Reply To: Plan B for Focus Fusion

[AaronB]

Regarding the relationship of science, religion, spirituality and faith, they all boil down to dots, lines, and constellations. Dots are the facts. Lines connect the dots in meaningful ways. Lines are connected to form constellations, or meaningful, higher orders of pictures. Science is supposed to be objective, starting with the dots, and working its way up to find higher levels of order without preconceived ideas. Religion starts with a given picture in mind, based on some source of authority, and finds dots and lines that fit that picture. However, religion has the advantage of not requiring dots. Faith can fill in the dark spots. Scientists can get a subjective picture in their head and exercise a measure of faith until they accumulate data that either fits or doesn’t fit the model. As asymmetric_implosion said, it’s human nature to exercise faith and have personal biases. We are hard-wired to look for patterns and project order into chaos. However, I do believe it is a conspiracy, but conspiracies are just organized plans of action between people. They’re not all bad. Our Focus Fusion project is a conspiracy to beat all the big fusion projects to the ultimate prize. Is that bad? No. It is a competition, and teams conspire against each other to gain advantages. That’s just the way it is. The bad part is when conspirators resort to cheating, falsifying, or using undue influence to tip the scales in their favor.

“Mainstream science” is the most popular constellation of ideas. Once the majority of scientists have a commonly accepted way of organizing the dots, they tend to expect future dots to fall within the lines of their constellation, and the money usually follows. Since new dots are constantly being found, the picture evolves. Some parts become more established while others require a significant change in perception. The center of the universe has moved significantly over the last few hundred years from the earth to the sun to the galaxy to who-knows-where. Science and religion have both gone through crises of belief and have adapted; some adapted more successfully than others. Skepticism is valuable because without it, there is no motivation to confront problems. Confronting problems leads to progress. Skepticism is not the same as cynicism. I don’t see any people here on this board who are cynics, but I see a lot of healthy skepticism, and that’s good.

Our project is fairly open, and people are free to interpret the results as they see fit. We don’t claim to have the final solution to the fusion challenge yet. We have ideas and hypotheses that we think are worth testing, because if they prove to be valid, we have a good chance of success. We share our data when it comes in so fans, skeptics, and pundits can chew on it. FoFu-1 isn’t the largest DPF, but it is a strong contender. Our theories have yet to be proven conclusively, and we are just now getting FoFu-1 to its full power regime where we expect either confirmation or disproval. We’ll see soon enough. In the meantime, it’s fun to debate different ideas.