DIY Nuclear Fusion Device

[KennyR]

I heard about the collapsing bubble fusion theory quite some time ago. It was discredited - but then again, anyone who sets out to present cold fusion to the academic world is discredited from the start and really needs to work hard to open eyes.

I'm afraid I'm just as skeptical. The energies that are needed to fuse two nuclei together are absolutely staggering - even at the billions of atmospheres pressure and millions of kelvin, its unlikely to ever happen - just the sheer number of them in a stellar core means it happens often enough to form a chain reaction. The conditions for fusion just can't exist in everyday matter, just in plasma at collosal energies. There is no easy route to fusion, no matter how clever.

That said, there's no such thing as free energy either. I heard a theory about gathering transient energy from the vacuum, but unless we want the speed of light to start taking a tumble and making the universe fall apart, we better leave that alone...

[KennyR]

Quixote wrote:
You're right, the academic world is very quick to discredit anything new, even without viewing the evidence.

No, that's too general. Rather, they're quick to doubt anything that goes too far against already known and proven principles. It's a conditioning that science has gained out of necessity - there is usually an overwhelming probability that theories that go against such known principles are actually wrong. There are very few cases where things have gone otherwise. Even Relativity did not totally disprove Newton, for instance, even though it rewrote physics.

Those are just the environmental conditions under which fusion cannot help but happen. To make fusion happen on demand is just a matter of finding a clever enough methodology. Of course, no one said finding the correct method would be easy.

There is no environment in which fusion can't help but happen. Even in the core of stars, with all that energy and pressure, it's very, very rare for nuclei to fuse. But when you have a trillion trillion nuclei and a one in a trillion trillion chance of fusing...