think the problem is the LACK of the scientific method, not the use of it. Physics is now based on pure math and trying to get the experiments to match the math. It should be the other way around. Some things are just complex, nothin' we can do about that. Fluid flow and turbulence are very complex issues, and if you tried to define it completely you would have great difficulty, but some very simple equations work great for predicting outcomes, and allow the design of hardware. Science does not have to fully understand to yield useful info. Of course that is the end game, but we can still play at less than perfection. After all, you have to start somewhere. The big lesson in this is just because a theory seems to predict outcomes well, it is not necessarily totally correct, in fact it may be very wrong on many levels. Subsequent developments based on such a theory would be flawed. They may work for a while, but eventually the flaw will make progress impossible.

I bet there is a fundamental mistake somewhere in the foundation of our current thinking. Few people realize that where we are now is based on a LOT of assumptions, perhaps some of those original assumptions are wrong. I would just about guarantee it. Having mathematicians in charge of where science is going is the same as letting the bean counters and lawyers decide how a technological society should operate. We all know how well that is working. Perhaps the concept of point particles is all wrong. What about the rest of Maxwell's equations that he assumed away? Maybe our idea of how the atom is structured is flawed, there are plenty of places to look.

What the hell do I know? I'm just a heretic engineer. BUT, I can do things while the scientists and mathematicians sit around scratching their heads saying it can't be done. Remember, what the Wright brothers did was impossible, and if you went too fast on a train, you would surely suffocate, the sound barrier etc. Give me some good empirical data and I will put a curve through it and build you a nice space ship, even if it is "theoretically impossible".

Monty
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Re: Why Net Power is so Hard

Post by guest »

Right on Monty!
The big problem these days is that science is now considered an art now ..... not!!!! a hard science.
Most research is little more than paid pud pounding.
Like a bunch of dull chimpanses these academic clods Reinvent the wheel every day!
Andy Warhol is more of a scientist than most I've met at the "Great American Institution" (Ole Miss)
Some past comments:

most recent>>>>>

Most people these days are technopeasents.
Radio is pure magic to them.
Anything that glows or is electronic in nature baffles the crap out of them.
Mark (Rowley) is absolutely right about explaining the fusor to people. Most people are on an eight grade science level or less... maybe.
People who can't figure out flourescent lights would tend to look at a fusor as hoodoo.

About school at Ole Miss:

I concur that the mania that started with the Manhattan Project still lives on. The mania is that big problems need big solutions. In the old days before the Military Industrial Complex co-opted universities and colleges , single individuals would do the work as cheaply as possible and weed out bad ideas.
Now the way it is done is to throw sugar water at an ant hill and file the results for an evaluator to look at.
Trouble is it's all politics these days..... Not what but WHO you know.
The school trained eval people frankly don't have the hard food required to eval toys no less big stuff.
Piles of paper in a file box or cabinet are progress.
Is it no wonder that most good science people are forieners?

Been there.
Done that.

All real science is done in FRANCE anyway is the cow like bellow I got when I wanted to do small scale experiments in fusion. The Physics department is an art history museum with pretty decorations and rows of pictures of when real reseach was done. ( late fifties) They were to build a linear accelerator but in the exspansion of the football stadium their tunnel was collasped so no accelerator. Just as well says the new dirrector/curator. Sonolumniscence was carried out at the acoustics lab of Engineering instead! The guy who was most up on sonoluminescence at Ole Miss was a parapschology professor of all things!
(retired engineer and ufo watcher for Bluebook,ex CIA spook)

I did not share with anyone less advanced than engineering seniors at Ole Miss and some professors.
Most of the so called college educated people can't seperate fusion from fission. I stopped trying to educate the non specialist. I had to shield my work from the prying eyes of jocks and faculty dependant kids at school. Even the Artificial Intelligence Geeks I worked beside lacked the ED to follow along. Physics instructors thought all fusion advances came out of a box labelled DOE ect. The most forward looking thinkers were in Philosophy!


Larry Leins
Physics Teacher
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Re: Why Net Power is so Hard

Post by Richard Hull »

Monty, Larry and others are correct, of course. I have been harping on the nature of science moving insidiously into the dogmatic regions once held in pre-renaissance Europe by the established church. The church comforted, guided and often employed most of the people then. and most were ignorant or at least kept ignorant. The church had joined in an alliance with kings and nations to bless taxation, limiting knowledge and suppression of new ideas, especially ideas considered blasphemous in the eyes of the church or rebelious to the Monarchs.

Slowly, even the ignorant started to wonder and worry about their future as the web of limitations was spun ever tighter about them. Suddenly, there was burst forth a new age of study and learning which the church tried to supress. The church killed a number of folks in the name of God then. The monarchs, however, saw the new knowledge as actually increasing the trade and domestic product with new inventions and processes which supported more taxes and, for the most part, left the process alone. Their day would have to wait about four hundred years when the people wanted a bit more freedom, especially where their right to profit was concerned.

Well, the renaissance was followed by the industrial revolution and science showed its value over religion (in this life) by creating all sorts of things that reduced man's burden and increased his standard of living.

Man ultimately came to look to science and not the church for guidance and his salvation; for, like the church, science and its practical arm, technology, were employing the bulk of the increasing population.

The Fathers of the new church were adored and admired at first, but now they appear strident and dogmatic when viewed against the original egalitarian premise leading to their ascension.

Science must grow by not only the introduction of new ideas, but by the free exchange of them and their ultimate application to the benfit of mankind. Todays monkish minions of science are not let out of the playpen. Instead, they scurry about repolishing the same old apples. They dare not go beyond to a bold stroke lest they be excommunicated or branded heretics. While the monastery court yard may be small, it provides shelter, warmth, acceptance and sustenance. Those outside its blessed walls are peasants who look to those inside for guidance and direction.

Science today is often viewed by the modern day peasants as abstract, secretive and vague. The wonders which once flew from its midst are now replaced by mass market hype and promises of a better future by ad men linked to business and industry who have replaced the money grubbing monarchs of old. The people's government puts on shows at controlling the money mongers, but ultimately they are allowed to quietly slip through the cracks like scattering cockroaches with vast sums bilked for the people in investment and get rich quick schemes. Only one or two with be smashed before all returns to normal.

Will there be a new renaissance? What form will it take? Will science reform itself the way the church did, but like it, be only a shell of its former self?

Science may fare better because it is not promising ever lasting life or dealing with the soul. It will have to lose its sense of self-importance gained by earlier coups and return to serving the people with practical, realistic advancments that benefit all mankind and not a bunch of best guesses about things which are so etherial and remote that it looks like an internalizing, self-supporting religion.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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