5 ms·
Breathless as usual, and as usual I can't judge. Experts, how big a deal is this?
by Jeff_Brown 4y ago
Breathless as usual, and as usual I can't judge. Experts, how big a deal is this?
- xwdv 4y agoIt doesn’t scale.
- etothepii 4y agoAren't we supposed to "do things that don't scale"?
- xwdv 4y agoI really don’t understand the downvotes, but the full version of that famous quote is “do things that don’t scale right away.” Not “do things that don’t scale and will never scale.”
- adwn 4y agoYou were probably downvoted because you made a strong statement without further explanation, or at least references that support your claim.
- einpoklum 4y agoI pressed the zoom button and it scaled just fine. Or perhaps you mean something else which you have not bothered to explain?
- Animats 4y agoRight. This is either huge, Nobel Prize / multi-billion dollar industry huge, or a gross exaggeration of a lab result. Which?
- Dalewyn 4y agoConsidering this comes from Japan, I'm going to lean on hot air exaggeration until demonstrated otherwise. Not taking away from the fact this is an interesting achievement in the science of nuclear fusion, of course.
- georgewsinger 4y ago> Considering this comes from Japan... Can you explain to me why this follows? I don't usually associate "hot air exaggeration" with Japanese culture.
- Dalewyn 4y agoI reflected on this once before[1], but basically I've seen Japan design great things only for them to fail on execution time and time again. I'm sick and tired of them at this point, so I simply refuse to hold my breath on anything coming from Japan until I see it in action. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803445
- mulmen 4y agoBy any economic measure Japan is an advanced productive nation. Like top five in the world. At the same time they have maintained a high quality of life over decades and a unique culture.
- Dalewyn 4y agoThat is tangent to whether Japan can bring projects to fruition. The recent termination of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet is a perfect example (among many others) of what I'm sick and tired about with Japan: Lots of bold claims to start, absolute failure when time comes to execute.
- mulmen 4y agoSeems like cherry (or is that lemon?) picking. The United States has failed projects too, as do all advanced economies. There’s no way Japan got where it is today if they can’t execute.
- cpleppert 4y agoI'm not sure why this seems to be hyped up in media reports and I'm skeptical this is a big deal. They used NIFS's stellarator to observe proton boron fusion in a magnetic plasma. The way they accomplished this is by bombarding the plasma with massively energetic particles. The energy produced through fusion is almost undetectable. I'm not sure what relevance this has to their proposed FRC reactor and the paper doesn't make that clear either. They do talk about a wealth of data that could inform their research but since the scale here is so astronomically different from a hypothetical reactor that produces energy it is hard to see how the knowledge gained from what is essentially a single experiment has any relevance to their eventual goal of producing net energy gain. Most of the work to make fusion energy work is engineering and engineering is very sensitive to scale.