Going astray may be as simple as not being able to provide the necessary clarity, the clear road map that leads from what is familiar, to those in the field, to the novel thing you are proposing.
I am talking of course of heavily mathematical fields. Not going to comment on the murkier situation outside of that.
Listening is an art.
One of the human failure modes that I witness on a regular basis is that people fail to separate "I hear/understand you" and "I agree with you" within their own heads. People have a tendency to assume that what they find convincing will be similarly convincing to another. As a result, if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work.
My current operating hypothesis is that vanishingly few people are genuinely interested solely in ideas. Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Being told that your baby is ugly, no matter how kindly, compassionately, or empathetically it is done, is rarely a positive experience. This is where people like Dale Carnegie come in.
Beyond the emotional aspects of it, there are other issues. It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. This is doubly true when most papers are patently wrong in some obvious way and the painstakingly handcrafted feedback unlikely to be taken up in the manner an idealist could hope for. I'm sure you have a way to handle this with the art of listening, and I'm just not seeing it. Can you help me understand?
Again, you're completely right. It can definitely help to separate the ideas of understanding and agreement, and reasonable people interested in ideas will handle this gracefully! There just might be some room for nuance and perhaps a careful consideration of costs and burdens might be in order.
Here's a thumb rule I try to follow: Before having a strong opinion towards one side, one must be able to be articulate both (opposing) points of view. So, my goal in any discussion is to reach that stage -- mutually, if possible. After that point, I'm willing to trust reasonable people to exercise independent judgement. At least we can get a shared understanding of which differing assumptions lead us to different conclusions, and see whether there are any tests which will help us validate those assumptions.
> Almost everyone has some ego at stake.
Aye, we're all humans! All we can do is strive to be a little better each day :-) The same with regards to listening to someone -- I try to listen carefully and respond sincerely with what puzzles me. It's up to them what they wish to do with that.
> It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing.
Absolutely! I don't mean to imply that one should take every crackpot paper seriously. I guess each researcher has a circle of respected colleagues whom one can trust for a little bit of indulgence. Also, this is partly what professors are paid for -- so I would hope they're willing to spend some time with their maturing students, and their colleagues, who have proven track records as researchers.
An interesting related tidbit: Some of my physics professors were very sincere in asking eager grad students to have some humility and avoid spending much time on the murky swamp of quantum foundations (which has claimed many decades of smart researchers' lives)--and definitely not by ourselves, at least till we had a few manifestly productive years working on other things, and developed enough of a research sense to understand when to back away from unproductive lines of inquiry.
If a person can't be convinced with real evidence, that is the road to crack-pottery.
Typically there's some agreement with a difference of either an underlying core axiom or some other tradeoff that the two people are weighing differently.
Pointing out the pieces you agree on helps the other person relax a little and open up when thinking about their position.
http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf is a fascinating read on this.
I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well.
"Thank you for developing a good approximation to the trisection of an angle! It has an average error of only 0.1 percent, according to this computer analysis of all angles from 0 to 180 degrees in steps of three. It compares favorably with past approximate trisections developed by X, Y and Z that work as follows..."
I don't think this necessarily holds. I'd need to look at studies, but I feel that the more time you've invested into something, the worse rejection is, sound mind or not. And this would be compounded if you get the feeling the other person isn't even trying to understand you and your point of view.
In physics you still need some exposition that leads to being able to work out the math. Ultimately it should lead to something that is either fits with known theory or contradicts it, and in the case of a contradiction then it might be experimentally confirmed or denied. You've got an uphill struggle otherwise.
This might be more common in fields like physics, where it comes down to the math. If you can explain the math, and it seems flawless, then it is understandable and may be publishable. But it could still be wrong, in ways that could be verified by experiment.
I find these questions and paradoxes that illuminate the limits of logical reasoning quite fascinating.
In principle, someone could be both right and incomprehensible, but there's no way forward unless one can get some people to both understand and agree with you. Even then, you could end up with one faction thinking it is on to something profound, while another thinks they are mistaken, as is happening with Integrated Information Theory at the moment.
without commenting on importance, novelty, truth ... he explains clearly the (conditional) probability functions and performs substitutions i.e. deriving conclusions.
It feels like the Idea is stuck in limbo and I can't get the resources together to test it.
I feel like I have a responsibility to the Idea itself. As long as there is a chance that it could work, dropping it feels criminal.
It needs to be killed completely, through testing, or it's going to keep haunting me.
So where's your evidence? The usual method is to have a track record, another method is to be able to state very clearly what the new/novel idea is for this to be different and workable. In that case, what's your elevator pitch?
If you're outside the system it boils down to that question - if someone gives you three minutes, you need to be able to convince them to invest more time to understand more detail.
Do you have a description like that?
Why is your idea different? What's new about it?
Why should some invest the time to see how/whether it works?
I would hope that nobody would blindly believe me, but would investigate the idea on it's merits.
It's basically an inside out cyclotron... instead of ions circling a central point, all ion trajectories intersect a focus point once per period. If they collide at that focus point without fusing, they will still be on a trajectory that brings them back to the focus.
There are no new physics, and only basic college level physics knowledge is required to understand the device.
Here is a simulation video I made using a program called simbuca that simulates ion motion in a penning trap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT6nvmN7GB0
As you can see, that simulation was made 3 years ago, but has very few views. I've tried, but don't know how to move forward without funding further research myself... I've basically stopped looking for outside funding.
