How does Polywell stack up?
(I apologize if this was done before.)
1) OK Hirsch Farnsworth1) Give me an authentic provenance to the idea. Show me the small steps others have made leading up to it.
2) Does it already have legitimate VC funding? (Military money is notoriously dumb, so it doesn't count.)
3) To whom does the principal give his or her time? (I would be much happier to see the AAAS than the American Antigravity folks: see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/americana ... message/64.)
4) Show me a credible reference client with a real application.
5) If you can't show me a reference client, show me a working prototype. If it's on the verge of being commercialized, it must be working somewhere ... in a house, in a car, in a flashlight, in an iPod. Show me! You have to know I will bring a plague of experts to bear on this prototype, so it had better be GOOD.
6) What is the history of ideas of the principals? What else are they involved in? (Zero Point Energy and energy from magnets are very, very bad signs. http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?nam ... e&sid=1357)
7) Look at the language. Is the development always "on the verge" of being ready? Is the "establishment" always "wrong", and the principal always right? Do they make the "Chinese market" logical fallacy? (Read "Art of the Start" ... not enough space here.) Watch out for firms that miss "whopper deadlines" (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000045.html) by a mile.
8 ) Show me peer-reviewed papers and presentations at mainstream scientific conferences by the principals. Better yet, show me serious scientists who respond to these papers. Papers by other people on collateral topics don't count. A paper on ZPE is not the same as a paper outlining an industrial process to capture it.
9) Give me reproducibility. I won't look at a company with "secret processes"; if you can't show me how someone else can do it, I won't even get up from my desk.
10) Give me competitors. If one person can do it, so can someone else. If one person is working on it now, you can bet two or three others are, too. You are defined by the quality of your cometitors, so the competitors had better look good to the baloney kit. If you compete with Boeing (even in a minor way), I am impressed. If you compete with Johann Bessler, I am much less impressed.
2) NO last time I looked Navy was military.
3) OK probably (I'm only on the fringes so I don't really know, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt.)
4) NO Navy as client? I don't think so see 2) above.
5) Maybe Not a functioning one. Smoked prototypes that are purported to have worked. Secret Navy research. None qualify as a GOOD prototype.
6) OK Good to very good.
7) Ambivalent [there is evidence both ways] It seems to have been on the verge for a long time. I don't fault any major missed deadlines here. Not exactly anyway. I have missed deadlines myself. They were usually set by the marketroids not by engineers. And fusion is a tough nut to crack. There are bound to be setback. I am intimately familiar with Murphy's law.
The language used in the papers and oral presentations is good believable scientific stuff. It does not set off my instinctive alarms.
8 ) Ambivalent [there is evidence both ways] Are the few papers we have actually peer reviewed? I think I heard an excuse for why they were not. Which implies that they were not.
OTOH Krall was supposed to have given some of the papers his blessing.
9) OK I think. Some repeatability is claimed by insiders, not by independent labs. OTOH No secrets here except the ones being kept by mother nature. No magical "science". Just an application of standard science to a new device. So anyone with the resources (which are significant but not outrageous) could test it. So it is falsifiable which is a good sign.
10) Ambivalent [there is evidence both ways] competitors? I don't see any with the same technology. What? You mean us crazies? Or is ITER a competitor equivalent to a Boeing? Other small fusion start ups?
OK so what do we have?
3 yes
3 no
1 maybe
3 ambivalent leaning toward yes (others might well lean toward no)
I'm beginning to understand Art Carlson's attitude.
So, what am I doing here?
It resonates with a part of me that says it just might work.
If it does the payoff is huge.
Dr Bussard's video presentation was made by a brimming over clear-seeming elder statesman of a field that I have always wanted to do.
I have always been a sucker for an underdog technology that promises to help the big picture.
It is the most professional fun I have had in a long time.