ITER Delayed, Scaled Back

[Robthebob]

Geez guys, calm down.

While the bitter sweet taste of irony is great and all when hundreds of scientists through out the 60, 70 years, all of their hopes and dreams, along with billions upon billions of dollars spent gets beaten by a group of scientists who've been working on the problem for less than 1/3 the amount of the time and spent less than 1/100 the amount of money spent, oh the taste should almost be a feeling only the most hardcore drugs can produce.

Okay, okay, enough humor. On a more serious note, I think we ought give polywell a chance. It doesnt cost much money to figure out if it will work; I'm against wasteful spending, but even to the opponents of polywell, they cant pinpoint if it will or will not work. To us there's a pretty good chance, as Dr. Nebel already announced, we will know in two years. Wait it out, dont fight, dont throw money at it, just wait, let the people who know what they're doing do their work, and we will see.

However, I dont know about the others, but if it does work, I promise, I promise I will personally never let it go. All the magnetic confinement proponents that I know will always get made fun of every single time I get a chance to do so, because I'm a little bit of an ass. Also, it's because they gave and still give us a hard time.

[chrismb]

Geez guys, calm down.

Seems calm to me..maybe my 'calm' threshold is too high (which may explain a good deal!).

While the bitter sweet taste of irony is great and all when hundreds of scientists through out the 60, 70 years, all of their hopes and dreams, along with billions upon billions of dollars spent gets beaten by a group of scientists who've been working on the problem for less than 1/3 the amount of the time and spent less than 1/100 the amount of money spent

So how about if an amateur comes along with a solution to the problem? What flavour of irony would that come out as?

The thing is, prior to the 20th century's motivations to nationalise and industralise the exploitation of technology for military advantage, ALL scientific discovery and engineering was done by private individuals, a fact that today's well-funded, and often bloated, government supported Institutes might want you to forget so as to remain in power as the High Priests of Science unto whom one must pay homage and get little bits of explicitly worthless paper qualifications to show one's fealty to their power.

Yet those people in those places are weighed down by a pressing need to generate the 'correct' answers as set by the political mandates of the day, and also by their gravy-train ride of career progression requiring safe, ponderous, near-infinitesimal step-wise evolution of the extant dogma of the day and, thus, the rejection of any ideas that do not immediately appear to fit that status quo of expectation (which, in turn, tends to reject all new novel ideas because they would be 'not obvious' ideas, else if they were obvious then they'd've been done before!). This is not a recipe for the successful development and rapid implementation of a game-changing technology!

[MSimon]

The thing is, prior to the 20th century's motivations to exploit technology for military advantage

I dunno. Da Vinci had patrons interested in his military ideas. And Roman engineering was pretty much military oriented.

And of course ship technology. Especially oared ships in ancient times.

And of course the first submarine - in the 1776 war - on the American side. Unsuccessful.

There never was a golden age when humans were not working out better, faster, cheaper, ways to kill and plunder each other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8MCl0bHVXo

I'd have to look up the sociology but I believe that even with all the killing going on the murder rates when we mostly had an intertribal culture were higher. i.e. these are the good old days.

The Plains Indians were not noble savages. They were just savages. Living in harmony with nature meant killing off rival tribes in order to have more nature to be in harmony with. Oh yeah. Take their women and enslave their children. Very popular pass times.

Say. Did I go off on a tangent again? Well I hope you have been entertained.

==

Chris,

Other than the above I agree with you.

BTW the military - being somewhat goal oriented tends to do science and technology better than places like DOE where they just want to do interesting stuff.

I think this was mentioned some where in terms of Gen. Grove and the atom bomb project.

