Reply To: What can we do with $189 Billion?

[meemoe_uk]

If you look back at Eric’s philosophy of focus fusion, he describes it as ‘ a quasar in a bottle ‘, this summary description tells you the goal and the inspiration for focus fusion. Its a long standing inspiration, built over at least 2 generations of plasma cosmologists physicists, going back at least to the 1970s. Quasars were known to have extremely powerful polar jets emanating from a central power source similar to polar beams in laboratory micro plasmoids in the lab.

The base hypothesis of focus fusion is that the physics of cosmo and astronomical polar jets is the same physics as lab plasmoids, just scaled up a few magnitudes.
The base goal is to replicate the physics and harness it as an energy source.

With me so far?
Everything I’ve said in this post so far is just retelling what the FF community have been preaching for decades.

Now, one thing that Eric has said in the past in an attempt to understand astro-jets is that there is a plasmoid in every star, or at least in every star exhibiting polar jets, and that this plasmoid is the source of the polar jet.
This is one assertion he made that I found a bit dubious. It made sense that there was major plasmoidal activity associated with each polar jet source, e.g. stars and quasars, but it didn’t seem certainly right just to assert a causal plasmoid within a star, where the jets punch out thru the stars surface and into space.

Was there another possibility?

Another idea was that the plasmoidal physics occured in a star’s corona. The corona has for decades been known to be a vast volume of multi million degree, thin hot plasma, a good place to prospect for plasmoid physics. But by the 1970s and early 1980s when Eric was getting his thoughts together, the conventional gravity pressure model of the sun had a near total grip on the astrophysics community, with its idea of gravity induced thermonuke fusion in the centre of the sun. Coronal fusion as the power source for stars was simply not considered. And iirc, Eric favoured the conventional model of stars in his cosmo book ‘ the big bang never happened ‘

In the last few years, plasma cosmologists have built up a strong case for coronal fusion as the power source of stars. I couldn’t easily conceive of a plasmoid deep inside a star having polar jets that punched thru the poles of the star. Plasmoid jets made in the corona don’t have this problem, they are already outside the star.

Last year Monty got experimental results strongly supporting the coronal fusion model.

So, remembering the base goal and philosophy of focus fusion community : to create and harness a ‘ quasar in a bottle ‘, they should try to mimic the physics of the quasar as closely as possible.

There are now 4 lines of reasoning that are converging on coronal fusion as the correct way for the focus fusion community to proceed.

1. Empirical : Lab work by Monty is confirming the coronal model of stellar fusion power.
2. Theoretical : Coronal fusion theory better explains observation cosmology i.e. astrophysical jets, and would explain how stars get plasmoid fusion without any scaled up lab equipment such as capacitor banks or switches
3. Practical ( the flip side of theory ) : It would greatly simplify the practically of laboratory plasmoid fusion ( I wrote this in my previous posts : no need for capacitor banks : charge is stored in the double layers of the corona. No need for fast switches, the plasma can discharge very rapidly by itself. No need for high durability or replaceable electrodes : the corona doesn’t require arcs to activate it.
4. Principle : the FF community touts their use of plasma nature as superior to the tokamak’s ‘engineering by force’ approach. Yet FF community persist in engineering most of the physics they need. They should take heed of their own philosophy and be more open and ready to apply ideas that explain how nature creates the charge and switch needed to induce natural electric discharges and hence plasmoids.

Hope that makes sense, but it was worth typing out even if you don’t understand. This is something the FF community will have to come to terms with, the sooner the better!