Stephen Strauss takes a look at big science and comes away unimpressed. He talks about two exhibits he saw. One for the $15 billion ITER (pronounced EATER – heh) and another about neolithic technology – mat weaving, pottery making, chipping stone axes.
At the recent European Science Open Forum conference in Barcelona, for example, I was strolling through exhibits aimed at — please don’t gag — science outreach. The underlying theme of all these displays seemed to me to be: since their schooling actually teaches many ordinary people to be discomforted by — if not to actually fear and loath — science, let’s see if we can’t do something in these venues to get people to hate science a little bit less.
And why do people hate science so much? Well it is hard to understand and requires a lot of complicated math and difficult concepts. I’m pretty good with that sort of thing. I understand Einstein but the math is beyond me. String Theory? Fuhgeddaboutit. So how about neolithic technology?
Right across from ITER was an exhibit in which a group of paleo-archeologists had set up a display to show the technology of the past in operation. So you had a guy sitting cross-legged, banging away at a rock to make a hand ax. Chip, chip, and chip. You had someone else weaving plants together to make a mat. Weave, weave, and weave. Someone else was taking clay and making a pot. There was no placard asking: Hand axe making, will it always be 40 years away? There were no critics of the effort calling it a huge waste of national resources.
So what does the juxtaposition of the two very different demonstrations of technology tell us about disbelief?
To begin with, the ITER project and all hugely expensive big science efforts — think the International Space Station, think Large Hadron Collider, which recently has received a tonne of press — aren’t like making hand axes. I looked at the man diligently chipping away and realized that the price of his failure wasn’t very high. So what if it turned out the rock type you made axes from wasn’t strong enough to chop wood? You simply went back and made axes from something else until you got an ax that worked.
And you, in this case, would simply be some intrepid carver and not some large part of the Paleolithic science world.
On the other hand, if ITER fails, it is massively unlikely there is going to be another effort to correct its errors. Research on its level is simply too big and expensive and time-consuming. But what if it succeeds — but only kinda? What if its results show that you can produce energy, but that it is 10 time times more expensive than energy from other sources? What if figuring out how to make that equation more favorable will require at least three iterations of ITER?
So how should we be thinking about such projects? A little differently to be sure.
What you put in place with these vastly expensive research efforts is a “can’t afford to fail” paradigm. Unlike trying to find the best plant material to weave into a mat, ITER, the Large Hadron Collider, etc., must succeed on first go-round. With ITER, there is no second kind of rock to be chipped away, no other plants to be woven, no different type of clay to be baked into a plate.
And that’s what I so disbelieve about it. It’s not really experimental science; it’s risky, we-can’t-fail, all-or-nothing science and I would respond to that paradigm with the wisdom of stone axe makers.
Sometimes your research should be based not on how glorious success might be, but on how little you will have lost if you screw up.
So what should we be doing about fusion? Lots of small “understand the science” and “proof of concept” projects. Say 100 two million dollar efforts. About 10 twenty million dollar efforts based on the successes of the two million dollar jobs. And one or two two hundred million dollar efforts based on the promise of the $20 million efforts. Total cost of around a billion dollars a year when everything is fully ramped up. Nothing that is too big to fail and nothing where testable results are fifteen to thirty years off.
Of course I have my favorites. Here is one that I described in the Fusion Report of 29 August 2008.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
19 responses to “ITER vs The Stone Axe”
I don’t hate science, but I do hate scientists who have convinced themselves that their expertise in macro-subatomic particles or imaginary linguistic structures qualifies them as moral and political philosophers.
I really hate scientists who conduct research, usually spending looted money, in order to promote their favored legislation. Such seem to believe their status as scientists prevents our recognizing them as corrupt liars.
If he fails to make a proper axe, he may die of pneumonia because he can’t make a proper shelter. If we don’t make a proper super collider, we’ll go home, have a nice meal, watch some tele and sleep in a comfortable bed.
Why do we need fusion reactors when we have Breeder Reactors? Or smaller, safer standard reactors?
I wonder how many nukes that produce power NOW could be built with that money?
Another big issue with Fusion is the fuel source. Its not terribly dense.
Increasingly, government funded science is a jobs program.
Why do we need fusion reactors when we have Breeder Reactors? Or smaller, safer standard reactors?
I wonder how many nukes that produce power NOW could be built with that money?
Another big issue with Fusion is the fuel source. Its not terribly dense.
Increasingly, government funded science is a jobs program.
I wonder how many nukes that produce power NOW could be built with that money?
About 1/4 breeder a year.
Understanding plasma physics may have other uses than just fusion. You never know.
In any case fusion power is expected to be low cost relative to breeders if the right type of reactor can be built. In any case I’m talking about a program on the same scale as ITER with at least 10X better results.