[chrismb]

Oh, of course science and technology has always been exploited before as well, no question, but not with such a dedication and mercilessness that caused the political powers to seize control of science resarch in such a profound way. Perhaps I should have written;

"The thing is, prior to the 20th century's motivations to NATIONALISE and INDUSTRALISE the exploitation of technology for military advantage" (duly edited above)

I did not mean to indicate this hadn't been done before, it has always been a major driving force for science. However, there was something more systematic about hunting down 'blue skies' research to see what could be done, whereas before it was really more about taking advantage of new developments. We're now more back into the previous 'model' of science, letting private enterprise develop and propose the ideas before funding and commissioning, yet the emphasis is still on this 'bound', retained set of Institutes as the arbiters of what, or what should not, be pursued. So we've moved back towards the military powers looking out for, rather than commissioning, opportunities but without the freedom of thought, and opportunity to make suggestions, to make that model work optimally.

[Aero]

I'm thinking that the funding source controls the direction of the research. I'm sure we can all think of historical examples, but can we decide whether or not the examples were mainstream research or were they individual outliers? Some near turn-of-the-century examples that come to mind:

Robert Goddard
Thomas Edison -
Nicoli Tesla

None of them faced review committees numbering in the hundreds (or nearly that many). One determining factor may have been private money can't afford such large committees. On the other hand, who or what was funding aeronautical research during this time frame and what was that review process like? Does anyone think that the movie, "The Aviator," gave a true picture?

[MSimon]

The deal is that advances have always been haphazard with impediments.

Take electronics. Bucky Fuller thought that went faster because the general public hadn't a clue. Aeronautics went slower because the public had some idea and housing the slowest because everyone had ideas.

Nano-tech is moving right along because the implications are unknown. Bio-tech is slower because gene modification is scary. Nuke technology the same and worse because of big bombs.

[TallDave]

Necessity is the mother of invention, and nothing is ever quite as necessary as keeping the other guy from killing you.

Historically war has always been the rule rather than the exception. In terms of percentages of deaths from war, there is less war today than at any time in human history (and probably before; that frozen guy they dug out of a mountain had an arrow in his ribs). War has declined steadily since democracies started going liberal and generally stopped fighting other liberal democracies as they got richer and freer.

Oh, of course science and technology has always been exploited before as well, no question, but not with such a dedication and mercilessness that caused the political powers to seize control of science resarch in such a profound way.

Heh, pre-Enlightenment science barely existed as a concept, and what research there was tended to be considered state secrets, or repressed for religious/political reasons. Free inquiry is a very recent invention, and there are still places it isn't allowed (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

Historically the primacy of military necessity over all other considerations was always the rule, even before Archimedes was burning ships at sea with giant mirrors, and the side with better researchers often won battles because of superior technology. The Bronze Age started when some clever fellow discovered mixing tin and copper made weapons that were better than copper (which in turn had been found superior to stone), and ended when another clever fellow figured out how to make an even stronger metal that did a fine job of killing people armed with bronze. The West won at Lepanto mostly because European metallurgy and shipbuilding was superior to the Ottomans'.

[chrismb]

Necessity is the mother of invention, and nothing is ever quite as necessary as keeping the other guy from killing you.

I think this is the key difference. Prior to 20th century, even after the invention of the rifle, you could still gain battle with pitchforks and some crafted tree-trunks into clubs or bow-and-arrows. Technology, for sure - science, no, not really.

But once we unleashed the world of chemistry during the previous few hundred years, so explosives and the materials sciences that aided the miltary meant that hand-to-hand fighting with pitchforks alone was no longer an option to win battles. These are sciences - chemistry, nuclear physics, aeronautics - and they did not originate with the military. This is my point - no military man said 'right, I need to sit down and do some science to get military advantage', instead they said 'right, what science can I take advantage of to gain military advantage' and they had to turn to folks who developed scientific knoweldge out of their own, pure interests. That is, up to the 20th century at which point they said something different; 'right, the enemy is employing people to come up with crazy ideas and they expolit the ones that work out, so I'd better do the same or I'll get left behind'. In fact, that not only was the process, it actually became a strategy to bankrupt the USSR whilst the US went all-out [supposedly] developing military space technologies. We don't have that latter view [much] any more, it's too costly, but, as you say, it did prove necessary for a large period of the 20th century for the sake of perceived survival reasons. To fall behind on fundamental science may've caused all manner of issues in the balance of power. But we're not there anymore and no-one wants to commit that much cash to maintaining the development of such random ideas anymore, yet we are still stuck with some of the basic mechanics of that process, namely extended committees who review these things. They used to just see which stuff was working out, now they have to decide who gets the cash.

