Slough and others presenting fusion-based propulsion concept

[happyjack27]

Figuring out how to make use of known forces to move or change known matter is engineering, not science.

i would say the best that could be done with turbulence here is getting down the non-linear equations that lead to it and devising some kind of adaptive control system that modulates the inputs accordingly to drive the system towards stability or at least some desirable regime. though apart from changing the dynamical phase-space regime of the system altogether, which in this case would probably mean "not a plasma" and/or using a different configuration (such as a polywell), what you have is a system with an entire manifold of chaotic attractors. and it is a mathematical certainty that in such a system there will _always_ be ergodic uncertainty that manifests as "turbulence". and thus every linear decrease in the turbulence would require an exponential improvement in your control apparatus. (like predicting the weather.) so basically you're f*****d.

[chrismb]

...like predicting the weather...

...and yet, despite the poor performance of weather prediction, engineers still create equipment that survives it, and even aeroplanes that fly through 99% of all weather types.

...if left to the scientists, they will still be telling you to stay in your cave for fear of being blown away...

[happyjack27]

...like predicting the weather...

...and yet, despite the poor performance of weather prediction, engineers still create equipment that survives it, and even aeroplanes that fly through 99% of all weather types.

...if left to the scientists, they will still be telling you to stay in your cave for fear of being blown away...

yeah, but i mean, if you know what your engineering problem is, and what causes it. well it seems the most intuitively obvious thing to do, from an engineering standpoint, is to remove the cause of the problem. like you said, this is an engineering problem. particularly a plasma physics problem. particularly having to do with instability. so you have to rearrange your magnetic field generators so that there are no unstable iso-surfaces. so do that. good. done. easy. isn't that what engineers get paid to do? or are these just glorified "draftsmen"? i mean, c'mon, i can use auto-cad. why aren't they paying me the big bucks?

dude, i could even do so much better, i could modify my sim to run through different tokamak configuration parameters and tell you which one's the best. and it'll only cost you 2 billion dollars. much cheaper than building them.

[happyjack27]

it reminds me of a line from the movie "primer":

Aaron: You know that story, about how NASA spent millions of dollars developing this pen that writes in Zero G? Did you ever read that?
Abe: Yeah.
Aaron: You know how the Russians solved the problem?
Abe: Yeah, they used a pencil.
Aaron: Right. A normal wooden pencil. It just seems like Philip takes the NASA route almost every time.


it seems to me like the government takes the NASA route almost every time. oh, wait...

[chrismb]

It depends on the nature of the engineering. Some engineering work is to achieve things known to work. But to do engineering to fix something you don't understand let alone know you can fix is a different ball-game.

I grant you, the approaches must be 'scientific' ones, carefully studying cause and effect to get to a point where a solution works, but a scientific approach does not mean you end up with 'science'.

At the moment, the means to approach the matter is that they are biasing external electrodes to disrupt the instabilities early so that they do not grow. It is trial and error. It is... engineering,....

[D Tibbets]

Definitions of Science like most other things, is in the eye of the beholder. Does applied science exist as a discipline? It does have Science in it's name. Also, Science does not only mean knowledge has been achieved somewhere, at some time and that any other investigation in that area is not science.
Take the Nobel Prize as an example. There have been numerous awards shared between groups as they reached the goal independently. By the above definitions, the second group, perhaps a few weeks or months after the first group obtained their results would not be doing Science, and should not receive a Nobel Prize for Physics, etc.
Also, Science by definition includes reproducibility. Without that, initial discoveries cannot be considered science until it is reproduced.
Also, much Science is not new discoveries, but refinement and expansion, or even refutation of previous discoveries. Was Newton not a Scientist, because Relativity better describes the Universe? Were the ancient Greeks not Scientists whey they tried to describe the Universe in terms of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth? Was Science at an end in the late 19th century, as some claimed that all of the universe was understood? Does Science require experiments? If, so, many physicists and mathematicians cannot call themselves scientists.


Trying to tightly define such interactive processes is imprecise at best.

Dan Tibbets

[Torulf2]

Wonder watt the relation is between this MSNW
http://msnwllc.com/index_fusiontech.htm
And Helion energy
http://www.helionenergy.com/
?

