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Should Google Go Nuclear?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 18, 2006 02:23 AM
from the gooboom dept.
from the gooboom dept.
Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."
Related Stories
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Bussard Gets Navy Funding For Fusion Research 146 comments
UnreasonableMan writes to let us know that Robert Bussard, the fusion researcher whose talk at Google was discussed here a few months back, has won continued funding from the Navy. The word on this spread from Kent Brewster at the Speculations blog, who reportedly had the word from Bussard himself. (The link is to another blog that reproduces Brewster's post, because Speculations has no permalink.)
[+]
Dr. Bussard Passes Away, Polywell Fusion Continues 79 comments
Vinz writes "Dr Bussard, the man behind the Bussard Collector and inventor of the Polywell fusion device, passed away last Sunday in the morning. He leaves behind him a legacy of EM fusion devices, and a team determined to continue his efforts. The news of funding extension for the construction of his WB-7 fusion devices made it to slashdot months ago (as well as his talk at google). They may be a serious candidate in the run to bring commercial fusion, and may work at lower scales than other projects. Let's hope the project continues in good shape despite his departure."
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Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's pretty much the same with our current fission reactors. There is no way that the design of the reactors would ever blow up like an Atomic warhead, because the warheads are explicitly designed to go super-critical in a very particular fashion, with the intent of burning the maximum amount of fuel possible in the shortest period possible.
There are actually shaped charges on the outside of the weapon to trigger this event. These charges *must* be properly aligned, or the weapon will never reach super-criticality. That's why the heros in the movie The Peacemaker removed one of the charges from the weapon. Without it, the normal explosives would detonate harmlessly. (There is another type of bomb that slams two carefully shaped, barely sub-critical pieces of Uranium together REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard. Again, you have the same problem of the design having to be precise.)
About all you can get from a fission reactor is the raw materials to make a weapon. And even then, it's best if the reactor is configured to produce the materials you need. It's pretty much the same way with a fusion plant. You can use or produce materials useful in nuclear weapons, but the reactor will be nowhere close to a weapon itself. The key safety issue is thus to ensure that sufficient safeguards exist to prevent the release of any poisonous radioisotopes back into the environment. (If the fusion reaction is completely clean, then this isn't a concern.) We wouldn't want another Chernobyl, which happened mostly because there weren't sufficient safeguards, and the ones that existed had been explicitly disabled (with authorization!) by untrained personnel.
The irony? They wanted to test the reactor to see if it would fail properly without the safeguards installed. Guess they got their answer.
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you bothered to WTFV (yes, it is an hour and a half...) then you would know they are talking about using Boron-11, which the waste products break down into all helium-4. Last time I checked, you can't make a dirty bomb out of helium, although you could make everyone talk funny. Sounds more like a Hank Scorpio plot...
This is one of the few kinds of technologies that you could share with any and everyone, AND would actually take away any reason for other countries to build breeder reactors. If Iran could choose between this and a fission breeder reactor that produces plutonium as a waste product, then their intentions would be clear by their choice. Either they wanted electrical power or bomb matierials.
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd even go so far as to say that cheap energy for all would save the world. I'm not normally a doom and gloom kinda guy, but it seems to me that the path we're headed on right now leads to civilization breaking down.
With cheap and bountiful energy, the US would care a whole lot less about what's happening in places with oil. And in turn those places would care a whole lot less about the US. Many parts of the world could be made to be much more pleasant places to live, and the general cost of getting things done plummets.
Right now there are many, many people in the world who are extraordinarily unhappy with things as they are, and would take down civilization if they could. They lack only the means, not the motive. Eventually, and inevitably, the means will become more and more accessible. Suicide bombers, for instance, are an expensive weapon. They work only once, at most, and are difficult to cultivate. Recently there was a story of Israel wishing to develop a lethal insect-sized robot. While not practical today, sooner or later it will be. And not long after that, cheap enough and available enough to use in place of suicide bombers. At that point the equation changes, and destabilizing society on a larger scale becomes much easier to do.
The only way to save the world is not through force, but rather improving the lives of everyone, everywhere. And nothing would take anywhere near as large a stride towards that end as cheap and plentiful energy for all.
The way to stop terrorism is not by spending a trillion dollars killing people, but rather spending that money on figuring out how to make things better.
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, high density power sources may open up new lines of weaponry (directed energy, magnetic propelled projectiles, ionizing plasma for destroying biomass like humans), and even new defenses against nuclear weapons (which would make them more likely to be used).