The only exception to my case above that I can think of, of a military man doing science himself directly for the purpose of fulfilling his vocation, was Frank Whittle. Of course, that story is well-told. The RAF saw no value in his 'jet engine' so allowed him to publish it as a private patent, the maintenance fee of which he could not afford so it lapsed. I am sure the Germans were all too grateful for Whittle's patent disclosure....Here, then, is an example that the military cannot even hold on to ideas generated within, let alone develop and spot which ones need the support. Generally, they expect to see and support stuff which is beyond 'proof of concept' - that is, after the 'science' is already done.

So I guess I am discriminating where the military promote the technological development of extant science, as now and prior to 20th century, but it is private individuals with pure dreams of scientific discovery (or, sometime, fame and wealth!) that come up with the science. Just look at Polywell - did Bussard think 'y'know, our ships need a fusion power source' or did he think 'I'd like to make a fusion power station that works'. Admittedly I'm guessing it was the latter, but the Navy's interest in the former then provided the motivation to make the suggestion of value to ship propulsion.

The Navy did not, and won't, issue a contract that says something like 'Contract XYZ; to take your time coming up with some fresh ideas'. It sounds absurd to even suggest that! Yet that is what 'real scientists' do with their own time and resources, and somewhat characterises the 'scientific process' and allows you to identify when it is actually happening.

[Betruger]

Heh, pre-Enlightenment science barely existed as a concept, and what research there was tended to be considered state secrets, or repressed for religious/political reasons. Free inquiry is a very recent invention, and there are still places it isn't allowed (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

I suspect you mean it in a big picture perspective.. But the Ionian period certainly was science in bloom, IIRC.

[MSimon]

The Navy did not, and won't, issue a contract that says something like 'Contract XYZ; to take your time coming up with some fresh ideas'.

The US Navy does have a Blue Sky Dept. that is rather well funded (as those things go). But it is a situation where he Navy pays for development rather than thinking.

But that merely amounts to an X-Prize for x.

In all this though it is rather hard to separate all the threads because they are interwoven.

[chrismb]

In all this though it is rather hard to separate all the threads because they are interwoven.

Sorry. The key thesis I was trying to run with that join up my contributions to this topic is that these projects, whether ITER or polywell or jet engines, need innovation - and innovation ONLY comes from individuals with ideas. It doesn't come from committees. It doesn't come from funding bodies. It doesn't come from any sort of top-heavy hierarchy. Just plain-old bright-spark-thinking-over-your-breakfast-cereal type innovation. I think ITER has lost its way for this reason - a lack of opportunity for individuals to innovate due to an excess self-induced momentum of a clumsy elephant trampling over the small green shoots of elegant objectives.

[MSimon]

In all this though it is rather hard to separate all the threads because they are interwoven.

Sorry. The key thesis I was trying to run with that join up my contributions to this topic is that these projects, whether ITER or polywell or jet engines, need innovation - and innovation ONLY comes from individuals with ideas. It doesn't come from committees. It doesn't come from funding bodies. It doesn't come from any sort of top-heavy hierarchy. Just plain-old bright-spark-thinking-over-your-breakfast-cereal type innovation. I think ITER has lost its way for this reason - a lack of opportunity for individuals to innovate due to an excess self-induced momentum of a clumsy elephant trampling over the small green shoots of elegant objectives.

OK. I get your point now. Totally agree.

Classic case in point is the ITER ELM problem. Known for 20 years. A fix was not designed in to the machine and there were no provisions made for some idea to come. So they are attempting to squeeze in a fix.

