Video of Bussard talk on IEC (at Google)

[Edward Miller]

What I mean is that outside of war research, science is terribly unfunded. We got those people into space because we had to beat the communists! And the major discoveries can't be forced along specific political project plans. And I can see Bussard struggling with that in his talk, justifying his progress against government goals. And fighting against a paper that is seen as absolute (No IEC will ever work via Rider's PhD Thesis). The best critics said we'd never fly.

"But when government directs scientific research, it's my opinion, and this is not necessarily true, that it rarely works. You look at paradigm shifts, the big scientific discoveries, and you can name them all, you have penicillin or the transistor or nuclear power or solar cells, anything you want, I struggle to find one that came from direct government scientific research. They're chance discoveries, and it's not surprising to me. It’s actually obvious why that is."

That quote is from the excellent Brian Cox Edge talk here:
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/cox09/cox09_index.html

Maybe we're going down the wrong track with politics and science.

In my opinion the government should actively fund new, unique, novel (and amateur) projects and not just these multi-billion-dollar and/or multi-national and war-relevant projects. (Furthermore as a side note I think a tremendous amount of money is wasted on hardware and research journals and I hope one day these areas become open-source and cookie cutter like linux/pc hardware.)

[Chris Bradley]

Not sure I agree that transistors were a chance discovery. Seeing that when Lilenfeld originally conceived and patented the idea the materials to make it work didn't even exist, it could hardly be described as a 'matter of chance' to have come up with the device! The idea that one happens, by chance, to write up a patent is not quite right! "Oh, look, I started writing a letter to tax office but it seems to have come out looking like a patent for a device I've never seen before!!" In that case, it *would* have happened by chance, but not otherwise!!

But perhaps that is just pedantery, because I fully agree with Brian's sentiment, and also I agree with Richard's point and add that the modern lack of commitment by many individuals to the betterment of us all (and particularly wrt the behaviours of, so called, "elected representatives") is disgusting.

Just to reply to edmo, though, I do not share the opinion that Polywell has been insufficiently funded. I am lead to believe it has received $25M yet has still not provided basic evidence that it can confine electrons in the manner it proposes to, let alone manipulate ions with those electrons. Such an elementary stage of plasma manipulation should have been reached very easily with $25M.

Also to add, you might be interested to note Todd Rider's appendix E of his thesis, where he throws in a few ideas of his own as to how a working IEC device might look.

[Chris Bradley]

That last one raised my 'eyebrow'.
>
> http://burningplasma.org/web/ReNeW/whit ... source.pdf

I could see the lines weren't linear which means they must meet 'breakeven' output at some stage.

This guy's just invented a breakeven machine! Either that, or his optimistic use of scaling equations has got the better of a sanity check. The latter seems the norm in all cases I have ever observed in fusion!!