The race is on Polywell vs ITER

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

TallDave wrote: People probably conceptualized the wheel thousands or millions of times before actually making the first one that did real work.
What can I say?... I don't think you understand how embedded is your lack of insight into an act of genius that you think all-and-sundry simply dream up the notion of a circle as a matter of course during their routine hunting-and-gathering, or whateverelse.

There is something so quantised about an act of inventive genius that unless you practice trying to see it, you never will....... nor will you ever be involved in, or initiate, an act of inventive genius and, quite likely, never recognise it when it is happening either.

Another example – who invented the plate? Did the food bowl come before the plate? You could see how someone 'stumbled' upon the idea with, say, putting food onto a big leaf.

And in your blasé attitude that presumes such things are self-evident – I guess because of your cosseted existence in a modern world that already provides these things - OK, then, why don't monkeys use plates for their food?? Someone, at some given moment in time, with intellect greater than a monkey, has formed an idea in their head that if they use something flat and put their food on it, then it won't get grit all over it when they leave it on the floor. That is an act of genius, no less by any degree than the invention of the rocket motor.

Who invented the pipe? Who invented the wire? Who invented the washing bowl – and then put a plug in it. The spoon, the bucket, the shoe, clothes, the stool/chair, string, the nail, the screw, the house(enclosed dwelling). All of these might have come about by some sort of accident, but still, even then, it still takes the ability to recognise that an inventive step has occurred. You may think that is easy, but it is not so at all. You can force a monkey to watch you eat with a plate, or make and use any of the above things, but why doesn't he then go on to use those things for himself? Sometimes, you can get experimental subjects that do exactly that – but you seem to think this would come easily. It clearly doesn't.

It is the state of things that our modern world that we are so well provided for by a mass of genius engineering before us that we've caused to be reverse-evolved new ape-like humans (particularly males between the ages of 13 and 18, it seems!!) that shuffle around and decry everything as boring and pathetic, as they punch the buttons on their ipods not giving a moments thought to any of this. And you imply these things are so obvious...... yet they are surely hidden from direct gaze by their very proliferation.

I do not believe that anyone who thinks the above examples are 'obvious' has the capacity to see the potential of a new inventive idea. I feel sorry for the first human who, sitting around in their cave/hunting group, pulls a big leaf of a tree and puts food on it. How they must have laughed at him/her 'why are you doing that!!' (in whatever grunts were used at the time). But that first human must've been prepared to go against the mass opinion and persist in using it, the bravery of engineering caught in that singular defiant act of not doing what was always done before. At some stage, a few more must have seen the value of it and copied it, until only then did it become 'obvious'.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

This whole "circle/wheel" thing is a bit off topic and getting personal. Please take it to the "General Forum".

vankirkc
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Post by vankirkc »

chrismb wrote:
KitemanSA wrote:
chrismb wrote:Hardly a similar scenario. Polywell/ITER is more like when caveman was trying to decide between triangular or star-shaped wheels, and had to wait several thousand years for someone to invent the circle.

(D'you like my little bit of 'instant' philosophy - was the circle, as a shape, 'invented' or 'discovered', and if the latter where was it before it was first 'found'? The invention of the 'notion of a circle' had to come before the wheel.....)
In Africa, several animals roll into balls and roll down hill (dune) to escape. Heck, there is even a snake that rolls into a hoop to do the same thing. Rolling round things are viewable in nature.
You misunderstand. A circle is an 'idea', the 'perfect' concept of equidistant points from a centre. So, I'm not talking about the first thing that rolled down a hill, I'm talking about the first concept anyone ever had that if they made a hub, and put a concentric circle about that hub (because they understood that's what a circle does), knowing that it would then roll smoothly and bear a load at that hub.

The concept of the circle is an invention - there are no circles in existence anywhere as it is an infinitely thin 2D geometric 'virtual' object for which every point on the circumference is perfectly equidistant to the centre. Did this idea come before the first true 'wheel', or did someone just happen to stick a hub through the centre of a disc and then also craft off the edge of that disc so it was as close to their newly understood notion of a circle as they could?

Which came first; a properly engineered wheel, or the notion of a circle?
Logs probably came first. Case in point the current theories regarding how the great stones of the pyramids were moved into place.

Then wheels evolved from the logs.

Then the notion of circles was abstracted from the logs and the wheels.

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

KitemanSA wrote:This whole "circle/wheel" thing is a bit off topic and getting personal. Please take it to the "General Forum".
You're right. (not sure about the 'personal' bit, just seemed to be a debate to me) Though - the issue of a viable fusion reactor does come down to whether we actually recognise if we've 'invented' and understood all the 'concepts' we need. One guy makes a square wheel, the other guy makes a diamond shaped one, which one figures out that the missing understanding is.......

