COLD FUSION! OR MAYBE, WELL, PROBABLY NOT!!!
OK, do any physicists see any reason to take this guy seriously? Honestly, last night I read a chapter about the cold fusion debacle of the late '90s. A few problems stuck out then: 1) they would have died had they been successful, 2) the ones who made the most questionable and potentially revolutionary claims were far outside their field (chemists playing in physicist land). This guy 1) still alive, and 2) a web developer.
He seems to have released a full-on media assault and he produces no evidence, or even discuss anything of interest as far as I can tell. My bullshit detector is going crazy, so someone let me know if it needs to be readjusted.
HJ
Seed Newsvine
5 comments:
This guy is a fucking idiot. I don't think he says one true sentence. I want to launch into a tirade, but I have a headache.
tl;dr: The science is plausible, there are engineering challenges. OTOH, this guy is not an engineer.
The guy may be an idiot; technically, the stuff he's building may not be BS. It sounds like he's trying to build a Bussard Polywell fusor.
These are hot fusion machines, which confine electrons with a magnetic field and use them to accelerate protons electrostatically. Bussard was building them for the USN. The standing problem is whether you can contain the electrons for long enough and whether you loose too much energy from the protons to the electrons.
Jonathan and Ben,
Thanks for your comments. I followed up on Bussard last night, and got the (very) skinny on that. It sounded to me like the starting point of his research was a youtube video. Yikes.
What bothers me more is that the media...seems fairly uncritical of him.
If you know what to listen for, he lets you know in the video that his "device" will never amount to anything.
"GRIFFIN [the interviewer]: And then you get this little glow. Now, does that glow mean anything? Are you actually creating energy that you can use at this time?
SUPPES: The device I've built so far is just first step towards a long journey. That device will never produce break-even fusion, and by that I mean producing more energy than it consumes.
But the device that I'm trying to build, and that we're going to build next, the but the reactor holds that promise, if we can build it at the right size, according to his calculations, it should be a break-even reactor."
He's currently got an expensive Power Wasting Machine™, and he plans on building the Hope and Dream Factory™ (fueled by Wishes™).
Yeah. That moment in the interview was ridiculous.
What I thought was the most interesting was that they never asked him where and when he learned the years of nuclear physics/engineering he needs for this. The guy is a web developer, something that takes about 5 minutes of learning to do. Also, they should ask the guy some specific science questions. See if he doesn't mumble his way through them. Who cares if it's over the anchors head. News anchors never know jack about shit anyway.
This guy was obviously on the program to get some money from ignorant people. The only thing he said that was specific about was how much money he needed.
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