The essence: A sphere with an array of pistons compresses a central point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence
The important equations are probably under:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer#Slow_valve_closur...
So for high flow velocity and small time delta, the pressure can be pretty astronomical. If you could somehow create a little bubble in the center of the Earth and let it collapse, you might get a little fusion, statistically speaking, before it flattens out to steady state conditions and obviously a low probably of fusion since we aren't standing on a star!
Edit: I realized one other connection here - I think this is what happens when red supergiant stars run out of nuclear fuel and can no longer produce enough heat to hold up their gas against gravity. The gas cools, collapsing into a small volume near the limit of a black hole's density, and under such tremendous pressure, much of the star's mass undergoes fusion simultaneously and releases 10 billions years worth of energy in an instant, blowing the remaining material out into space. That's where the heavy elements in our bodies like iron (and even heavier elements that require added energy to fuse) come from:
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/bmendez/ay10/2000/cycle/snII.htm...
I've looked a lot at what they are doing and hope to replicate their story. If I can generate some "marketing neutrons" like they did, maybe funding will follow.
Sorry.
At the focus, where repulsion is more of an issue, all ions are essentially flying straight at the focus (at the same time) with enough energy to pass through it easily unless they collide with another ion there.
There were some instabilities in some simulations that I did where I cranked repulsion to massive levels... It's beyond my expertise to interpret whether those instabilities are fatal or not, or would cause problems in an actual device. this simulation is here: https://youtu.be/NnbfgTP7v5M
One benefit of this weird geometry is that the walls of the device can be very far from any hot plasma. Energy losses should be minimal, and the self intersecting trajectory gives ions multiple chances to fuse once accelerated.
It may not work, but I feel that it deserves to be looked at.
I've followed a similar path to the one you want to take. I got funding and built a fusion reactor design with some similarities (see US patent 5818891 for some details). What you are describing is more similar to a Migma design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migma). If you are not already aware of Migma, I recommend researching it to see what the problems were. See if figure 3a looks familiar here http://www.rexresearch.com/maglich/migma.htm.
This type of design will have a few problems. First, to work the way you simulate, it will have to remain at low density. This is because of space charge (all those repulsions add up as you add more particles). Also, the particle velocities will smear out over time as the particles adopt a Maxwellian distribution (see https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412). You can get around the space charge issue by putting electrons into the mix, but then you have a large source of energy losses (bouncing electrons emit photons that leave the area).
I'd love to see someone crack the self-sustaining fusion problem. If you would like to talk fusion, feel free to email me.
I am familiar with Migma, which has self-intersecting orbits. I believe the main difference is that my ions will have a thermal distribution from the start, yet still be able to self intersect. (Particle velocity does not change cyclotron orbit timing until much higher energies. So Rider's arguments are not as applicable)
My hope is to exceed the Brillouin limit only very briefly, and that most of the time, the plasma will be diffuse enough that space charge won't be an issue...
The size of the focus should be the diameter of the electron beam, and electron beams can be very narrow. If the beam diameter is made very very small (electron microscopes prove this is possible), density at the focus could be very high for very short amounts of time... higher than even the Z machine, yet would quickly drop to levels low enough that space charge is not an issue.
The possibility of this periodic density spike is predicted in "Beyond the Brillouin limit with the penning fusion experiment" which implies that local density can exceed the limit in either space or time. They chose space, I've chosen time.
I'd love to email you about this, but fear I'm falling well into crank territory as it is. I'm pontifier everywhere, including gmail.
To overcome that you’d need to increase the strength of the magnetic containment, and shrink your container, but that will raise the density and change the behavior of your plasma while heating the walls of the chamber.
The deuterium would start out as a very diffuse gas and a high energy, narrow electron beam (pulsed at the cyclotron frequency) would be used to ionize them at the focus and add energy. The resulting deuterium plasma would be non-neutral. It would want to fly apart, but as it expands the self repulsion should get much weaker allowing the weak magnetic field to steer each ion back toward the focus again. (in 2d, cyclotron motion in a uniform magnetic field is circular)
There are many questions I can't answer about the technical details of how the plasma would evolve with repeated electron beam pulses, and what qualities the beam pulses should have to give the best result... I think it should be short duration, narrow, and high energy.
Likewise, I don't know how high density can get before it starts to cause synchronization problems.
Meaning, it would be negatively charged because of the added electrons?
My guess is, you want the plasma to be neutral. (The term I've seen is "div-free" — you want the divergence of the E field to be everywhere zero.) But maybe removing the excess electrons wouldn't be too hard.
Anyway, if you want to chat about this more, feel free to email me — address in profile.
The goal is for the ions to act like individual ballistic deuterium nuclei flying along a cyclotron trajectory. The density should be very low most of the time, but spike dramatically very briefly.
That line between high density and acting like individual particles is one of the reasons this device is difficult for me to model.
I've contemplated writing my own software from scratch, but that just seems daunting. I'm quite burned out.
As an alternative, you could homebrew a simple NMR yourself with a cow magnet or a neodymium magnet.
[1] https://www.fishersci.ca/shop/products/thermo-scientific-pic...
The device I've looked at that I believe will work is a Hitachi Airis II. It has just about the right field strength, working volume and field uniformity for the prototype to have a chance of working. It's an older model and I have seen some for sale for approximately $30k.
Tokamaks by the way, were invented by an outsider with no previous domain knowledge...