(Maybe someone comes along with a circular wheel, but they're so caught up on trying to figure out how to make their designs better that they miss the bigger picture.)

Are these as-yet-to-be concepts going to be 'invented' or 'stumbled upon'? If history tells us anything, it says polywell's got a lot of these hurdles to get over, if it is going to do anything at all. You're dreaming if you think everything's been figured out based on a ms flash in a chamber and a load of hot air (viz. no academic papers). Tokamak has already stubled into them and perhaps it has frozen for this very lack of innovation. By what disciplined approach does one rationalise and formulate 'innovation' and the invention of concepts. I was just exploring that a little, maybe taking a look at what thinking needs to be done before a great idea for a solution gets thought up and then recognised.

Seems to me that both ITER and Polywell are doing a lot of stumbling and little innovative re-invention. Look out, dwarf, someone might come and shove you off your bike and get the race underway....

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

vankirkc wrote:
chrismb wrote:
KitemanSA wrote: In Africa, several animals roll into balls and roll down hill (dune) to escape. Heck, there is even a snake that rolls into a hoop to do the same thing. Rolling round things are viewable in nature.
You misunderstand. A circle is an 'idea', the 'perfect' concept of equidistant points from a centre. So, I'm not talking about the first thing that rolled down a hill, I'm talking about the first concept anyone ever had that if they made a hub, and put a concentric circle about that hub (because they understood that's what a circle does), knowing that it would then roll smoothly and bear a load at that hub.

The concept of the circle is an invention - there are no circles in existence anywhere as it is an infinitely thin 2D geometric 'virtual' object for which every point on the circumference is perfectly equidistant to the centre. Did this idea come before the first true 'wheel', or did someone just happen to stick a hub through the centre of a disc and then also craft off the edge of that disc so it was as close to their newly understood notion of a circle as they could?

Which came first; a properly engineered wheel, or the notion of a circle?
Logs probably came first. Case in point the current theories regarding how the great stones of the pyramids were moved into place.

Then wheels evolved from the logs.

Then the notion of circles was abstracted from the logs and the wheels.
The logs idea has been shot down in favor of sledges greased with watered silt. However, the wheel as a measuring tool pretty much explains how pi got incorporated into the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

To make logs work you need to control their roundness and diameter. For sledges greased with mud you only need to be able to do a flat runner.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

There is something so quantised about an act of inventive genius that unless you practice trying to see it, you never will....... nor will you ever be involved in, or initiate, an act of inventive genius and, quite likely, never recognise it when it is happening either.
You're missing the point: even if the wheel is an act of inventive genius, it requires a lot of other things to be useful, so lots of geniuses probably had the idea before a situation arose in which it was really valuable.

And yes, the wheel is actually pretty obvious given that people see things rolling all the time. What is genius? The stirrup maybe, the formula for steel probably, Principia Mathematica certainly. A round wheel, not so much:

Image

As you can see, it becomes rather obvious with any practical application.

Probably the best example of early genius is the act of writing, which was only independently invented three times in human history. It seems obvious to us now, but there isn't much of an analogue in nature, and it required various abstract rules to be formulated.

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

TallDave wrote: As you can see, it becomes rather obvious with any practical application.
Again, with the 'it's so obvious' line. Why don't monkeys use plates? Or make boxes to put things in. Give a moneky a box and he loves it, so why won't he make one.

I agree the wheel needs other stuff, but it's off my original point - I was suggesting that thought should be applied to whether one can invent the wheel without being initially aware of a circle, which you seem to suggest is the case. Or maybe not. Not sure. Something that rolls doesn't have a hub. The hub is an integral part of the wheel and I would've thought you need to understand that there is a centre to a circle before you can stick a hub there. This is not at all obvious.

Betruger
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Post by Betruger »

Apples and oranges (and off topic). Monkeys aren't men. Crows understand keys and keyholes. They pick the keys up and unlock the container.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

You would stumble onto the circle in the course of finding the best shape for a wheel, by rolling different shapes (a monkey wouldn't figure this out but a man would). And I think it's a case where practical application reveals the problems of an off-center hub pretty quickly; this would have been figured out by the potters when their pots went flying off.

If you read the wiki, it wasn't enough to find the center. The challenge of materials (and roads) was probably bigger.
That people with capacities fully equal to our own walked the earth for so long before conceiving of the wheel may be initially surprising, but populations were extremely small through most of this period and the wheel, which requires an axle and socket to actually be useful, is not as simple a device as it may seem. Making and balancing a wheel requires a skilled wheelwright.

Wide usage of the wheel was probably delayed because smooth roads were needed for wheels to be effective.[10] Carrying goods on the back would have been the preferred method of transportation over surfaces that contained many obstacles. The lack of developed roads prevented wide adoption of the wheel for transportation until well into the 20th century in less developed areas.
It's interesting too that even cultures which did not use the wheel practically do demonstrate a knowledge of it -- in children's toys.

