Maybe you already know what I want.
;)
s
At 06:11 AM 3/9/2006, you wrote:
I quote:
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"I am not sure that I have ever mentioned it to you, but controlled fusion
has been a real problem with me for over 40 years. I was involved in some
of the first meetings where this crap was first promulgated. I told them
then that they were full of shit, because they had not the slightest notion
about how to achieve it.
It is hugely important to understand the difference between science and
science fiction. A good scientific problem is one that is just slightly
outside of our "sphere of understanding" -- it's far enough out that success
expands our "sphere", but it's close enough in that you have a pretty good
idea about how to solve it. Science fiction is stuff that is so far outside
the sphere that you have no idea as to what the path to the solution might
be.
These guys have now spent billions of dollars producing nothing and most
often clogging the literature with nonsense.
I guess that you know that my field of research was surface physics. One of
the most amusing (but so sad) results of the fusion program was when the
Princeton folks found that radiation from their plasma was desorbing gas
from the walls of their vacuum chamber -- a problem that was easily
predictable, and was predicted. Overnight, they were throwing millions of
dollars at completely unqualified and inexperienced people who were trying
to do surface physics. Their work was nonsense, but it corrupted the
literature for years.
These billions of dollars that have been spent have mostly caused good
people to waste their talent on bad problems."
End quote.
