Ormond Otvos wrote: Not to be offensive, but merely to relay the likely impression a naive reader might get from reading it, the wikipedia entry for focus fusion redirects to Eric Lerner, who is mostly painted as a weirdo who’s got his own view of the origin of the universe.

Now you and I might be able to correct for that, but if you want focus fusion to be a concept in its own right, standing separate from the other aneutronic processes, someone authoritative needs to build a wikipedia entry for focus fusion. I can start the article, but some of you senior bloggers would need to fill it out.

Wikipedia is a very important source of information for the average person who just barely uses the internet, such as a congressional staffer, or the funding researcher for a venture capital firm.

I just went to wikipedia, where I have an old account, still active, and have found many changes stiffening up the quality of the articles, which is a good thing. However, that means that I need strong references to put in the articles, and a thorough explanation of the uniqueness of focus fusion.

I don’t think it’s enough to have a focus fusion link at the bottom of an article about Eric Lerner. Anyone skilled at composing wikipedia articles?

Here’s a very rough draft:

”’Focus Fusion”’ is a specific aneutronic method for producing electricity from plasma fusion of a boron compound and hydrogen, by generating a metastable toroidal plasma between a central post electrode and several surrounding post electrodes, from a large ultracapacitor voltage source.

The plasma so generated automatically collapses in such a fashion as to generate charged particles that exit through a coil that converts them directly to electricity, with no moving parts. Incidental x-rays are also converted to electricity using a multilayer wrap of several elements to cover the wide range of x-ray frequencies generated.

Emission of neutrons is very low, thus overcoming one of the most important objections to such processes, and the process proceeds by repeated impulses, occurring the low kilocycle range.

The process is much cheaper than tokamak to build and has recently (October 2009) achieved actual fusion and produced energy.

Excellent synopsis. Although I agree with your take on the first impression of the wiki article about Eric, I believe that it is a very effective filter. We’ll have our corporate-grade fanboys soon enough. Anybody willing to invest $4M to $20M before 2011 is not going to be ‘normal’.

Ormond:

There had been an article about ‘Focus fusion’ but it has been deleted after Eric and Aaron had big debates with someone called ‘ScienceApologist’ (or something similar). The entry ‘Eric Lerner’ even has been one of the most controversial in Wikipedia because of that debate. So you have to be careful not to wake sleeping dragons again.

I think what’s Aaron doing is to add small pieces to ‘Aneutronic fusion’ updating the advances. One of the gatekeepers there is Art Carlson, a physicist involved with tokamak construction (currently at Leibnitz Rechenzentrum in Garching near Munich) – as far as I remember. Art himself is quite interested in Robert Bussard’s Polywell, and is a frequent contributor to talk-polywell.org . Eric and Art had long discussions about the validity of Eric’s theories on focus fusion, but in the end admitted the possibility Eric might be right. [ I got that from reading talk-polywell. ]

But now with ongoing experiments, focus fusion could be described just as an experiment as any other physical experiment like LHC. As long as its experimental nature is emphasised and not being described as a hypothetical device, this could even pass somebody like ‘ScienceApologist’.