[D Tibbets]

Wonder watt the relation is between this MSNW
http://msnwllc.com/index_fusiontech.htm
And Helion energy
http://www.helionenergy.com/
?

Try this post by Art Carlson.

viewtopic.php?t=1486

Dan Tibbets

[kurt9]

Wonder watt the relation is between this MSNW
http://msnwllc.com/index_fusiontech.htm
And Helion energy
http://www.helionenergy.com/
?

Both of them are John Slough's operations.

[kcdodd]

So the only job of a physicist is to discover new fields? What!? That is what you think it is we do all day? Sit around hoping to find a new field? Hahaha. I can just imagin a group of engineers staring at a chalk board with the only thing written is the lagrangian for the em field, and then written under it say design fusion reactor using this field. Signed- physicists.

[icarus]

kcdodd:

lol.

I guess that was similar thinking driving those who maintain Polywell's 'science' is proven and it is just an engineering problem from here ... I think that was to justify some shaky politics, funding hi-jinx and FOI denials, rather the reality of the situation though ...

[icarus]

Back to topic ... bit more here.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/fusion ... lsion.html

[chrismb]

So the only job of a physicist is to discover new fields? What!? That is what you think it is we do all day? Sit around hoping to find a new field? Hahaha. I can just imagin a group of engineers staring at a chalk board with the only thing written is the lagrangian for the em field, and then written under it say design fusion reactor using this field. Signed- physicists.

Yup. That sums up the way I see fusion research, save for a few details. Whether those details are exactly the same or otherwise, the outcome is much the same.... no working fusion device for 2010.... just like the previous 60 years that physicists have been toying with 'plasma science'.

I can name you many plasma scientists whose 'dream outcome' is to have a working device in a few decades(!), whereas I can name you several engineers who are pushing to have theirs working in a few years.

(As a physicist, can you please summarise what new pieces of scientific knowledge you've introduced into the world?)

[happyjack27]

(As a physicist, can you please summarise what new pieces of scientific knowledge you've introduced into the world?)

viewtopic.php?t=2767

however, that's a mathematician, not a physicist.

then there's quantumn entanglement and so forth, making bose-einstein condensate for a photon, looking through reams of data for signs of a higgs boson...

looks to me like experimental verifiction of existing theories, looking for new ways to make stuff predicted to exist, and/or finding new ways to mathematically look at / describe existing physics, and considering the ramifications.

so then mostly theoretical. save testing of theories. and much of it would more properly be categorized as engineering than science. but the thing is you're always going to have to do some engineering, and often fairly creative engineering at that, to set up the experiment in the first place.

but then the question is: what does one really hope / expect to get out of the experiment? always, above all one hopes for the unexpected.

[chrismb]

so then mostly theoretical. save testing of theories. and much of it would more properly be categorized as engineering than science.

Well, that's the point I was circling around.

But in this case I was asking what kcdodd himself (herself?) has done, because I do think physicists do an awful lot of fruitless sitting around hoping to find something new. Nothing wrong with that, so long as some collective grouping of physicist come up with at least one new idea between them that leads to something practical.

For the rest of the time when they're not looking for something new, the best a physicist can do is to engage in some engineering to built kit to test out these new theories. But the science part of that activity comes in improving the description of the universe, not in the building of kit to test theories, per se. Hence (within my definition) building ITER, or whatever, isn't science because nothing is learned from it as a building exercise, only coming to an understanding of its operation may lead to science - yet ITER is unlikely to do anything particularly unexpected or unpredictable; either the instabilities will be tolerable (naturally, or by active external edge stimulation), or they won't be. That's an engineering finding, not a scientific one, because it doesn't lead to a new understanding of matter.

Bringing this back onto the topic, the same applies here; a scientist talking about options isn't science and nor, even, is building it. Once this fusion frc cannon thingy is built (yawn... when did he say he'd build it?? or is he waiting for an engineer to take the project on - a white board with an idea with his signature at the bottom "please build this" ) it will operate in some manner [null, or otherwise] and at that point one can look at it and ask 'is it working in a manner which can be predicted with current scientific understanding, or do we need to look at the way matter behaves differently so as to comprehend how it is working?'. The former will mean it was a piece of engineering (successful or otherwise), the latter would be science if it took understanding to a different place.