Rider's thesis advisor was Lawrence Lidsky, who himself was plenty down on fusion of all kinds, not just Polywell; he wrote a very pessimistic paper, "The Trouble With Fusion", published in 1983, over a decade before Bussard's testimony. I have no doubt but that it colored his subsequent views on fusion, and possibly Rider's as well, something I wrote about late last year. Ligon's assumption that Lidsky was simply out for territorial revenge therefore seems odd; Lidsky himself had stuck a far bigger knife into tokamak fusion years earlier. (The former MIT professor had been part of that school's Plasma Fusion Center labs for many years.)You want to know why Dr. Bussard was embargoed by the Navy against publishing? The answer is a major pissing contest between the group funding him and somebody in the Office of Naval Research. You want to know who was funding Todd Rider as he pursued his Masters Thesis? Look at the Acknowledgements in his 1994 Masters' Thesis, which states, and I quote, "The author is partially owned and operated by a graduate fellowship from the Office of Naval Research."
Ask yourself how a recent EE grad, new to plasma physics, comes up with the idea to tackle an entire field of fusion physics? Does he do this entirely on his own, or does a sponsor suggest it, and provide some guidance? I'm not criticizing this practice ... I would guess this is the way most masters theses go ... you find a sponsor and work on something that interests them and that they will know how assist on and can judge.
Now realize that 1994 is the year Dr. Bussard gave some extremely damning testimony to Congress regarding the fusion research programs in the DOE, earning himself some highly motivated opponents, at least one of whom was causing trouble from ONR.
If you ask Dr. Bussard directly about what the thinks of Dr. Rider, he will very probably tell you EXACTLY what he thinks. I'm not going to repeat it here.
The polite version is that Rider selects his conditions to support his conclusions. And he doesn't listen when you try to explain how IEF machines actually work.
The embargo was, at least in part, to prevent Dr. Bussard from responding to Rider, due to the infighting going on within the Navy. I don't know the exact circumstances or motivations ... probably would make good political intrigue.
In fact, while he apparently does not like to refer to him by name, Dr. Bussard has basically addressed all of Rider's objections. He has not ignored them. He tries to point out the way he believes the machines operate. I was witness, in fact, in 1995-96, to Dr. Bussard thinking Rider had actually found a fatal flaw in the idea. He dissappeared in the office for a couple of days of furious analysis and calculation, and emerged about the most jubilant I'd ever seen him. He'd discovered that not only was Rider wrong, but the machine itself had held the built-in cure all along, and would work better than the original model had predicted. I believe that was the edge thermalization process that "anneals" out any tendency the device has to Maxwellianize.
Frankly, I wish Dr. Bussard and Dr. Krall would take off the gloves and rebut the critics for all they're worth. Maybe, if they can get enough funding to hire somebody who can do better graphics for their papers, you'll even take them seriously.
If it is impossible to fuse aneutronic fuels, why are they listed in the NRL Plasma Formulary? I certainly hope, and strongly suspect, that is wrong. But I know darned well the IEF approach can burn deuterium, or DT. That, alone, is reason to do the next stage of research, WB7 and WB8.
Believe Dr. Rider for any reason you wish, if you wish to. Analyze his math and assumptions about operating conditions, or judge the graphics in his papers.
I'll know which side is right when I see the test results. But we will all be poorer if the tests are never done because Rider has better graphics in his papers.
Ligon is also slightly wrong in the source of his quote (the "owned and operated" quip actually comes from Rider's 1995 Physics of Plasma paper), but as the two seem to be contemporaneous, it's largely immaterial.
We still don't know the whole story behind the scenes, and it would be useful to know what role, if any, L.L. Wood played in this fracas. Recognizing that unearthing this bit of trivia may be generating more heat than light, I exit the floor.
