4 ms·

Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die

23 points by brkumar 18y ago

mattmaroon 18y ago
They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very short time relative to fission.
asciilifeform 18y ago
Tabletop fusion per se is trivial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor Or whack a piece of palladium deuteride with a hammer. Breakeven is another matter.
- thaumaturgy 18y ago
  Right. One of my clients has working sonofusion, but are currently spending several magnitudes more energy to produce the effect than they are getting for output.
troystribling 18y ago
Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate.
- rkowalick 18y ago
  Apparantly you don't either. There are plenty of scientific theories that are indisputably resolved and closed to debate.
  - troystribling 18y ago
    I think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability, is used by many to define an assertion as scientific. From the article, "Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby theories become less bad". A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy. There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1. I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.

23 points by brkumar 18y ago

They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very short time relative to fission.

asciilifeform 18y ago

Tabletop fusion per se is trivial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor Or whack a piece of palladium deuteride with a hammer. Breakeven is another matter.

thaumaturgy 18y ago
Right. One of my clients has working sonofusion, but are currently spending several magnitudes more energy to produce the effect than they are getting for output.

troystribling 18y ago

Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate.

rkowalick 18y ago
Apparantly you don't either. There are plenty of scientific theories that are indisputably resolved and closed to debate.
- troystribling 18y ago
  I think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability, is used by many to define an assertion as scientific. From the article, "Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby theories become less bad". A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy. There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1. I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.