Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded

pln2bz writes "Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, has received $600k in funding, and a promise of phased payments of $10 million if scientific feasibility can be demonstrated to productize Lerner's focus fusion energy production device. Unlike the Tokamak, focus fusion does not require the plasma to be stable, does not produce significant amounts of dangerous radiation, directly injects electrons into the power grid without the need for turbines and would only cost around $300k to manufacture a generator. Lerner's inspiration for the technology is based upon an interpretation for astrophysical Herbig-Haro jets that agrees with the Electric Universe explanation."

Electric universe

Has the electric universe theory made any headway in offering a viable alternative to currently accepted cosmology? Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.

Re:Electric universe

Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.

Yep. Contrasting nicely with "dark matter" and "cosmic inflation" which are mainstream science based mainly on conjecture and magical thinking.

Re:Electric universe

Why not? String theorists are still around despite a complete lack of verifiable findings. At this point, after decades of study, there's still no reason to believe that there will be a way of disproving the framework. Science these days is unfortunately as much about gathering funding as it is about actual science. In that environment crazy whack jobs have a bit of an advantage by seeming brilliant.

In terms of the matter at hand, does he have a PhD.? It's somewhat odd to refer to a scientist who has one without the title, and even more odd to have a device as significant as this without one. Of course, that assumes that it actually could be made to work in a reliable, safe, cost effective manner. It's definitely not there yet.

I really wish that I could take another view of this, but in a time where ID can be entertained by anybody as scientific when even at the most basic level it's problematic(As somebody else pointed out elsewhere an intelligent being would not design something as complicated as a person, complexity is just not the sign of a well designed anything), I'd be naive to believe otherwise.

That being said, there is also a lot of truly amazing work being done, unfortunately a lot of the most interesting, and potentially most useful, is being stymied for political, religious or social reasons.

Re:Electric universe

Dark matter and cosmic inflation may prove to be incorrect theories but to say they're illogical demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of these two theories.

The argument for dark matter, in its simpliest form, states that owing to the gravitational effects we observe in the universe there must be a lot of matter we can't measure. There's nothing "magical" about that.

Re:Electric universe

Your astroid field would be made of Baryonic matter. The current expectation is dark matter is non-baryonic. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon#Baryonic_matter [wikipedia.org]
So dark matter actually does not interact with the photon field.

Re:Electric universe

When I was doing my physics degree the big question was: Is dark matter WIMPS or MACHOs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or MAssive Compact Halo Objects). You're talking about MACHOs. Even if we can't see these objects, we do know where they must be, so if it was asteroid fields or dead stars of little black holes we can calculate how much light they would absorb and see the larger ones as they passed in front of stars, even if we couldn't see them individually. There have been many studies looking for them, but no evidence has been found. WIMPS have pretty much won that one. We've not seen any WIMPs either, but MACHOs are well understood so we know exactly what to look for so if it was them we'd expect to have seen the evidence.

All this is assuming dark matter really exists. I'm still still not wholly convinced. Basically all our long-distance measurements of gravity give the wrong answer. Even our longest distance solar-system probes (the Pinoeers) give the wrong answer, though that data isn't really good enough to be wholly convincing. Are all these answers wrong because there is hidden hidden matter (and energy, woo hoo!), or is GR just not a good enough approximation at those scales? Eric Lerner thinks it's all about plasmas.

Re:Electric universe

Translation: We have a pile of bullshit we're trying to sell, so we'll log into Slashdot as AC's and try a little astroturfing.

An as agent of the shill consortium I can confirm that this is exactly right. Yesterday we got our check for $600 million. We considered running the experiment. We considered instead using the cash to lobby big business and government. We considered spending it on a big party. Then we realised that all the big players with REAL influence are on Slashdot. So we hired an army of shills to spread the message with their evil talk of "mainstream science". But with your keen insight you saw straight through us. Foiled again :(

Re:Electric universe

Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.

The Chilean Government has put up $600,000 to see if any of that magical thinking can be applied to the real world.

And really, what's with all the cynicism?
At worst, someone else's government wasted some taxpayer dollars on science instead of market distorting business subsidies. At best, we have a revolutionary new source of electricity. Somewhere in the middle is the most likely possibility, namely that some bit of research turns out to be useful and can be applied elsewhere.

Re:Electric universe

The Chilean Government has put up $600,000 to see if any of that magical thinking can be applied to the real world.

Not necessarily a bad idea when you consider how much alchemy (not to mention much of early medicine) produced that could be applied to the real world. Science isn't about truth, it's about telling stories that are sufficiently close approximations to the truth that they can be useful. Alchemy, in spite of being largely nonsense, produced a lot of valid conclusions (although, sadly, not a method of transmuting elements) and it may be that the Electric Universe Theory falls into the same category.

Re:Electric universe

I agree, and it's got to be better than some of the things the US Army has invested millions of dollars in, like the "gay bomb".

Actually, the gay bomb was a good use of our tax money. Not just good... I'd go so far as to call it fabulous.

But seriously, I disagree with the logic here: justifying an idiotic use of money (crazy-ass fringe science research into fusion) by pointing to a more idiotic use of money (gay bombs). It's like arguing, "I'm gonna burn twenty-dollar bills. Why? Because it's far less wasteful than burning hundred-dollar bills."

Re:Electric universe

Nope... as far as I've been able to tell, the electric universe "theory" is still purely in the realm of pseudoscience, being touted by various internet quacks. Of course, many of its proponents also believe that the empirical scientific method is some sort of outdated relic of a bygone era, so I'm not really sure what sort of standard they should be judged by. I'm actually really curious about where CMEF, the organization which gave Eric Lerner the $600 million in funding, got its money from. Their website doesn't seem to have that info, although it looks like they're trying to raise private funds via the interweb.

