Reply To: What are you doing to promote Focus Fusion…

[Brian H]

Lerner wrote: Tulse, no matter what the results of the experiment, they will be disputed. 100% chance. So no matter how well we do (and we don’t know that yet) , or how well we feel we have proven it, it will not be “indisputable” as people will dispute it.

Think about it. Some tiny group operating on a shoestring says they have done something that billions of dollars could not. Do you really think everyone will roll over and shout hosannahs? Is that how science works today?

No, Eric. I think there will be waves of fear and exaltation that sweep through various sub-sets of scientists and administrators and others. One such sub-group is the large and largely MSM-excluded community of AGW skeptics, who above all do not want the world to buy a carbon-control pig-in-a-poke on the basis of extremely dodgy science and grotesquely incompetent computer modelling. Having a prospect like FF which renders the entire issue moot, and does so by means of a back door opened by human genius, will make them (us) very, very happy.

As for the fusion science community per se, the gauntlet will be well and truly thrown down. You are, of course, familiar with the “existence proof” phenomenon: once something is known (or very likely) to have actually been achieved by someone, over half of the heavy lifting is done. “How” is then much easier to attack. Many will do so, urgently.

In any case, the “engineering” phase will in all likelihood be much easier to fund if scientific unity is demonstrated. And once there is a prototype which actually generates net current from boron, it’s game over. Sell a few manufacturing licenses to a few outfits or utilities anywhere in the world, and the rush will be on. The payoff ratios are so huge, and the penalties for abstaining so dire, that no one will be able to refrain from checking it out and acting with great dispatch.

So I believe.