Glow in the Dark Toys

Back when I was in college the only thing you were likely to find in a dorm room that glowed in the dark was a black light poster. Or a doobie. Now here's a guy named Andrew Seltzman who graduated this year from Georgia Tech and what's he got in his dorm room? A fusion reactor! Yes, that's right. He built a fusion reactor in his dorm room. Here's a picture of the deuterium ion injector parts all laid out on his bed:


And here's the assembled machine:


He tried a couple of test runs with no fuel just to prove it was generating a plasma. But before he actually fired up the fusion reaction he moved it to a lab in the nuclear engineering building. Here's a picture of the deuterium plasma of the reactor in actual operation, generating neutrons:


This type of device is called a fusor and it is simple enough that several dozen very accomplished amateurs have been able to build one. Andrew Seltzman actually built his first fusor in high school. His new one is pretty sophisticated. It has a liquid cooled grid electrode and an ion injector. My hat is off to him and I hope he has a brilliant career as a physicist.

By the way, you'll never guess who invented the fusor. His name was Philo T. Farnsworth. You've probably never of him but I'm sure you've heard of something else he invented: television. Fusors are used as neutron generators but are hopelessly inefficient for power generation. The amount of power they consume is way more than they could ever generate. However, the fusor has a cousin that I've written about before that is more promising: the Polywell. I'm fascinated by this line of research and I hope it pans out. In the meantime, the pictures are pretty cool!

Art Imitates Music

I just saw this fascinating article in New Scientist:

Boléro: 'Beautiful symptom of a terrible disease'

The painting above, called Unravelling Boléro, is a measure-by-measure visual representation of Ravel's Boléro. The scientist-turned-artist who painted it, Anne Adams, was suffering from the early stages of a rare neurological disease called primary progressive aphasia. The parts of her brain responsible for speech were slowly degenerating, leaving her eventually unable to speak at all. In its early stages this disease sometimes causes a blurring of the distinctions between the different senses. Victims can also develop repetitive behaviors. Accordingly the painting, like the music, slowly builds to its climax through many variations of the theme. Remarkably, some scientists think that Ravel may also have been a victim of primary progressive aphasia. This could explain the structure of the piece that so captivated Adams. Tragically, the disease eventually cost Anne Adams her life.

Caffeine and me

Two recent studies have put my beverage habits on the high ground. First we had the news that daily caffeine intake reduces the risk of Alzheimer's. Then the word comes that the rule about drinking eight glasses of water a day is pure bunk.

If caffeine helps you stay mentally sharp, I think I drink enough coffee to add about 10 IQ points. And when I'm not drinking coffee I'm usually drinking iced tea. Water is fine in a pinch or if you're really thirsty, but I had despaired of ever drinking eight glasses a day.

Starbucks, anyone?

Duck and Cover

This just in:

Researchers: Asteroid Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah

Two scientists claim that a huge meteor grazed the earth's surface, leaving a path of destruction from the Middle East to present-day Austria. It was recorded by an ancient Sumerian astonomer on a clay tablet which say they have succeeded in deciphering. According to the scientists, this event neatly explains over 20 ancient myths, including the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They have even dated it to the predawn hours of June 29, 3123 B.C.

Hmmmm... Of course, I am a Christian and I believe that Genesis is a true historical record of those times. I'm equally comfortable with a natural or a supernatural explanation of what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, because even if it was a meteor or an earthquake it was still an act of God - literally. But this theory seems way too neat and tidy. They even have a date! An event of this magnitude would leave a lot more evidence behind besides a clay tablet and a few stories. Where is the other evidence?

[update 4/1/08] This article from the University of Bristol gives a little more information and makes the theory sounds slightly more plausible. They had the good sense not to mention the Sodom and Gomorrah connection. I don't think this is meant as an April Fools story. If so, they were off by a day. :-)

Uglier Than Thou

So now scientists have determined that the most successful marriages are the ones where the man is uglier than the woman.

Yeah!!

As a long time beneficiary of this principle (see my picture in the sidebar) I think I knew this instinctively. It also fits in with the larger principle that, as I have often observed to my friends, almost every guy I know "married up." When you first hear that it sounds like it doesn't make sense. But then you realize that women are, on the average, better looking, kinder, more patient and more industrious than guys are. Shoot, they even have a higher pain tolerance. What would the birth rate be if men gave birth instead of women? So guys, kiss your wife today and tell her how beautiful she is. Maybe she'll keep you around for a while.

Looking for Mr. Fusion

Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log is one of my favorite geek blogs. He recently wrote a review of a new book called Physics of the Impossible. I won't rehash all he wrote - please go read Alan's post for that. But the gist of the book is that there are three classes of impossibility. A Class I impossibility is something that doesn't violate any known laws of physics; we just don't know how to do it yet. A Class II impossibility is one that requires some new science - theories that might be true but we don't know yet. A Class III impossibility clearly violates known laws of physics. Unless the theory is wrong, these items are truly impossible. (I might add that they are impossible for us, but not for God, of course. He is not constrained by the laws of physics that he invented. But that is a subject for Believer's Brain.)

Since I read that a few days ago it has been bouncing around in my head and has bumped into something else I mentioned recently: Dense Plasma Focus fusion. Building a device to generate net power by controlled nuclear fusion is, currently, a Class I impossibility. We think it should be possible, but we don't know for sure how to do it yet. In fact, there are several possible approaches that have been investigated. Two of these have received by far the most funding and attention: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Billions have been spent, and continue to be spent on developing these ideas. It's appropriate to spend billions on fusion power research, because long term it is probably our best source of clean energy. Unlike nuclear fission, on which all current nuclear power plants are based, fusion does not inherently require a radioactive fuel or generate huge amounts of radioactive waste (although some types of fusion are cleaner than others).