In related news, $750,000 has been awarded to Gene Ray to create a source of renewable energy based on his "Time Cube" concept, and $1.5 million for research into improved fission reactor designs has been awarded to Ludwig Hansen, a.k.a. Archimedes Plutonium.

Re:Electric universe

Interestingly, the theories that might make this work have very little do to with the electric universe. Eric Lerner was doing some theoretical work looking in more detail at some aspects of cosmological plasma and got some inspiration from it - but we're talking about two separate things.

Unfortunately Eric Lerner keeps bringing the cosmological plasma thing up, he somehow got it into his head that associating his current work with that will make him more credible :/

Re:Electric universe

I don't know much about the electric universe theory. It probably is a load of crap, but still I like to laugh at the expense of anyone who is offended by those who dare to put forward alternatives to the "settled" theories of mainstream science. (Hah! I'm not afraid to use the phrase, so there.)

It's not the theories that we're opposed to, it's the approach. You're more than welcome to suggest that the entire universe was the result of God's Gargantuan Fart, and that interstellar space is composed of His Holy Flatulence through which electromagnetic waves propagate. I might think you're being silly, but I won't be offended by your theory. What I WOULD be offended by is your attempt to pervert the scientific method in order to try and "prove" your theory.

Another example: I'm not offended by creationists who use scripture to dispute evolution. If they want to believe some ancient manuscript instead of modern science, that's their call. But I AM offended when they pretend to disprove evolution by misquoting and misrepresenting the research of others, or by presenting their own asinine assumptions as if they were scientifically verifiable facts.

Exactly the right approach.

This is brilliant. $600k isn't a lot to some people, yet there's a tiny sliver of a chance that the guy is on to something. So he gets funding from a private institution who will be absolutely minted in the very unlikely circumstance that he's right. The odd $600k wouldn't even scratch the surface for more traditional avenues of research where the numbers are into the billions, so there's no real loss either.

Plus, the chances of me getting a backer for my "buttered toast and cat" turbine are much improved. Fantastic.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

Exactly my thought. ITER is costing US$ 9.3 billion. This costs 0.006% as much. If it is more than 0.006% as likely to work, then it's probably a good use of money.

Re: Exactly the right approach.

Exactly my thought. ITER is costing US$ 9.3 billion. This costs 0.006% as much. If it is more than 0.006% as likely to work, then it's probably a good use of money.

That reasoning works when you only consider one fringe idea. What happens if you try to fund *all* of them?

Re:Exactly the right approach.

Is it really enough for him to proceed on? At a big company it costs that much to keep 2 PhD's on a project for 1 year. Presumably this project would also have a large requirement for expensive hardware.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

Plus, the chances of me getting a backer for my "buttered toast and cat" turbine are much improved. Fantastic.

Don't even try, PETA will shut you down before you can get any serious headway. That's what happened with MIT's monkey-weasel-mulberry bush bomb.

Re:Exactly the right approach.

Yep, and it might be a good idea to repeat this with some other stuff that looks at least borderline credible. Bussard's "polywell" fusion device comes to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell [wikipedia.org]

Both Lerner's and Bussard's approach are not exactly proven, but they seem believable enough that investing a few millions (as opposed to billions in Tokamak research) seems worthwile.

New page 1

It's just a bit harder to take it seriously when the HTML title of the page is still set to "New Page 1"

Developmental Stages.

Congratulations, Mr. Lerner. You've been promoted from crackpot to fraud. Here's your paycheck.

summary

It looks like the tech talk is slashdotted, but if memory serves (and I'm not a physicist, so my understanding is fuzzy at best) the idea is that the device (which has some resemblance to a large spark plug) sits in a chamber of has a large electrical current applied and exploits a sequence of unstable states to produce a small ball of plasma where the fusion takes place. The reaction produces X-rays and a directed stream of charged particles. The X-rays are collected by a sort of multilayer onion-like solar panel that converts them to electricity, and the charged particles also get converted directly to electricity. The device can be relatively simple since there's no need for steam turbines. A steady stream of electricity can be produced by repeating the reaction over and over, and storing the output in big capacitors (and part of the resulting energy is used to initiate the next pulse).

Re:summary

Yeah, that's close enough. Although, personally, I think once you had one working you could make 20 of them and do a 20-to-20 connection with some high power switching (I believe diamond switches are required anyway) so the output of many units is cumulated on the input of one unit, with no capacitor bank in the way. That way you get really fast cycling of pulses.. much like a piston engine.

Good technology, bad researcher

What is Slashdot's fascination with this guy? Seems like an article pops up every 3 months. As an undergraduate, I had the pleasure *cough* of working with Mr. Lerner when he came to use our plasma focus to do a p-B11 study for JPL. To get the required diborane gas, a nasty toxin, we had to evaporate decaborane, another nasty toxin. In the end, we had a mess to clean up in our chamber and an academic mess when Mr. Lerner embellished (or flatly misrepresented) the results of the experiment in publication. We had to lobby to get our names off the paper, but there's still a few copies of it floating around out there. Plasma focus technology has been around since the 60s (see the works of Mather and Filipov). They make cute neutron and x-ray sources, but not much more practical for fusion power production than these "bubble fusion" designs. I believe there's still a lot to be learned from the plasma focus, and I'm glad that someone is willing to pay for further research. And if we get p-B11 fusion working, that would be a great step forward too. But I wouldn't give this guy a nickel if his head were on fire, let alone $600,000.

Ford Focus Fusion

Sounds interesting, but I wish they'd named it after something other than a couple of Ford car models. Ford Fusion, Ford Focus, Focus Fusion?

If they'd wanted credibility, they shoulda gone for something like the Yaris Matrix or maybe the Fit Element.