Friday, September 21, 2007

Orthodoxy

Over at Climate Audit they are discussing “Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis”.

Let me relate this to my current field of study - Nuclear Fusion.

The big money is going into projects like ITER (the US is spending something like $200 to $400 mil a year on this project). All the scientists involved say we are at least 30 years away from a net power reactor delivering watts to the grid. When that net power device is built it will be too big 17GW (most power plants built today are under 100MW and the largest are in the 1 GW range), too expensive (at 20X to 30X the current cost of electricity), and too late. All this is inherent in trying to get fusion by heating things up. And yet funding rolls on. Grant money is relatively easy if there is an ITER angle.

Contrast this with IEC fusion. In the US there are 5 to 10 projects going on at a funding rate that is probably on the order of $20 million or less total. The thing about IEC Fusion is that instead of heating up a mass of gas to get fusion in the high energy tail, particles are accelerated directly to fusion speeds. This makes the devices much smaller, less costly, and quicker to develop. So who is doing IEC Fusion? Basically a bunch of old cranks who see ITER and the Tokamaks as useless except as science fair projects. Let me quote Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall who said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And yet the money rolls on.

If I was in charge of science I would see that in any discipline 70% went to mainstream and 30% to dissenters. That would tend to keep everyone honest. Does it mean some money would go for stupidity? Sure. As Murray Gell-Mann says - there is a reason most new stuff ought not get funded, most of it is flat wrong. However, if we do not encourage dissent from orthodoxy we will never learn anything new.

Our current ratios are out of balance.

Let me add that a significant part of the 30% should go towards replication by dissenters.

If we are really going to do good science we must encourage a climate of dissent and replication.

Let me add that we see this in Cold Fusion. The mainstream derided it because at first replication was difficult. Now at least the laboratory aspects are better under control and replication is the norm. We still do not understand what is happening or why. However, finally progress is being made. So far it seems to be a low energy process. Heat is created. Just not enough to even boil the water (actually D2O) in the experimental apparatus. It is being researched. We will find out why. We lost 10 years of useful work because of clinging to orthodoxy.

In many way science is like religion. Woe be unto him who strays from the canon.

Interestingly enough the US Navy is funding IEC Fusion and Cold Fusion. Why? They don't look at it from a right/wrong basis. It is all about risk vs reward. They are not crazy. They do require at least a minimum of results before funding. They come at it from: "we don't know everything" and "mathematics can be helpful but is not definitive. Only real world results count".

Why not more dependence on math? Because with math - if you pick the right assumptions - you can prove anything.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

14 comments:

LarryD said...

Mathematics is a great tool to describe the Universe. But it can describe more than one Universe.

That's why Science requires experimental verification of theories.

Snake Oil Baron said...

I do not have the knowledge about physics to comment on the viability of the traditional approaches to fusion but given the results they have provided (weak) and the nonintuitive mechanism they employ it seems odd that they have such strong support when compared to the Bussard method. It is one thing to be skeptical of a technique that appears to violate currently known physics or is hard to reproduce like "cold fusion" but when a technique seems more in tune with the laws of physics (lets try putting the particles close together instead of racing them around a ring) and seems to have produced results fairly quickly (in comparison to other methods), there seems to be a need for some close examination of the alternative.

But the climate issue is just disturbing to me. I have spent a great deal of time reading about biology and quite a bit more time than the average layman in studying the subject academically not to mention following the Intelligent Design/Creationism vs evolution politics and I am disturbed to see the climate alarmist side of the debate having been portrayed as the scientific side in this issue while using the methods and arguments that I have come to expect and loath from the creationists. I feel so much pity for the climatologists who do not side with the alarmists because even if they take a stand and oppose the current narrative of the falling sky, their science and indeed, all of science will take a major black eye if the earth does not transform into the predicted cinder.

Anonymous said...

GoogleCount++;

The reference to ClimateAudit is priceless. What a great impartial source of information. Let's again review who Steve McIntyre is:

From Wiki:
"McIntyre was the President and founder of Northwest Exploration Company Limited and a director of its parent company, Northwest Explorations Inc. When Northwest Explorations Inc. was taken over in 1998 by CGX Resources Inc. to form the oil and gas exploration company CGX Energy Inc., McIntyre ceased being a director. McIntyre was a strategic advisor for CGX in 2000 through 2003.[9]

McIntyre is a former mining executive; prior to 2003 he was an officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies."

I'm sure he has no ties with big mining and big oil!!

Great job again MSimon!

