Talk-Polywell.org

"The cure to all this is engineering. Can you make an artifact from the knowledge base?" I have come to think this is very important to the "philosophy of science." It seems to me that every time something that has been engineered is used, that use is (besides being useful) a repeat of a repeatable ...

It would be great if both FF and polywell work out so well that we really have to worry about the comparative economics of building and using focus fusion devices and polywells. Tis a consumation devoutly to be wished.

Last week I attended the 2011 SC conference. There were (at least) two papers that dealt with a 'production' supercomputer fusion simulation code known as GTC. my quick web serach (googling 'Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code'): http://www.nersc.gov/research-and-development/benchmarking-and-workload-characte...

...or maybe so. Momentum is conserved in a collsion, but not kinetic energy, right?

"...but due to the Lorentz force, the particles will tend to turn at right angles to the magnetic field, so some linear motion along the toroid length will tend to form and this will establish a direction which will cascade till most of the plasma has this behavior. It would be difficult and probabl...

This description gives a much better quick understanding of an idea I posted a while back which didn't seem to attract any attention. I was trying to describe, I think, this same idea in a message I posted in February of 2008. http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=584&postdays=0&postorder=...

I have been thinking about this type of simulation, and I am mentally stuck on one thing: Are you accounting for the propagation of the magentic fields generated by the moving charges (and the electric fields associated with the moving charges) or are you assuming the propagation speed to be infinit...

some people at my work are experimenting with couch DB for dealing with datasets, results of algorithms run on datasets, etc. It's a RESTful database, and it provides reasonable structure with url access. It doesn't have the rigidity of a relational database and it gives more structure and ease of a...

I'm going to reveal my ignorance here. When I think of the polywell, I think mostly in terms of particles, not plasma. I think of the magnetically shielded grid as a fairly constant environmental entity (a simplification which I realize can lead to trouble). I then visualize electrons moving around ...

Due to recent (not entirely desired) career jumps, I have landed at an excellent spot in Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque. I'm a computer scientist (master's UNC-CH) with an EE/Math/CS Degree from Duke. Most of my career has been in data visualization, including a fair amount of supercomputer sim...

I should also throw "modified gravity" theories into the contender list for future scientifc revolutions. There are probably others, but, as I implied in the last post, I'm just trying to throw this out there.

Last week I was reading some interesting stuff (likely familiar to many here) about Kuhn and his book about scientific revolutions. here's one line about it (a course outline from a professor at Emory) http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html Some key points related to this discussion seem to be: 1) N...

That Wired article is from 2003. I haven't noticed diamond prices dipping noticeably in the past 7 years.

Perhaps turbulence is a chaotic system, in the mathematical sense of "chaos." If so, it might be possible to "control" a turbulent system by finding an attractor which is beneficial, i.e. a situation where flow is smooth, and then figuring out how to supply inputs to keep the system in that attracto...

In Analog magazine, where I and I suspect others first came to know about IEC fusion through Tom Ligon's articles, Jeffrey Koostra penned an "Alternate View" column which basically took the position that cold fusion is now established as a phenomenon beyond all reasonable doubt, and also that it's d...