I understand Einstein but the math is beyond me.
I suspect that you could understand the math if you spent the time. It’s just linear algebra.
Seriously, if we can make just one Higgs boson with the thing, it will be worth it, because that will unlock all sorts of doors. It would be for particle physics what the discovery of radium’s effects on photographic plates was for nuclear physics. If we cannot make any Higgs bosons with it, then the astronomically small chance of not making one in the LHC would force a re-examination the Standard Model of particle physics, and that could actually open quite a few very different doors. Even if the LHC produces nothing, that nothing is an important thing to know about.
Maybe the exhibit was trying to make the point that if we don’t get a handle en energy, we’ll be living in mud huts and chipping our own axe-heads.
I have to doubt Mr Balibar when he says “… fusion also emits neutrons that will produce helium gas bubbles inside the wall material, which tends to explode”.
On the other front, they shouldn’t be pushing this as a solution to the energy crisis. They should be pushing it as a scientific experiment with definite goals, like the Large Hadron Collider.
There is a good arguement to be made that there should be ‘separation of science and state’ for the good of science.
As to String Theory, I read one practitioner of it say we wouldn’t be able to test a theory for a hundred years….hmmm…I think that places that on the register of experimental truth somewhere far to the left of parapschyology and slightly right of theories of the Great Pumpkin.
And another side note: Just how do Classical Values and Science interact? After all, from what I hear Pagans believed in heavenly chaos, and the Romans believed in slaves, and thus neither led to Science.
nine women cannot make a baby in one month. while i agree some of these projects may be boondoggles, perhaps most of the $2,000,000 questions in plasma have been answered by now. venture capitalists have a target “check size” for this reason. they would rather place 100 $10m bets than 5,000 $200k ones because it costs time and money to manage each.
Actually we really don’t know much about plasma. The difficulty is that everything affects everything.
Magnetic fields affect charged particles. Moving charged particles create magnetic fields and all that interacts. So the moving charged particles affect the magnetic fields. And then you have all the charges interacting.
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It may be easier to watch over a fewer larger projects but if there are 100 things you need to know and you are only looking at 5 of them at a total cost equal to looking at the 100 bits then you are obviously wasting money.
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For instance – we have no idea why the sun’s corona is a a temperature many multiples of the sun’s temperature. That is definitely worth looking into and might give us some hints about how to do fusion.
Eric R. Ashley,
The Romans were very good engineers. Some of their roads have lasted 2,000 years. Checked the roads in Illinois lately?
The Romans were very good engineers.
But not scientists. With widespread slavery, the physical labor involved in say, testing out whether your new type of hand-axes are good ones is something that is considered to be the job of slaves. You can’t support a culture of experimentalism alongside a culture of slavery.
In any case, there is a role for megascience to support the sort of individual experiments you want. In some cases, this multi-billion-dollar infrastructure creates a place for thousands of scientists to explore their individual ideas that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Projects like the International Space Station and, before that, SkyLab, serve as infrastructure which allow lots and lots of scientists to design and submit experiments individually. Now, one can argue whether this is a good use of limited resources to create this infrastructure, but you are mistaken if you think that such infrastructure is antithetical to supporting the role of the individual trial-and-error experimenter. The fixed costs are quite high, but if we’re in a situation where the marginal costs of experimentation that uses this infrastructure is relatively low, then you have the potential for great scientific payoff.
Um, you do realize we’ve been doing fusion research for decades, right? It’s not like ITER just fell from the heavens, it follows from research that has been going on since the 1950s. The $2M projects have been done, the $20M projects have been done, the $200M projects have been done. Now it’s time for the multibillion dollar project. The brutal, unfortunate reality is that science is complicated and can get expensive.
Rick,
You realize that edge mode instabilities in the ITER design have been known for 20 years and that not only was there no fix but the design for a proposed fix was only added after construction had started?
ITER is not science. ITER is not engineering. ITER is a con job.
Mega projects may be needed to do space. (I have my doubts).
They are not a good way to do fusion.
The instabilities are called ELMs in the technical literature. Edge Limited Modes.
maybe this will help the discussion
http://www.vimeo.com/1431471?pg=embed&sec=1431471#success
Indeed, I do not hate science. While my high school teachers did their best to make me hate it, I really enjoy what is happening now. Sadly, i do not have the maths ability to really check what is going on.
As Brett said, the problem becomes, and largely has become, when we adopt science as a new religion. We compare everything with science, and even go as far as to say that everything needs to be scientific. The biggest insult to anything new is: uncscientific.
The reductionistic approach of science is good in some fields, not all, not EVERYWHERE as it is now. am i an individual, or just another statistic or maybe even a standard deviation of some sigma…f&ck knows – i am unscientific me!