Stuff The Ballot Box

Discuss ways to make polywell research more widely known or better understood. Includes education and outreach.

Moderators: tonybarry, MSimon

Post Reply
MSimon
Posts: 14334
Joined: Mon Jul 16, 2007 7:37 pm
Location: Rockford, Illinois
Contact:

Stuff The Ballot Box

Post by MSimon »

This on line poll needs some help.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1612

tonybarry
Posts: 219
Joined: Sun Jul 08, 2007 4:32 am
Location: Sydney, Australia
Contact:

Post by tonybarry »

Stuffed. Actually I think fusion is much more likely than any of the other items.

A cure for cancer ... well, that is such a broad grouping of separate malaise that it defies belief. If they said, "Breast cancer", or "glioma", or "pancreatic islet cell carcinoma" ... I might give it a better mark. But the term cancer applies to so many different things ... there's no magic bullet for them all (as far as I can see).

Discovery of alien life ... that's gonna be hard too. Any probe that lands on Mars is going to have its own share of earth bugs. Separating them will not be easy. Communicating with aliens (SETI stuff) has been going for a while and they've had just one chunk of something that might have been a comms ... and might not. We'd need serious data transfer to establish the presence of alien life.

The origins of life? Hmmm. Seems unlikely too. Miller and Urey's expts brewing up amino acids in primordial atmospheres ... nice, but a long way from a lipid bilayer and functional cellular apparatus. That will take centuries to prove (and especially centuries to establish that it didn't come from contaminating bugs).

True AI? well, Halo III might make a good candidate :-) other than that, the Turing machine definition kind of means most humans would fail the test as well as most machines. Hmmm.

The Higgs boson? Bigger colliders are required. Unlikely to be funded.

So bring on the polywell!

Regards
Tony Barry

Indrek
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Jul 04, 2007 1:51 pm
Location: Estonia
Contact:

Post by Indrek »

Not that I know that much about this but isn't the Large Hadron Collider going online early 2008? There's a big fat chance it'll uncover the higgs boson as well. So out of that list the higgs boson is most likely to be found first.

- Indrek

MSimon
Posts: 14334
Joined: Mon Jul 16, 2007 7:37 pm
Location: Rockford, Illinois
Contact:

Post by MSimon »

Going on line is just the first step.

Then they have to calibrate the eqpt. Ramp up the power. And hope they get lucky. i.e find the particle in the first few runs vs 10 years from now.

Don't forget the time it takes for data reduction and also confirmation by numerous experiments.

It is also possible the LHAC doesn't have enough energy to "create" a Higgs.

Fusion is a better bet.

Post Reply