M. Simon said...

And the Climate scientist who are warmologists have ties to big government.

So what is your point?

Did Mann screw up or not?

Did Hansen screw up or not?

In science that is all that matters. Right or wrong. Funding sources are just a smoke screen from those who can't stand the heat.

Anonymous said...

First things first: GoogleCount++;

So you think ITER is fraught with cost overruns and a waste of money? Christ, that's a drop in the bucket compared to what the DoD wastes on weapon systems. Here's a few examples that should put things in to perspective:

1. Navy DDG-51 Destroyer --> $1B per ship; over 100% program cost overrun thus far.

2. Navy DDG-1000 Destroyer --> $3B per ship, over 100% program cost overrun thus far.

3. F-22 Fighter --> $338M per aircraft. Vastly overbudget, skyrocketing maintenance costs. Regarded as a step backward in combat readiness.

4. F-35 JSF --> $112M per aircraft. Fails to meet multi-force combat requirements -- e.g. Too fast for ground support operations (i.e. A-10 replacement)

5. Ballistic Missle Defense System: A whopping $86 billion thus far. Only "successes" have occurred in 5 of the 9 highly scripted, unrealistic validation tests -- i.e. not even the simplest of missile countermeasures employed, no functional sea-based X-band radar used, etc.

And you criticize science spending? Give me a break.

M. Simon said...

Well C it looks like the ships actually work.

More than you can say for tokamaks.

As to BMD. A nice 1 GW portable power source could come in real handy for something like that.

Anonymous said...

Simon,

Tokamaks do work you moron. In fact, they are the only fusion technology that shows any promise for the future. Name a single controlled fusion device that has *verifiable* comparable Q. IEC? What a joke. Maybe you can get those IT morons in the audience at Google to cheer you on. Jeez, even the guys who experimentally confirmed POPS (PRL 2005) acknowledge that current fusor-based technologies are no better than a Q of 0.0001. You live in a complete pathological science dreamworld.

As for your "working" Aegis destroyers, they are nothing more than cold war planning relics whose need kept being propagated by the DoD and defense contractors. Because of the perpetual cost overruns characteristic of these programs, the Pentagon is at its largest in over 40 years. Same thing with the Reliable Replacement Warhead -- except Congress has the sense to knock that off the table.

M. Simon said...

Fusion the Tokamak way is still 30 years away from delivering power to the grid. AS it was 30 years ago.

Give me 1/6th the money that is going into ITER ($6 bn) and I will deliver you a power producing IEC reactor in 3 years.

In any case, not to worry, the Navy is going into IEC in a big way if Dr. Bussard's experiments work out in the next 6 to 9 months.

Be patient. In you will have your answer in less than a year.

Here is what Vincent Page has to say about the Tokamak assuming it is successful:

# Designs need to be feasible with power output in the 15 MWe to 1500 MWe range and cost less than $6700 per KWe.

# More expensive machines will not be commercially viable.


So let me repeat at 17 GW minimum size the machines are too big, they will be too expensive, and they will be too late.

Anonymous said...

Chatterton,

You forgot to mention that Steve McIntyre is a math prodigy.

If McIntyre is guilty of anything it is exposing stunning mathematical incompetence by "expert" peer-reviewed climate scientists.

Anonymous said...

MSimon,

Since you're big on Feynman, perhaps you should think carefully about his views on pseudoscience:

"I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself." R. Feynman on pseudoscience, in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

Does this not give you pause when considering the fact that Bussard's WB-6 was "hastily put together" and the experiments rushed so as to finish prior to the end of funding? How is it that you are so confident as to base your future predictions on the purely anectodal results of WB-6?

M. Simon said...

Chat,

How is it that you are so confident as to base your future predictions on the purely anectodal results of WB-6?

1. I know one of the experimenters involved.

2. The Navy finds the work (done over an 11 year period) promising.

3. Some other folks (physicists among them) who I trust who are independent of Dr. Bussard think the work has great promise.

M. Simon said...

Let me add that every objection I had at the beginning has been overcome by peer reviewed papers (where there are papers on the specific objection).

It is my opinion that Dr. B has found the sweet spot for fusion reactor design.

It is possible that there will be insurmountable problems in a full scale reactor design (specifically heat load on the superconducting coils), however it is my belief that even those problems can be overcome by making the reactor bigger if nothing else.

Anonymous said...

Alright then -- let's revisit this in a year and see where things are at.

M. Simon said...

Chat,

You can count on it.

I will report results positive or negative.