[willis936]

In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.

[ggm]

Totally agree with this bit. The alarm bells about these ones are pretty huge.

[Khelavaster]

The fusion tractor's control system needs far more EM signal processing and optics than we understood util recently.

[willis936]

You don’t really need a serious amount of computation even for tokamak feedback systems. The computers of the 90s are adequate. Most other confinement machines (magnetic or otherwise) don’t even need feedback. It’s just bog standard industrial automation/control.

We’ve been on the ball for optics for a long time now. Where computation really comes in handy is in simulation and optimization. Plasma physics is still a very unfinished field and computation is a very valuable tool in speeding up the theory <-> experiment loop.

[tragomaskhalos]

The "quintessence" bit was a bit of a red flag wasn't it

[Khelavaster]

Not at all--https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics)

[Gurathnaka]

I would be careful with that one. 'Dark Energy' has been in this weird grey area for a while now, where we have this observation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but we have no explanation. There have been a lot of hypothetical explanations. Seems like Quintessence is just one of them.

Recently there has been growing doubt that expansion of the universe is accelerating at all, favoring that it's constant. That would completely undermine this Quintessence thing.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-evidence-key-assumption-discov...