Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die | Hacker News Reader

Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die

economist.com

23 pointsbrkumar6 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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