Also, I doubt that whoever discovers this "free energy for all" would dare to allow all to have it, much less for free. It is such a powerful economic advantage that any country with that technology would far surpass the rest of the world, resulting in more inequality, not less. With ridiculous amounts of free energy, we could afford to mine/assemble everything here and be nice and isolationist. Who knows, maybe wars will be fought over this technology? Those in power are often reluctant to give it up...
I'd like to see fusion power get to the point where it's a useful substitute, but you should be very careful what you wish for. "With great power comes great responsibility" they say, and if mankind has proven anything over the least fifty thousand years, it is that it is anything but responsible.
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple of things:
1. We already rely on large corporations for our power. What exactly would change?
2. I presume that the initial reactor at least would be intended to meet Google's growing demand for power. Nuts to the rest of us.
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Funny)
Because it helps further mankind's patriarcic domination of Gaia. A better solution would be to live a life in tune with nature, where people only inhabit the fruited plains of Africa, just coming down from the trees to forage for fruit (that has dropped to the ground; it's wrong to tear plants apart) and being led by matriarchs who aren't repressed by body image or hygiene.
Technology is for people who haven't learned to hate being human. Don't they realize that life would be better if only innocent animals inhabited the earth?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Google Goes Nuclear; Microsoft's Pants=Brown Alert (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
Obligatory science fiction refernce: Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned"
Re:Google Goes Nuclear; Microsoft's Pants=Brown Al (Score:5, Funny)
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Fusion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just fusion. There's some fission involved too in the particular chain of reactions he wants to use. But it's fission of light elements, and Bussard claims it won't produce gamma rays or speeding neutrons.
In fact, pure fusion reactions do produce neutrons that go flying off and have to be captured, which means that they produce harmful radiation. The seeming lack of neutrons is what makes many very skeptical of cold fusion claims. But the reaction chain he proposes involves fusion and fission and produces no neutrons or gamma rays.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I believe the fuel is tritium (one proton and two neutron hydrogen, radioactive and unstable, but not very much so) and boron. The end result is 4 stable helium nuclei. There is no plutonium or other weapons grade material produced. These are all nuclear reactions at the very low end of the periodic table. You might be able to build a hydrogen bomb, but there are lots easier ways to do that.
From your confusion, I would suggest reading up on fission and fusion on Wikipedia.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Deuterium + Tritium
Deuterium +Deuterium
Boron 11 one.
Re:Fusion? (Score:4, Informative)
Waste:Helium.
Meltdown:Meltdown is the wrong word. A failure of the containment could occur, but the reaction would die when exposed to outside conditions and the magnets could explode they would throw shrapnel around. however this would not a be a sudden or instant thing. Unlike a nuclear reactor the fuel is supplied at a constant rate, when fuel is removed the reaction stops. it would be equivilant to a large piece of machinery at a factory breaking falling over or exploding. Nothing is leaving the building and its gonna be expensive. However if this happens you need to be looking at the people running the thing, and ask them why they didn't turn it off.
Weapon stuff:Well deuterium is used in a fusion weapons, but you can get the stuff isn't that hard to get, and you still need a fission reaction to start a weapon fusion reaction.
So devices use have a system that catches neutrons that leave the reaction and converts them into tritium then feeds them back into the reaction.
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Re:Fusion? (Score:5, Informative)
So 1) what's the fuel,
Boron.
2) what's the waste,
Carbon and helium.
3) what's the risk of a meltdown,
No risk of meltdown, china syndrome, or other runaway problems. The worst case would be a conventional explosion.
and 4) is any plutonium (or other weapons-grade material) produced?
No.
He talks a good physics snow job; glibly spicing his words with equations that provide a certain kind of high energy ambience without actually conveying any information to his audience. In his own way, he is quite the showman.
However it did seem to me that he is saying that the theory behind his fusor engines has been proven, and that he is staking his reputation on that. I'm also pretty sure he is saying that the remaining problems are in the engineering, not the physics. So its like rocketships: we know it can be done but we don't yet know how to do it well enough to be really useful.
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Fusion, but might actually work (cor!!) (Score:5, Informative)
Within minutes, he had pointed out that his reaction did not produce neutrons. He clearly knew this is a key issue. He described the basic geometries of fusion reaction. He made a nice, clear description of the random walk nature of tokomak fields, and why that meant some of the contents would always head for the walls. His explanations involved nice, clear numbers, like how many times the ion should go through the dense region before it collided. This isn't a popular science gloss-over - I am pretty sure you are getting the real deal here. He argued the need for a 1/r-type field to contain the ions, and why this is best done using electrons guided by coils. I have some familiarity with saddle-field ion sources - not the same thing, but similar enough to recognize what he was talking about.
