Beyond Big Science

Des Emery, St. Thomas, ON, Canada — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 03:38:40 GMT

The Bigger Science projects being tackled now and slated for future development only prove that Man's reach still exceed his grasp, thank God. I like the idea of Fusion, but I am concerned about as well. Inertial confinement sounds good, but will control of the process of fusion rely on inertia only or will it encompass a secondary or even a tertiary method of safemaking? As we advance our steps become more and more difficult and more and mora expensive. We don't fly our keys into a lightning storm, or test-pilot an airplane on isolated sand dunes. But those early experiments led to the high-tech world we inhabit now. Unfortunately, we degrade some advances and become entrapped by things like new car bodies every year enclosing the same old internal combustion engines, when the same old bodies should by now be covering emissionless methods of propulsion.

Work like yours, Alan, acquires more value as more individuals become more aware of the world and how it really works.

Beyond Big Science

Michael, East Windsor, NJ — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:28:44 GMT

Ah, yes, the economics of scientific research. Are we asking the right questions? Are we doing the right things? Are we getting more out than we are putting in? Are we getting enough out as compared to what we are putting in? Cost/benefit ratios. Risk/reward. Results.

Just look at our world today and see the benefits of advances in science and technology. Back in the 60's I used a slide rule to earn my college degree. We were on the verge of the four-function calculator. Then the personal computer. The Internet. The science fiction of Star-Trek defined the hand-held communicator. Anyone remember Dick Tracy's wrist phone? Today we have the iPhone and a myriad of other communications devices. Remarkable.

How many millions of dollars went into the technology of the iPod just so we could listen to our own playlist of downloaded music?

Ok, fusion and particle physics are far removed from consumer devices at the present time but can anyone predict what great wonders will open up in the future as we learn more and more?

The real question is not "can we afford to invest in science and technology" but rather "can we afford not to"? How much is just a matter of degree. We do not live in a world where resources are unlimited. How much to invest in science and technology is a valid question but not for scientists and engineers. We need brilliant minds to ask the right questions and do the impossible work. There will always be more questions to ask than money to answer them.

Spend we must; benefit we will.

Just don't give the green-shaded accountants, politicians and MBA's more power than the curious scientist.

Being wrong is just as valuable as getting the right answer. Thomas Edison was notorious for being wrong; but every wrong answer brought him closer to that "Eureka!" moment. Nothing has changed. We hope to be efficient in our investigations but the laws of science and technology are far more elegant than our current understanding and capabilities. We just gotta figure them out and we need the dedicated people, money and state-of-the-art equipment to do it.

Advancements in science and technology are not defined by personal considerations, budgets nor international boundaries. Payoffs from applied science will always be more measurable than those from basic science. But it's basic science that makes applied science possible.

As it should be.

Beyond Big Science

Bob Arnold — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:17:11 GMT

By the way, there has been a very good development in inertial confinement fusion of late. See the New Scientist article:

Rapid-fire "spark plug" may bring fusion power closer

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/
earth/energy-fuels/dn11732-rapidfire-spark-
plug-may-bring-fusion-power-closer.html

... for the details.
Cheers.

Beyond Big Science

Joseph Basile — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:36:13 GMT

Des Emery,

Your saftey concerns about fusion seem a bit misguided. Confinement technologies are used to initate and sustain a fusion reaction, not contain it.

Stars fuse hydrogen because their gravity creates immense pressures. Confinement technologies for fusion are trying to do the same thing.

If a fusion reactor fails while a reaction is ongoing, it will simply loose pressure and the reaction will stop.

As for my own opinion, we do need to invest in as many science research projects as possible, but we do have to be careful in how we choose to make those investments, as the shiuttle and space station have made apparent.

Beyond Big Science

shaydEller — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:54:37 GMT

the man from canada has a good point,we are so concerned about buying new car bodies wrapped around old internal combustion engines--being that we are so ignorant, "Maybe we should go back to the horse."

Beyond Big Science

Chris Eldridge — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 01:59:58 GMT

That's always the risk... I remember just after the Texas super collider was cancelled, Popular Mechanics ran an info spot on some new form of proton accelerator that would only take a few miles, not dozens. We also have to keep in mind that mysterious energy that came from the "Z-Machine" experiment that created temperatures ten times hotter than the core of the sun, which -from what I recall - showed four times MORE energy than what was used.

If you are going to do a report on international cooperation, you might want to look into the various records of the country involved. We cancelled the super collider and a significant part of the space station even before the shuttle accident. To my knowledge, we are not very good partners nor can we seemingly commit to any long-term project of our own. I'd personally just like to see NASA given a yearly allowance and left to decide how to spend it on its own rather than have congress so involved that it is totally counter productive. To authorize the space station but then cancel the affordable (shuttle derived) booster that was needed to build it efficiently was just as stooped as such decisions come. Yeah, they also cancelled the seven-man lifeboat that could have come in handy if the Atlantis really was damaged and could not return. Ug...

Beyond Big Science

Chris E — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 04:18:33 GMT

I just glimpse at the 787 announcement and began to wonder if that will be the day we mark the beginning of the "Composite Age?" Up till now composites have been heavily used but (apart from just a few small aircraft) even the F-18 Hornet or the Airbus A320 which used extensive amounts of composites were never more than 14 - 16 percent composite by weight, which was A LOT! The A380 took that percentage up to 25 but the 787 will be 50% composite materials by weight. This new era of weight savings materials is here ten fifteen years sooner than I would have expected and all began because of the strides Airbus was making over Boeing. Boeing's only way to fight back was to just sell out and go for broke with composites. Airbus's response to the 787 will be the A350 XWB, which will be over 60% composite by weight.