A few years ago some scientists generated a huge stir with their claim to have produced "cold fusion". This was tabletop physics. No huge magnets or high voltages or high temperature plasmas. Cold fusion is a Class II impossibility. If it's real there's some new physics involved that we don't know about. Unfortunately, subsequent attempts to replicate their results did not meet with much success. Most scientists reluctantly concluded that cold fusion doesn't really exist. It was all a matter of experimental error.

A while back the blogosphere became aware of the work of Dr. Robert Bussard to develop a new wrinkle on an old approach to nuclear fusion: inertial electrostatic confinement. There's no doubt that this approach can generate controlled nuclear fusion and there's no controversy about how it works. The only question, the Class I impossibility, is whether it is possible to build a device based on this principle that generates net energy. If you're going to build a power plant, you have to get out of it more energy than you put into it. That's usually called "breakeven" and nobody in the fusion business has yet achieved it, even the big boys spending billions on magnetic confinement.

Sorry for rambling on. I needed to give you some background in case you haven't been tracking what's going on in the field of fusion research. Now, finally, to the point I wanted to make. I've been aware of Bussard's work on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) for a while. I just recently heard about Dr. Eric Lerner's work on dense plasma focus (DPF) as another way to potentially achieve breakeven fusion. Both of these approaches have the potential to result in smaller, cheaper and cleaner fusion power plants than what the big boys are doing. It caused me to realize that maybe IEC isn't so strange after all. If there are two alternative approaches, how many more might there be? After all, we are "only" dealing with a Class I impossibility here. Are there other principles for confinement that might yield an efficient fusion reactor?

Fusion is potentially so important to the future of our economy, environment and national security that it is almost criminal for our government to be so narrowly focused in our research funding. Both IEC and DPF have struggled to gain any funding at all in the U.S. And these are not totally crackpot ideas. No one denies that both have achieved nuclear fusion. It is only a question of whether it is possible to build a device efficient enough to produce net power economically. Why should we not be investigating all avenues? I don't want to take away research funding from other possible energy sources, fusion or not. Solar energy, ultracapacitors and the like have great promise. When you consider what is at stake we need to be putting more money into all of these. But we need to remember that most of the really big advances in technology have come out of left field, so to speak. So spending a small amount of money on even the apparently less promising approaches seems like a good investment. Hmmm. I might need to write my congressman.

Something else to worry about

And now, as if we hadn't already identified enough things that might wipe out our species, we learn that astronomers have discovered a loaded gun pointed at our planet. Wolf-Rayet star 104 could go supernova at any time, and it's pointed straight at us. At only 8000 light years away, it could emit a gamma ray beam that would fry Earth's ozone layer. At that point you would need some pretty stout sunblock...I'm thinking SPF 200 or something. Say, a quarter inch layer of lead paint, like Queen Elizabeth I used to wear. Trouble is, all the little plants and critters in the forests and oceans don't have any sunblock. We might be eating canned beans for a long, long time.

How much time do we have left? Well, the astronomers say this thing might blow at any moment. Which, to an astronomer, means a few hundred thousand years. Better start stocking the pantry now.

Paging Albert Einstein...

For some years now NASA scientists have noticed that two of our early space probes, Pioneer 10 and 11, are not quite where they should be. Launched in the early 1970s to study the outer planets, these two spacecraft are now billions of miles away from Earth on escape trajectories out of the solar system. As scientists have tracked them over the years they have noticed a tiny, unexplained error that has been accumulating in their predicted positions. This is called the Pioneer Anomaly. Efforts to explain the anomaly have been unsuccessful. Is it caused by a slight outgassing from the spacecraft materials, or perhaps infrared photons radiating from the onboard nuclear power supplies? If you eliminate all the possible onboard causes, a much more interesting possibility remains. Perhaps the theory of gravity needs to be adjusted a bit! Einstein's theory of general relativity has been astonishingly successful at explaining the motions of the planets and other heavenly bodies. It would be Big News if even a tiny adjustment needed to be made in theory. For that reason, most scientists have assumed some other explanation will turn up for the Pioneer Anomaly. After all, it has only been observed with those two spacecraft.

Until now. A new anomaly has now been observed in the motions of five other spacecraft. Each is going either slightly slower or faster than expected after a flyby of Earth. There's no obvious connection to the Pioneer Anomaly, but it seems unlikely that two independent anomalous effects would exist.

So is there something wrong with our theory of gravity? Probably not, but it's fun to wonder.

Peace, Love and Nuclear Power

This week I heard for the first time about another proposed approach for fusion power called Dense Plasma Focus. Its unorthodox proponent is Dr. Eric Lerner, long time leftist and cosmological contrarian. He is best known among physicists for his 1991 book The Big Bang Never Happened. Suffice it to say he's not a creationist, however!

Lerner was invited to describe his concept at a Google Tech Talk last fall. This was the same venue that previously hosted Dr. Robert Bussard, whose talk described another approach to fusion power called inertial electrostatic confinement.

The major powers (Europe, Japan, the U.S. and other partners) are sinking billions and billions of dollars into the ITER project to achieve break-even fusion power generation using a tokamak reactor. In contrast, alternatives have a tough time getting any funding at all. It seems to me that whatever the prevailing opinion among physicists about Lerner and Bussard's chances for success, we could afford to siphon off a few million just to see if the long shot bets will pay off. There's no question in my mind that the Real Answer to our energy woes and to global warming is nuclear power, particularly fusion.