4 ms·

Wendelstein 7-X - from concept to reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA Im Zeitraffer: Zusammenbau v

• adrianN 11y ago
  I find watching the assembly of these ultra-high tech machines to be super inspiring. It gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies to see what we're able to do if we put our mind to it.
  • balabaster 11y ago
    Mostly it's inspiring because most people sit back and say "It can't be done, it's impossible" or "wow, they must have had a shit ton of luck to get this out of the door" instead of looking for solutions or ways to circumvent or exploit the million little problems along the way that seek to obstruct the endgame. Kudos to these guys for sticking at it long enough and persevering to achieve their vision.
    • understand17 11y ago
      bla bla
    • nerdy 11y ago
      My inspiration from massive science projects is more like: "With that in mind, debugging this 1500-line function is nothing!"
      • balabaster 11y ago
        Dude... refactor that shit. There is no place in today's development world that a 1500 line function is okay :P
        • Practicality 11y ago
          Indeed. It will save you from needing inspiration to debug it as well. It's much less cognitive load when you break those crazy things into understandable parts.
          • joelberman 11y ago
            The potential speedup on those old F2C routines is amazing. The ability to use much more memory, understand cache levels, etc. have a huge impact.
        • TeMPOraL 11y ago
          When was the last time you've seen pure Assembly? Also, JavaScript namespacing shenanigans & stuff... :P.
          • nerdy 11y ago
            I make 3rd party/unsanctioned mods for video games in my free time, which involves plenty of Assembly :)
        • fsloth 11y ago
          Not all functions are refactorable. A 'purely hypothetical' scenario: a numeric routine of several klocs on length, that takes in 20 parameters with 1-3 letter obscure variable names, was written 30 years ago in fortran, was f2c:d 20 years ago into c and has been doing it's 'stuff' correctly ever since somewhere in the bottom of mission critical code in a codebase of millions of lines. Commercial codebase. Only a handful of developers. Management expect new features and expedient, safe bugfixes that do not change end user functionality.
          • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I guess different people see different things in such projects. What I see: - *massive* success of coordination and cooperation - illustration of potential humanity has - that careful and methodical approach can make even such monsters of recursive complexity work Luck does not enter the picture. Will and determination do though.
      • balabaster 11y ago
        You'd be surprised how often will and determination is more of a factor of success than luck. [Your level of surprise may vary]
• justifier 11y ago
  the first video claims a magnetic field strength of 2.5 Tesla(o) roughly that of an MRI(i) can anyone speak to sort of considerations that lead to this value? 2.5T seems insignificant considering the events it will be confining how sensitive is the field to magnetic interactions outside of the device? (o) https://youtu.be/lyqt6u5_sHA?t=301 https://youtu.be/lyqt6u5_sHA?t=301 (i) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit)#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(unit)#Examples
  • madaxe_again 11y ago
    That's part of the beauty of the stellarator design - you need a comparatively weak (2.5T is still an unholy field) field to maintain containment.
  • jessriedel 11y ago
    Steady magnets can't get much stronger than that. The very strongest steady magnets, purpose built, are in the 40-70 tesla range. I believe the limit is set by the break down of normal matter. Higher field strengths can be achieved, but only for fractions of a second and are general destructive.
    • madaxe_again 11y ago
      Imploding coils. This stuff gets me every time I see it - chills down the spine. You can induce a field in the MEGAtesla range for an infintesimal amount of time. Take a copper (or superconductor, if you're feeling ballsy) coil, run a huge current through it from your enormous capacitor bank, set off a wad of high explosive surrounding the apparatus - the near-instantaneous collapse of the conductor causes the field within to become absolutely enormous - and equally importantly the Ts-1 - i.e. the rate of change of the field - again, you can induce enormous currents outside of the apparatus through induction. This technique is mostly used in solid state and, surprise surprise, fusion experiments. Oh, and you can make an EM bomb if you make a big enough one, and wipe out a city's electronic infrastructure in a microsecond. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...
  • 11y ago