Physicists began to be taken seriously by the public after Einstein became a popular figure and atomic bombs began to be made. Then they were supposed to create abundant cheap power from nuclear energy, but a funny thing happened on the way to the future - people got scared of nuclear plants and we stopped building them. We relied on oil, and as that suffered price shocks in the 70s and now again today, the news oracles and various activists increased their demand for alternatives.
While alternate energy schemes like windmills, hydrogen burning cars, and solar cells continue to be promoted by the mainstream media, one hopeful technology has fallen by the wayside - fusion energy.
Decades ago fusion energy was touted as the next best thing on a large scale to replace fission energy - nuclear power plants. Billions were spent on building gigantic tokamak devices which resembled titanic donuts. The basic idea was to bottle pellets of hydrogen in a magnetic vise, hit the pellet with an enormous amount of energy until the hydrogen fused releasing what the sun does that would then be converted into electricity.
As opposed to nuclear fission, fusion was going to be clean and non-radioactive. It was also abundant beyond imagination. It was big Manhattan Project style science. Government, politicians, and universities loved it. It was pure pork. The stuff a lifetime of lucrative grants was dreamed on.
It didn't work, of course. The thresholds of energy that went into it hardly came out. Nor was it as clean as advertised. And what came out was heat. Not electricity. Conversion always means a dramatic step down in efficiency.
Little noticed among energy scientists and physicists then (and now, sad to say) was a process described by physicist Eric Lerner in his book in 1991. (I'll reveal the title later. It helps explain the obscurity of his research.)
Lerner had been studying the work of Nobel prize winner Hannes Alfven who was pioneering our understanding of the fourth state of matter, plasma, and how it acted in the universe through plasma vortexes, cyclones in space (but incredibly slower and larger). Enormous sheets of ionized gases spread across galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and super-clusters of clusters were generating force through electro magnetic energy and organizing matter from the macro to the micro.
Those fields of plasma were little accounted for since their energy is extremely low and their actions are immensely slow. They take billions of years to organize matter into coherent forms such as suns and planets.
Plasmas generate filaments of electricity much as you see in those energized purple glass balls which start shooting out jagged streams of light when you touch the glass. In this case, though, those filaments in space create a plasma vortex which organizes matter and reach across distances almost too vast to imagine.
One of the results of this research into plasma physics was an eventual understanding of how to generate plasma filaments in a way that would make the filaments spread out from a center like a donut and then turn back inside to the original center. Where the filaments met, a condition called a plasmoid was formed. Sort of like a knot. This knot caused an instability to occur which built up enormous force in a tiny place. When that force is expelled, it shoots two high energy beams in opposite directions. One is electrons, the other is ions. With electrons, you get electricity. Voila!
This is called a plasma focus because the plasma's lines of energy get focused into the plasmoid where the amazing event occurs. The idea came from looking at how quasars work according to plasma theory and then scaling it down to a small device that would duplicate it.
Lerner's book detailing all of this and a number of other things did not win him many friends in physics, though. It was titled, John Mark Butterworth is ma
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