For those of you familiar with Hollywood Science, 11 years of research with a load of failed designs may not seem like an investment. Actually, it showed a lot of steady progress, with many orders of magnitude improvement. The only faintly Hollywood bit was the final experiment, and that rang very true to me. The lab is being shut doown; the apparatus is going into storage. We may get to use it again, we may not. Why not turn the current supply all the way up? You can do it safely enough if you stand behind the filing cabinet. Oops, it fried. Oh well, we got some numbers anyway. Yup, that's what a lot of science is like. It is much slower and less dramatic then you would believe.
The 'wiffle ball' effect is really cute. He is working with plasmas. You have charged stuff zipping about in magnetic and electrostatic fields. Unfortunately, that stuff is itself charged, and because it is moving, it has its own magnetic field. This usually means the plasma can work out within microseconds what it is not supposed to do, and start hosepiping, or wiggling, or whatever it was that it shouldn't. Just occasionally, you can use this self-will to your advantage. The microwave magnetron is an example (particularly cute that he used one inside his experiment to keep the ionization up). Well, I would see that you could concentrale positive ions using negative electrons, but wouldn't they hit each other and neutralize all the time? Well - no they don't, because the electrons will make fast lanes through the slower moving ions.
He had worked on space engines. He is one of the mad atom smashers from the fifties. Okay, let's see how his proposal stacks up in traditional Mad Scientist terms. Usually a good Mad experiment involves at least two of (a) space, (b) H-bombs, (c) superconductivity, and (d) a small country. A mad experiment needs a budget that is a mere 10% of the US annual defence budget/spending of fossil fuels. And, usually there is the requirement for government funding to pay for the bits that won't make a profit. Some biofuel proposals get well into the Mad bracket. This project has clear aims and costs. It is not huge. You can build it. Either it will work or it won't. If it works, then we can put it into ships and conventional power stations. Project Plowshare it ain't.
The only thing I might say against is that this may be just
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Buttons (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually one of the biggest safety advantages of fusion of fission. With a fission reactor, loss of control or containment doesn't stop the fission reactions from occurring, since fission occurs naturally in Uranium, whereas with a fusion reactor, loss of containment or control stops the reaction, as fusion does not occur naturally in Deuterium or Tritium under terrestrial conditions.
Re:Buttons (Score:4, Funny)
Ummm... can you explain the downside?
Soko
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Yes, this is the ramjet guy (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet [wikipedia.org]
IECs (Score:5, Interesting)
About the $200 mil, apparently the power output of these scales as something like the 7th or 9th power of the radius of the device (don't quote me on these numbers), so while the prototypes tested so far produce piddling amounts of power, not nearly break-even, they supposedly confirmed the principles, and the $200 mil model should be big enough to be power-positive. I really hope Google decides to sponsor this. I mean, if they can spend $1.6b on Youtube, what's $200m?
Re:IECs (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't in the ATX Power supply manufacturing busininess either, but that didn't stop them designing a new one.
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Hostile Google AI Takeover?! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hostile Google AI Takeover?! (Score:4, Funny)
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His company has no website? (Score:3, Interesting)
Published Papers by Dr. Robert W. Bussard (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion." [science.gov]
Shane ;)
(yes, I'm shamelessly publishing links to my servers for all the Slashdot community to hit. After all, they have to have some reason to keep me employed!
I wonder if they call him (Score:3, Funny)
an interesting question (Score:4, Funny)
fusion with boron-11 (Score:4, Informative)
See the p-B^11 fuel cycle [wikipedia.org], too.
Moron at eleven.
Re:Oil companies (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Oil companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not. Oil companies know even better than you do that their oil wells are not going to last forever, and they want to be ready when they do start drying up by already being leaders in the next power resource. They are generally not stupid nor abnormally immoral. They do want to make a buck, but they are good at thinking long-term.
(Note: I am talking about most large oil companies other than Exxon/Mobil. Those guys in particular seem a little on the retarded side.)
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Oil companies defend the status quo (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not.
This reminded me of one Native American method for buffalo hunting:
In this analogy, the oil companies "leading the alternative energy charge" are analogous to the young men getting the herd to follow them. The oil companies lead the charge away from the truly revolutionary breakthroughs, towards business models where they're still relevant.
I met a physicist some 4 years ago who was working on his doctorate, on Cold Fusion-style research. At the time said he'd have to modify one of his papers to acknowledge some tokamak-fusion research that'd just been published - the experiment turned out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it. Just finished his doctorate a month or two ago...
