In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Mon, 13 Nov 2017 17:42:50 -0500: Hi, [snip] ><[email protected]> wrote: > > >> >As I >> >said, that total is always more than the energy added to the plasma, up to >> >the iron limit. >> [snip] >> Actually, iron is not the limit. It depends on which nuclei you are trying >> to >> fuse. A lone proton has zero net binding energy, so would fuse with any >> element >> in the periodic table, if you could get it close enough to the nucleus. >> The "iron limit" applies only to elements fusing with themselves, i.e. one >> iron >> nucleus fusing with another iron nucleus. >> > >Again with the scientific accuracy! Such nitpicking, just because that's >how the laws of physics work!
:) > >Krivit would say I am engaged in "active fraud to the public" because I >simplified the explanation and left out an important exception. Perhaps so, but I didn't. Actually I agree with most of what you wrote here below. In this case, you could have easily have left out the clause "up to the iron limit". >Whoever wrote the ITER public relations blurb did nothing wrong, any more >than I did in that message. Or in the first chapter of my book, which >Mallove and I wrote. It is an oversimplified introduction to cold fusion. >It is for non-scientists who know nothing about cold fusion. It is not >intended for an expert audience. Any expert can poke holes in it. Heck, *I* >can poke holes in it. > >When you write about a complicated machine for the general public you must >leave out thousands of vital technical details and important distinctions. >You present a grossly oversimplified picture. Because people do not have >weeks to devote to learning about ITER. You end up using terms like "net >energy" which have no strict technical definition, and which invite >confusion and disputes. The paragraph about "net energy" is sorta right in >some ways, and it gives the reader a sense of what is going on and why ITER >advances the state of the art. Close enough for government work! Ship it. > >It is like writing a manual for a complicated program, which I have done. >That ain't easy. The customer has no idea how the thing works, and doesn't >want to know, yet there are certain things he or she must grasp, or the >product will not work. Whaddya going to do, anyway? Not tell the customer? >Look at the way the *New York Times* describes self driving cars or neural >net artificial intelligence. They are forced to be inaccurate for lack of >space and because the reader has no idea how these things work. Would it be >better not to describe them? Should ITER not even try to inform the public >what they are up to? > >If you want the real details I expect ITER has published a ton of technical >documents. I doubt they include vague assertions about "net energy." If you >want to know about neural nets Google has published marvelous papers, in >*Nature*, no less. Such as: > >https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf > >- Jed Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
