by Doug Coulter » Thu Nov 28, 2013 4:35 pm
Well, for whatever reason, the story is the inventor got into an acrimonious battle with his source of funding - after setting what was then a record. Whether he was a jerk, or there's something important (scientific) missing, dunno - not a clue.
If electrons hang around, they are a great way to lose all your input energy into photons....
At this point, I'm pretty sure we don't even know what's going which way in a fusor, and how much, just total current flow. For example, are those negative (I think) things coming out the end of the grid electrons, D-, what? Not a hint yet.
Likely electrons, but...there's that evidence we have of losing Q as the tank walls heat up and discharge whatever D is buried there - so it's not *all* electrons...there's a lot we don't know how or why going on here - and it looks like emergent behaviour that isn't predicted/prescripted by the standard model. That doesn't mean the model won't explain it flawlessly once we know what it is - it's just that you can't get from theory to what we see - we need data on what's actually happening in there.
Understanding an ant doesn't tell you about how an ant colony works, to map the problem onto physics of charged particles. And it for certain doesn't tell you why there are ant colonies and how they fit into the big picture. The math just isn't there yet for things like that. This looks like another "one of those", to me, anyway. I've always been enamored of the idea that you'd do this with precision and subtlety, rather than brute force, since it's becoming obvious that the brute force/obvious approaches don't yield much Q, even after decades and lots of money tossed their way. So something else must be the answer if there is one. Of course, I do hope that there is one, and that one of us finds it.
This particular paper was pointed out to us by an old friend of Bill's, who used to work the field. I'm not sure whether he thought we were trying this, or if he thought we should. Might not be all that hard to try, if I can get more details on what they actually did. That strange curve-change of the trajectory tells me there's something here I don't "get", so far.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.