

Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die - brkumar
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13361472

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asciilifeform
Tabletop fusion per se is trivial:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor>

Or whack a piece of palladium deuteride with a hammer.

Breakeven is another matter.

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thaumaturgy
Right. One of my clients has working sonofusion, but are currently spending
several magnitudes more energy to produce the effect than they are getting for
output.

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mattmaroon
They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by
anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of
power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd
bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a
totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very
short time relative to fission.

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troystribling
Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not
understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably
resolved and closed to debate.

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rkowalick
Apparantly you don't either. There are plenty of scientific theories that are
indisputably resolved and closed to debate.

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troystribling
I think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would
interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately
describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability>, is used by many to define an
assertion as scientific. From the article,

"Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a
prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of
choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby
theories become less bad".

A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set
of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy.

There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations
within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those
observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1.

I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on
anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that
left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.

