Reply To: minimal size device for focus fusion to work?

[ikanreed]

Everyone should embrace the scientific method like this. However, I’d like to point out that the biggest liability that you should look for potential problems in is the theory, not the particulars of mechanical implementation.

What are the assumptions about plasma and nuclear physics they’re relying on here? How many of those are already well supported by existing research? How many have been verified at least tentatively by experiments so far? For example, I’m not sure anyone has ever actually experimentally verified the enthalpy needed to fuse boron and hydrogen, even in energetically wasteful ways like particle accelerators . If the theory is even a little off from the reality, the whole concept might not work, ever. But even for things like this, we at least know the premise well enough to know what experiments LPP will need to complete before they know.