Scientific revolutions [emory.edu] come in waves. Right now we have the old-guard (established energy companies & rogue energy terrorists [whitehouse.gov]) fighting to suppress the coming paradigm shift. They'll lose eventually, and we'll all be better off.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know enough to be able to evaluate the ideas. But from what I know of Tokamak research, it deserves every helping of scorn that he heaps upon it. It has been a ridiculously expensive failure. About as useful for advancing the cause of fusion power as string theory has been for advancing our understanding of physics.
This post of yours is very elegantly written and completely trashes Mr. Bussard. In its way, it's exactly the same level of attack as he levels against other fusion research.
In my m
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Insightful)
I just love it when people say "I dont know crap about x" - and then proceed to have an opinion on x anyhow, and act as if it should be taken as a valid one.
No - it's exactly *different* than Mr Bussard's attack, in that it lays out his specific failures and behaviors that trip the 'kook' flag. Whereas Mr Bussard's attack is nothing but mudflinging and blaming unspecified others in the goverment for not funding his research - even though he cannot (or will not) actually demonstrate he has something worth funding. (This is, in and of itself, reason to apply the 'kook' label.)
I just knew this petulant and ignorant whine would show up [whiny voice] But the promised, they did! They did![/whiny voice] Grow the fuck up - R&D isn't amenable to precise scheduling and prediction, especially when working at the frontiers of science and technology.
At best he deserves a couple of thousand for a few copies for a paper ready to be submitted for peer review. Demanding money, and refusing to supply the data required to determine what that funding is to be used for is ludicrous.
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Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody outside of science fiction writers and science reporters in the press said that fusion was going to be easy. It's been clear from the get-go that it's an incredibly hard field to develop. What was said by the people in the field was along the lines of "if we start seriously working on this now, it'll pay off in a matter of decades". Had we actually put the money in at the time, we'd be further along today.
But we didn't. Those "huge budgets" that people claim fusion sucks up? They're a pittance, and in almost all cases, the cost is spread among several nations. Expressed as a fraction of those countries' annual budget, fusion R&D is a minor expense. Moreover, political bickering (the bane of any multi-national project) has gotten in the way more than once, most recently with the question of where to build the ITER project.
Simply put, we're barely trying, and given how monumentally hard it is to build a working fusion reactor, that minimal effort has had predictable results. Saying "X years ago, they said we'd have fusion" assumes that R&D happens magically, without any human element.
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Re:Pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it isn't. But I regard with great suspicion anybody involved in mainstream fusion research who doesn't want anybody to pursue anything else. Tunnel vision happens everywhere. And while it seems that Mr. Bussard may suffer from it, I have no doubt that people who have their entire careers wrapped up in magnetic confinement have it even worse.
If the original poster had given even a shred of a reason why the idea wouldn't work, especially if (s)he gave a pointer or to to some pages describing why it wouldn't work in detail, I'd be all impressed and credulous. As it is, Mr. Bussards idea of confinement with electric forces doesn't seem particularly ridiculous to me, and it seems like it deserves to be on an equal footing for funding.
I stand by my claim that the original poster engaged in exactly the same kind of mudflinging and ad-hominem attack that Mr. Bussard did and from the shield of 'Anonymous Coward' no less. Neither of them deserve any respect for engaging in such attacks, though I submit that the anonymous coward was being much nastier for trashing an individual rather than an idea. But I also see no evidence presented that his idea stands a lower chance of working than the magnetic confinement ideas that have been being pursued for all these years.
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Re:Pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the Slashdot moderators appear to have found your handwaving and strawman rather clever.
If you do not find at least plausible his explanation of a hold on publishing and loss of funding due to alternative energy research being cut from the Navy budget due to spending pressures on R&D coinciding with the Iraq war, without evidence to the contrary, you are simply unreasonable. Do you really believe, having provided no evidence to this effect, that this man is attempting to swindle potential investors out of $200 million? This borders on libel.
You imply Bussard is engaging in deception, yet you offer no evidence of this other than handwaving and your science fiction strawman. Do you assume everyone is attempting to deceive you until proven otherwise in a controlled experiment? Did you even watch the presentation of the story you are commenting on? I doubt it.
What are these "results" you claim he purports to have found but can't reproduce? The claims he makes of his tests are not remarkable. You appear to present the issue in a purposefully antagonistic manner. He does not, to my knowledge, claim to have demonstrated a fusion device that would be capable of producing greater useable energy than is required to power it. And in this sense, there is nothing remarkable about what he claims to have found in his results. Certainly nothing paranormal.
And what on earth should Randi have to do with this? Randi is an excellent foil for psychics and dowsers, but he is not a physicist.
And he is not asking for $200 million for himself or his company. If this is the form funding to see these tests realize took, he would accept this, but as he says, he is an old man and is tired. He only wants to see his vision realized, even if that means it is carried out by another company or by another country.
