The essay didn't suggest that a fusion reactor would become usefully operational, but rather that fusion research continued.
I was struck instead by the lack of common sense or general engineering training in the remarkable plan to, "make it as close to the allowed threshold as we can" or the mismanagement that LLNL actually followed that…
The essay didn't suggest that a fusion reactor would become usefully operational, but rather that fusion research continued.
I was struck instead by the lack of common sense or general engineering training in the remarkable plan to, "make it as close to the allowed threshold as we can" or the mismanagement that LLNL actually followed that absurd advice. I also felt a disconnect between the beauty of the Gibbs phenomenon and how its overshoot would cause the pressure excess as compared to unwittingly adding 9% (or 18%) additional margin compared to the ideal square wave.
It was fun to read in the Wikipedia article linked within that in the early 1900s none other than Michelson failed to understand the Gibbs phenomenon.
Thanks for clarifying my wrong assumption. It does read as research experiment within the article's thought experiment. I do stand by my hubris comment. Just gave a bad example. As for Michelson, he was probably prone to a bit of confirmation bias ;-)
I confirm that "as close as possible" was (and has been, for the last 30 years or so) a reasonable thing to do: it would have helped to fight plasma instabilities. But "_possible_" is the key word here: its meaning depends on speaker's grasp of functional analysis or just analysis.
hi Paul, I'm no fusion expert. What's the scenario you were imagining in the essay? That is, what's the cell that breaks under pressure? Does it relate to the link to LLNl's inertial confinement method?
I wonder if this essay might work better with a equity trading algorithm initiating a crash that drives a world-wide depression and associated wars.
Thanks Paul. That article about Arthur Ashkin was fun to read. I remember as a student in the 1980s reading about the optical tweezers and thinking how wonderful that concept was. It came around the same time (for me) as the scanning tunneling microscope, so lots of exciting stuff. It continues these days too!
I had never heard the term Ashkin pressure. I have never heard of radiation-driven implosion for nuclear weapons being related to it, but now I can see it might. And it must be complicated! Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ashkin has this:
Ashkin ... obtained his BS degree in physics at Columbia University in 1947. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied nuclear physics. This was during the era of the Manhattan Project, and Ashkin's brother, Julius Ashkin, was successfully part of it. This led to Arthur Ashkin's introduction to Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and others who were at Cornell at the time.[1][19] He received his PhD degree at Cornell University in 1952,[20] and then went to work for Bell Labs...
So does "Ashkin" pressure, as you used it, refer to Julius or Arthur?
The Schott glass article reminded me of a quip a manager at LLNL said to me in the 1990s (?), "This project has sucked up all the XYZ glass available worldwide for the next N years." I don't remember the values of XYZ or N.
As a non-mathematician and amateur (in the true sense of the word) of the epistemic (not necessarily the technological can of worms) fruits of the scientific method, my fundamental grasp at this level of all this is admittedly tenuous. But my perspective also allows (compels?) me to view in particular the mathematics (perhaps as a 'cope' ;-) as a near religion, revealed partly by the decades-long failure of such as string 'theory' for certain mathematicians to achieve much other than job security and generally inscrutable ecstasies of 'beautiful' math. And there is also Godel shouting into the void that consistency and completeness are mutually exclusive properties of any axiomatic system with sufficient expressive power. But math does work beautifully at most human scales, just not so precisely predictive at the smallest ones, which our evolutionary infatuation with symmetry compels us to wish for. I fear that AGI may become the Deity in this religion with a priesthood of techies. But I digress...
The essay didn't suggest that a fusion reactor would become usefully operational, but rather that fusion research continued.
I was struck instead by the lack of common sense or general engineering training in the remarkable plan to, "make it as close to the allowed threshold as we can" or the mismanagement that LLNL actually followed that absurd advice. I also felt a disconnect between the beauty of the Gibbs phenomenon and how its overshoot would cause the pressure excess as compared to unwittingly adding 9% (or 18%) additional margin compared to the ideal square wave.
It was fun to read in the Wikipedia article linked within that in the early 1900s none other than Michelson failed to understand the Gibbs phenomenon.
Thanks for clarifying my wrong assumption. It does read as research experiment within the article's thought experiment. I do stand by my hubris comment. Just gave a bad example. As for Michelson, he was probably prone to a bit of confirmation bias ;-)
I confirm that "as close as possible" was (and has been, for the last 30 years or so) a reasonable thing to do: it would have helped to fight plasma instabilities. But "_possible_" is the key word here: its meaning depends on speaker's grasp of functional analysis or just analysis.
hi Paul, I'm no fusion expert. What's the scenario you were imagining in the essay? That is, what's the cell that breaks under pressure? Does it relate to the link to LLNl's inertial confinement method?
I wonder if this essay might work better with a equity trading algorithm initiating a crash that drives a world-wide depression and associated wars.
My text is a fictional "fusion" (in a literary sense now :-)) of several elements, each of which, taken separately, was real. One of them was the actual glass cell used by LLNL <https://www.schott.com/en-us/news-and-media/media-releases/2022/fusion-energy-breakthrough-enabled-by-laser-glass-and-optical-glass-from-schott>, in December 2022; another was an idea---that was in the air 35 years ago---to use a large number of laser beams to apply Ashkin's pressure (<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-021-00768-0>) on the plasma, with a feedback loop that would keep the plasma ball nearly spherical. The very same pressure could, in principle, provide an ignition mechanism.
Thanks Paul. That article about Arthur Ashkin was fun to read. I remember as a student in the 1980s reading about the optical tweezers and thinking how wonderful that concept was. It came around the same time (for me) as the scanning tunneling microscope, so lots of exciting stuff. It continues these days too!
I had never heard the term Ashkin pressure. I have never heard of radiation-driven implosion for nuclear weapons being related to it, but now I can see it might. And it must be complicated! Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ashkin has this:
Ashkin ... obtained his BS degree in physics at Columbia University in 1947. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied nuclear physics. This was during the era of the Manhattan Project, and Ashkin's brother, Julius Ashkin, was successfully part of it. This led to Arthur Ashkin's introduction to Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman and others who were at Cornell at the time.[1][19] He received his PhD degree at Cornell University in 1952,[20] and then went to work for Bell Labs...
So does "Ashkin" pressure, as you used it, refer to Julius or Arthur?
The Schott glass article reminded me of a quip a manager at LLNL said to me in the 1990s (?), "This project has sucked up all the XYZ glass available worldwide for the next N years." I don't remember the values of XYZ or N.
"So does `Ashkin' pressure, as you used it, refer to Julius or Arthur?"
Arthur.
As a non-mathematician and amateur (in the true sense of the word) of the epistemic (not necessarily the technological can of worms) fruits of the scientific method, my fundamental grasp at this level of all this is admittedly tenuous. But my perspective also allows (compels?) me to view in particular the mathematics (perhaps as a 'cope' ;-) as a near religion, revealed partly by the decades-long failure of such as string 'theory' for certain mathematicians to achieve much other than job security and generally inscrutable ecstasies of 'beautiful' math. And there is also Godel shouting into the void that consistency and completeness are mutually exclusive properties of any axiomatic system with sufficient expressive power. But math does work beautifully at most human scales, just not so precisely predictive at the smallest ones, which our evolutionary infatuation with symmetry compels us to wish for. I fear that AGI may become the Deity in this religion with a priesthood of techies. But I digress...