Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

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Fusion does remind me of the space program. Surprising new solutions in a wide range of sciences. Easy to produce superconducting ribbons being one of the big successes so far. Said ribbons have lead to significant improvements in electro magnets, improving both field strength and decreasing the magnet sizes. Said magnets are useful for a wide variety of applications (outside of fusion), like improved MRI machines. The ribbons have the potential to help transmit power across the grid with less losses. Significant improvements in predicting and shaping turbulence in plasma has a wide range of applications in producing more efficient engines. Using AI/ML to attack the complexity of the plasma flows that were otherwise computationally intractable.

I'm all for the LHC, but it does seem like the world needs a bit better of an idea of the mysteries that the LHC++ might solve before spending $10-$100B on it. Does seem like science could be pushed further in other areas.

Didn't CERN and LHC had big contribution already related to magnets(though maybe LHC designers don't directly apply to fusion needs) ? There are projects related to fusion too but I am expecting that people agreeing to this article will also want to remove the funding for fusion and invest it in electric cars and solar panels or his pet project.

I heard of some news in that area, but the breakthroughs I heard of where fusion related and at MIT:

https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...

From what I can tell it's really is ground breaking, significant changes, well ahead of the normal projections for improved magnets. Literally with a single technology that allows magnet to be 40 times smaller. The easy to produce superconducting tape of arbitrary length is likely to find interesting applications as well.

Sure, like all research, practical fusion is not guaranteed, but it does look promising, and real progress has been made, and not just the "few % better this year" that might lead to real progress in a decade or a few centuries.

However Fusion is just an example, imagine 100 $1B projects, doesn't it seem likely for humanity to learn more from those then some particle that is hard to produce, last for a billionth of a second, and makes some models more likely and other models less likely? Maybe help with cancer, medicine, energy production, AI, space travel, faster computers, improving food production, mitigating global warning, energy storage or similar?

If we solve physics we solve everything if we solve fusion we have solved fusion.

> If we solve physics we solve everything

A particle collider does not, in fact, "solve physics" in any meaningful way, especially not in terms of practical applicability.

> if we solve fusion we have solved fusion.

The comment you are replying to has explained in some detail why this is not true.

Why bother doing science at all if it's not practical applicable right? Such a nonsense argument I wonder how you think any scientific progress is made.

Research is never a sure thing, but ideally we'd push all areas of science equally. How many other areas of science have a $100B tool that may or may not reveal something interesting?

Why should high energy physics get priority over any other area?

It's the nature of high energy physics that the higher the energy the rarer the event. The standard model already explains our universe unbelievably accurately. Sure there are corner cases, and maybe, just maybe a LHC++ might give some evidence towards one model or another. But what happens if global warming, wars over fuel, lack of fertilizer, and lack of food makes it harder for humanity to survive let alone complete major science projects.

Renewable and/or carbon neutral energy in all it's forms seems pretty important these days compared to slightly reinforcing one physical model over another.

Maybe a fusion engine would let us explore the solar system enough to find planet 9, which might well be a black hole. That would open up particle energies well in excess of anything we could manage with LHC++.

That was a small part of my argument. That you have to concentrate on that in this way shows that you don't really have any arguments yourself.

If we solve fusion, surely we have a lot of cheap energy (and attendant economic output) to throw at solving physics?

No. It would cost far, far more to extract useful energy from fusion than using well-understood renewables.

And, we control plenty of energy. The project is to concentrate it in one spot.

What is meant by "solving fusion" if not making fusion an economically viable source of power?

And I didn't mean to suggest that available energy was the limitation on building LHC++, but rather that available economic surplus was.

In that case, fusion will never be solved, and any money spent toward that goal is money wasted.

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