And infact in the proposal he presents, the first step involves only $2 million, and is intended to reproduce the results of earlier tests in an environment where engineering, and lab control and instrumentation are fully funded in order to improve the reliabilitty of the results. This is more than the paltry prize offered by Randi. Although I fail, again, to see why Randi would have any interest in verifying unremarkable claims of nuclear fusion.
This is not some nut playing with magnets and tesla coils in his garage.
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Hi its me, the pot (Score:4, Insightful)
Your criticisms are mostly ad hominem, e.g. his "Incessant groveling for cash" - he does not grovel incessantly, in fact in the Google lecture he admits to giving up on the search for funding. Should he have just packed his bags when his funding was cut (it should be noted that it was all navy energy research funding, not him in particular)? He also defends the malfunction quite reasonably (it was one not a series as you suggest), and considering the supposedly successful prototype was only tested a few times at useful power levels, small amounts of data are also not unreasonable.
If he's a quack, so be it. But let's actually add to the debate by citing facts, not armchair opinions that essentially a love of science fiction == hack (Remember how people used to dream about a better and wonderful future? That used to actually be a fairly american quality and he is of that generation).
I don't try and discredit ID proponents just by calling them assholes. I point to the fact that it is a scientifically sterile non-theory and that there is a wide body of evidence supporting evolution. He wasn't working alone in his basement, he had a pretty impressive team (Jim Benson immedialely hired them after funding dissapeared) that would have complained publicly if he was lying about his results. Treat his science as you would any other, and fight it with evidence, or restrain your tongue.
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The presentation in a nutshell (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to prove that you're not full of it why not rebuild the last machine you built, which would be relatively cheap, to recreate the results you got the day before you had to close the labs down?
- Well the $200M will build ones which will be 50x better, one of them will be a dodecahedron.
Why is no-one funding you?
- No-one thinks outside the box. If you let me choose who goes on the panel who gets to decide whether it's worthwhile I'll pick some people who can think outside the box. There are lots of people in China and other countries who can think outside the box, and if I don't get funding here in America I'll give my patents to China for free and you wouldn't want that. (I'm not making this up, he literally threatened the audience with giving the tech to China for free)
How do you get the helium waste products out?
- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
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not quite (Score:4, Insightful)
You might be right tough that he is a kook as I did not hear him addres the biggest problem with IEC: bremsstrahlung. Every time you have to accelerate a ion it will leak some radiation in the form of bremsstarahlung (braking radiation). The ions you want to fuse each have to pass the center of the well a couple of thousand times (depending on density and temperature) just to have the chance to meet another ion close enough for fusion to occur. Pump more energy into it, and more radiation leaks away and you will never be able to break even.
The other thing that is fishy is the strange reason he gave why they did not publish for 11 years. If you don't publish essentially you are not doing science, even after the embargo they did not release the floodgates and publish all the articles they had written over time but could not publish. He is promising a 100+ paper, but appearantly it is not ready yet. WTF? you had 11 for that and one year you knew for certain what situation you'd be in now. On october 1 they sould not have been doing last minute experiments, but been submitting all their articles to every journal respectable enough. They would have had a much better chance to get funding with a couple of influential papers to their name. In science it's publish or perish, and they chose not to publish.
The other countries threat is hollow too: if they had really cared about the subject, they would have had no problem moving to another country just to keep their lab going. He is still here...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How many rocket launch facilities are there "around your town"? Zero, right? Guess they're still sci-fi too...
If by "around my town" you instead meant "in the world", I direct your attention to the JET project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JET [wikipedia.org]
And it's (not yet build) follow up, ITER:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [wikipedia.org]
Both use the toroidal design. JET is even older than I am, and has alrea
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, you can get a self-sufficient reaction to work quite easily in a small lab rig. The hard part is combining "self-sufficient" with "multiple megawatts of power" and "cheaper than oil". You need all three at the same time before you've got a viable fusion power plant. JET was aimed at the second one. ITER's an attempt to get the first two to work at once. We still have to crack the third one - it's not enough to produce more power than you put in, you also have to produce more money than you put in. Converting expensive materials into cheap power is not practical in a capitalist economy, which is why the lab rigs are no use in the real world.
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Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Insightful)
You are obviously not a researcher and have never attempted to get research funding.
If you have something that you can prove will work, to a layman, you'll still have to fight for funding. If you can't prove ahead of time that your experiment will be a success, buy a lottery ticket instead. Better odds.
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Re:Pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
James Randi is not a trained diviner, psychic oder medium either. In order to assess the question, if something works, it is not necessary to understand how it works. If Bussard won't indeed produce any verifiable experiments then he's just not doing science.
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