I'm not actually certain about all the details but metals are by no means out for the count. Newer metallic glass metals, which are frozen INSTANTLY after leaving the mold, offer some amazing performance of their own.

One thing to note with Airbus... Boeing... International cooperation... is that I do firmly believe that government subsidies is exceedingly helpful. The A350 and the 787 are extremely expensive to develop - 14 plus BILLION. Small nations can't even afford R&D like that and to make progress as rapidly as possible, I see no problem in governments spurring business with such contributions, and with the way things are going, I'd RECOMMEND IT! FAST!

Beyond Big Science

Des Emery, St. Thomas, ON, Canada — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 06:03:09 GMT

shaydEller brings up the old "horse of a different colour" argument. I don't want all that horse manure hanging around again, even though it did prove that two can live as cheaply as one, as long as the other one has the appetite of a sparrow. And I used to have to wait for the milkman's and the breadman's slow progress up my street, hoping for a "donation" from the horses to dig into my mother's rose garden. And all that time there was the internal combustion engine around the corner, blowing carbon and fumes everywhere. shaydEller should realize that consumers still pay much too much for the opportunity to buy that same engine all wrapped up in a shiny new colour and a 'streamlined' shape every year. Don't you think that an engine operating on electricity could have been on the market long ago? If consumers had demanded it, of course.

Michael of East Windsor, N.J., writes a well-reasoned letter, especially about basic science and applied science. He mentions risk/reward, but too many people do not balance them fairly; a project that brings risk to hundreds or thousands should not be judged OK when the reward will go to the shareholder only

Thanks to Joe Basile and Bob Arnold for the quick lesson in fusion. I had the idea that failed fusion would be that much worse than failed fission.

Chris E. - airplanes and Global Warming. Or nuclear winter. Makes good sense, as usual.

Beyond Big Science

Craig from Seattle — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 06:59:45 GMT

Michael,

I agree completely with your assertions that "we" need to pay for science, but that "we" also must analyze the cost/benefit.

My only hope is that by "we" you don't mean a congressmen voting for the IRS to steal money from me because an entrenched bureaucrat who doesn't understand or care about the science beyond the fact that it pays his pension told those congressmen that it might get them 0.5% more of the vote in their district.

By far the best person to decide the cost benefit is not the congressman, it's not the bureaucrat, it's not a businessman, it's not even the scientist. It's not a person at all. It's the market. If you support science on economic/development grounds, you have to play by those rules.

We're at the point now that people can't even conceive of research *not* paid for by government. Some things that were created by private industry: Cotton Gin, steam engine, Wright flyer, lightbulb, phonograph, Model T, microprocessor, radio, telegraph, telephone...

Beyond Big Science

John J. Corbin, Fort Worth, Texas — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:40:53 GMT

Whatever happened to plasma propulsion research, which held so much promise a few years ago...faster space voyages to Mars and beyond? Work was being done at NASA's Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center; also the Astronautics department of the University of Washington.

Beyond Big Science

Chris Eldridge, Harrisburg PA — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:17:02 GMT

"Whatever happened to plasma propulsion research, which held so much promise a few years ago...faster space voyages to Mars and beyond?"

I think you are referring to the Ion engine that was proposed for the IJIMO (sp?) explorer that was supposed to use a very strong nuclear power cell to power a very large probe to the "icy moons" of Jupiter. Wasn't Northrop handling that until the project was cancelled? Ion engines are ordinarily very week but when you get the kind of power they were talking about with a newly developed reactor, you get a tremendous amount more thrust!

The Soviet nuclear rocket engine that we also tried to copy was really nothing more than fissioning tubes that hydrogen was pumped down and expelled at many times the strength of a conventional rocket without the need for an oxidizing fuel. I suppose those types of things are on the back burner in some lab but since no one is going out there they are not important enough.

Every once in a while I hear about some ultra new chemical explosive (yeah… um… bordering on the strength of a nuclear weapon) that the military developed and I’ve been wondering is just types of compound could be added to solid rocket boosters in very small quantities just to add thrust. The one was based on 10 atoms of Nitrogen and the other had some mysterious aspect to it that was hard to understand.

Des, The newest airliner engines reduce CO2 emissions by something like 94%… They are called the GEnx engines from General Electric, which is on their web site probably under their slogan ‘ecoimagination!’ 30% quieter too! I personally think air travel technology is reveling that of the military at this point, though the GE technology probably comes from the super hot engines the air force developed in their IMPET project for their new fighter going on since the early 80s. The materials they use and how they manufacture the blades is jaw dropping! Single crystal parts with no grain boundries or defects, um… that actually perspire air like our skin perspires water…

Beyond Big Science

EGamboa Tampa, FL — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:25:15 GMT

"Whatever happened to plasma propulsion research, which held so much promise a few years ago...faster space voyages to Mars and beyond? Work was being done at NASA's Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center; also the Astronautics department of the University of Washington."

Check these articles on a Costa Rican newspaper...

http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2006/diciembre/27/aldea940497.html

http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2006/diciembre/15/aldea930021.html

http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2007/julio/01/aldea1151130.html

Unfortunately for most, this is all in Spanish, a few news articles from La Nacion, the Costa Rican national newspaper, on the progress of Franklin Chang Diaz (Costa Rican NASA Astronaut) who is behind the Plasma propulsion engineering for this rocket that will be tested soon. Pretty neat stuff!!

Beyond Big Science

Wayne, M'town TN — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 22:01:32 GMT

There was an American nuclear Ram jet developed during the cold war nicknamed "the Rocket from Hell".
It was tested and found to be far to dangerous even in total warfare. Its exhaust and radiation from its engines would give anyone on the ground below a fatal dose of radiation as it passed.

Of course such an engine couldn't operate in space because it used superheated air as reaction mass.

Beyond Big Science

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 02:37:50 GMT

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