D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

My two cents worth (they are round coins afterall :wink: ).
Brilliant concepts and predictive theories and models are great and can aid in developing an idea. But, often it is bull headed persistance that delivers the goods. Metallergy was mentioned, but at least historically, the various alloys were developed through trial and error. If something did not work, variations were tried till a solution was reached, then the recipe was followed (and often tinkered with leading to further improvement) without any indepth understanding of the physics or chemistry involved. As another example, people were breeding domestic animals long befor Darwin came along.

Iconistic theories, models, etc. can also sometime be an impediment. A.Carlaon mentioned that then current magnetic theory predicted that the reversed field configuration wouldn't work, but someone tested it anyway and the theory got trumped. Either the expermentalist had an insight that other's hadn't seen, or he was just being bull headed.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

Art Carlson
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Post by Art Carlson »

[Getting sucked into off-topic speculation...] You can invent the rim and the axis separately. The "rim" can be anything round, like logs or pebbles rolling under your load. The "axis" doesn't need to be in the middle of anything - a square board set off-center can still be useful for a potter. That way you don't need a full genius to invent the wheel, just two half-wits.
D Tibbets wrote:Iconistic theories, models, etc. can also sometime be an impediment. A.Carlson mentioned that then current magnetic theory predicted that the reversed field configuration wouldn't work, but someone tested it anyway and the theory got trumped. Either the experimentalist had an insight that others hadn't seen, or he was just being bull headed.
[Getting vaguely back on topic...] I doubt that they were being either insightful or bull-headed. I think they just hadn't given much thought to MHD stability. But your point remains that it may have been a lucky piece of ignorance.

vankirkc
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Post by vankirkc »

MSimon wrote:
vankirkc wrote:
chrismb wrote:You misunderstand. A circle is an 'idea', the 'perfect' concept of equidistant points from a centre. So, I'm not talking about the first thing that rolled down a hill, I'm talking about the first concept anyone ever had that if they made a hub, and put a concentric circle about that hub (because they understood that's what a circle does), knowing that it would then roll smoothly and bear a load at that hub.

The concept of the circle is an invention - there are no circles in existence anywhere as it is an infinitely thin 2D geometric 'virtual' object for which every point on the circumference is perfectly equidistant to the centre. Did this idea come before the first true 'wheel', or did someone just happen to stick a hub through the centre of a disc and then also craft off the edge of that disc so it was as close to their newly understood notion of a circle as they could?

Which came first; a properly engineered wheel, or the notion of a circle?
Logs probably came first. Case in point the current theories regarding how the great stones of the pyramids were moved into place.

Then wheels evolved from the logs.

Then the notion of circles was abstracted from the logs and the wheels.
The logs idea has been shot down in favor of sledges greased with watered silt. However, the wheel as a measuring tool pretty much explains how pi got incorporated into the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

To make logs work you need to control their roundness and diameter. For sledges greased with mud you only need to be able to do a flat runner.
My point was that it was more likely an evolutionary process as opposed to someone sitting down in a darkened room and inventing the hub and spoke wheel or the anstract circle out of the blue.

D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

Art Carlson wrote:.... [Getting vaguely back on topic...] I doubt that they were being either insightful or bull-headed. I think they just hadn't given much thought to MHD stability. But your point remains that it may have been a lucky piece of ignorance.

Ah, ignorance is bliss ! :roll:
To error is human... and I'm very human.

rcain
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Post by rcain »

D Tibbets wrote:
Art Carlson wrote:.... [Getting vaguely back on topic...] I doubt that they were being either insightful or bull-headed. I think they just hadn't given much thought to MHD stability. But your point remains that it may have been a lucky piece of ignorance.

Ah, ignorance is bliss ! :roll:
...can i just mention Euler at this point...?

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

rcain wrote: ...can i just mention Euler at this point...?
Feel free!... Presumably you raise him for his own use of circles in set diagrams, a use not previously prescribed.

My thesis is that we just don't know whether many of these 'ancient' inventions were just random event coming together, random ideas, and/or a mixture of both. My contention is that if we just say "ah well, it just evolved and no-one really thought about it" and do not seek to analyse that process and see if we can accelerate it, then we're doomed just to 'hang around' until some event comes up with the ideas, entirely at the whim of random circumstances and probabilities. And with that attitude, is it any wonder that innovation on fusion energy has stalled?!

What is it that enables us to see the value and use of 'a plate' or 'a bucket' that a monkey can't see? There is, quite literally, "more than meets the eye" when it comes to humans making use of new ideas. But it still doesn't happen easily - despite how much you may have convinced yourself that it is otherwise - so how do we generate new concepts, and learn to spot others generating useful ones?

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