More than once I have told customers that too much money is as bad and maybe worse than too little. In the first case you fail - but at low cost. In the second case you fail at high cost. The sweet spot is just a little short of what would make the project easy. People then get creative.

As a consultant I often got called in to fix wrecks. When my boss would tell me - what ever it costs, how ever many hours a day you have to put in - do it. The brute force method. In my usual insouciant manner I ignored their entreaties and their efforts to fill my pocket book and went about my business as I saw fit. Usually doing things in 1/2 the "impossible" time and at less than 1/3 the estimated cost. Of course until they got used to me I was one scary dude. After a while my favorite company would just assign me to wrecks and ask me what I wanted to do.

But I have never been a team player in the usual sense. I would die (soul wise) at a place like ITER or more likely be fired. In places like that boat rockers (why don't we do something completely different as a side project - this will never work) are never welcome.

I hate committee work, and meetings. And I used to never go to them.

[TallDave]

Prior to 20th century, even after the invention of the rifle, you could still gain battle with pitchforks and some crafted tree-trunks into clubs or bow-and-arrows. Technology, for sure - science, no, not really.

Generally you needed considerably more than that if you wanted to win, at least by the time the Roman Empire was established.

There was quite a bit of military-controlled research before the 20th; it may have actually been the majority of all research. The English longbow was a huge technological achievement in its heyday, as was the crossbow. Both were heavily controlled by the state, as were such things as trebuchets, siege towers, ballistae, and catapults -- all of which required some fairly sophisticated state-subsidized engineering research to develop. And of course cannonry has been a driving force in metallurgy since the first cannon was cast.

[TallDave]

Heh, pre-Enlightenment science barely existed as a concept, and what research there was tended to be considered state secrets, or repressed for religious/political reasons. Free inquiry is a very recent invention, and there are still places it isn't allowed (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

I suspect you mean it in a big picture perspective.. But the Ionian period certainly was science in bloom, IIRC.

In some sense, yes, though of course the Ionians were a tiny fraction of the world's population so "barely existed" still applies. As some of the first rationalists they certainly laid the foundation for science, and figured out quite a bit of mathematical theory, but the scientific method wasn't established until the Middle Ages, when Muslims began using experimentation as a method. And that's when the concept of "scientific research" as we understand it was really born.

[MSimon]

Heh, pre-Enlightenment science barely existed as a concept, and what research there was tended to be considered state secrets, or repressed for religious/political reasons. Free inquiry is a very recent invention, and there are still places it isn't allowed (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

I suspect you mean it in a big picture perspective.. But the Ionian period certainly was science in bloom, IIRC.

In some sense, yes, though of course the Ionians were a tiny fraction of the world's population so "barely existed" still applies. As some of the first rationalists they certainly laid the foundation for science, and figured out quite a bit of mathematical theory, but the scientific method wasn't established until the Middle Ages, when Muslims began using experimentation as a method. And that's when the concept of "scientific research" as we understand it was really born.

I did a bit of research into this when interest in all things Muslim was in full flower and if the Muslims ever did much experimentation it was squelched when the school of faith won out over the school of reason.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... berty.html

The more sordid the Islamic present seems, the more we are told of the glories of the Islamic past. And the most glorious of the glories of Islam, the most enlightened of its enlightenments, are the "Islamic science" and "Islamic philosophy" of the Golden Age.

So what does Islamic law say about this science and this philosophy? According to Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368), they are unlawful, serious affronts to Islam, a form of apostasy. Apologists for Islam in the West brag about the "Islamic science" and "Islamic philosophy" that their accomplices in the Islamic world condemn.

Let me add that I believe TallDave is no apologist for the current state of Islam but is merely mistaken or his evidence is only partial.

Causes and effects are inadmissible, according to al-Ghazali, because causes limit the absolute freedom of Allah to bring about whatever events he wills. Effects are brought about, not by causes, but by the direct will of Allah.

The article is a good source for further research.