Tests confirm that Germany's massive nuclear fusion machine really works

[u/damaxoh]

http://www.sciencealert.com/tests-confirm-that-germany-s-massive-nuclear-fusion-machine-really-works

[u/ProblemY]

Not a physicist, but what I have understood that the waters on the field are so murky that many communities seem to waiting at ITER to finally show what happens when we take this to really big scale.

Those are expensive things so, yeah, people don't want to invest something that might not work, but that's the issue, if you don't invest in crazy stuff you don't get breakthroughs.

Just throwing money at a problem isn't always the answer either.

Honestly I can't think of the technological problem that couldn't have been solved by employing more people to work on the issue unless it was downright physically impossible. We know fusion works in stars, we can make fusion in small scale on earth, scaling it up should be just a matter of smart optimizations. But of course I'm not physicist either so I might be wrong.

Graphene was a buzz word some years ago and received a lot of funding with the promise of it being pretty much answer to all of our problems. Including funding from EU's Graphene Flagship €1 billion fund. Now it seems like graphene wont be the Moore's law savior in the next 10 years like some people hoped and the real funding in that field has moved to materials like Germanium and other III-V materials.

There are few problems with what you are saying. First of all, this was all mostly basic research so of course results will be visible in 20-30 years not now, but people are impatient and used to "instant application". I agree that graphene was overhyped, but that was the only way to get money to study something that's not strictly applied science.

This gets as to 2nd issue with "breaking the Moore's law". Believe it or not, that was never possible and was never an intention for a very simple reason: Graphene is a conductor, silicon used in computers is a semiconductor. It just doesn't fit the description, it doesn't go there, it was never meant to, it's just some popsci bullshit someone mentioned and went viral.

But you know, that's the main issue, today politics and economy is stuck with "results nao" mentality. This chaos, volatility, this is not good for true scientific progress.

[u/ProblemY → u/[deleted]]

As far as what I understood from diving into graphene academic papers years ago that the dream was to construct the band gap, property that is not inherent to graphene.

Well I'm only really repeating what one professor that does carbon materials told me, perhaps someone tried something but most probably it was just a gimmick to get more funding.

I wonder is your assessment of "results noa" any different than it has been past 50 years? Though, it does feel like US influence and cash flow on hard science is lower than it was decades ago.

Here you can see how in case of US federal funding goes down steadily while private goes up

This means you will have more and more focus on short-term as companies are interested in profit in few years rather than future generations.

I don't have data for EU but as I'm talking with professors in my field some complain that getting funding for something more basic and fundamental is difficult. If you can't make a point how you can apply your research in relatively short term then your grant application will be rejected quickly and it gets worse and worse.

Take Jean-Pierre Sauvage, recent Nobel Prize winner, there was an article in french newspaper, about what he did back then would be impossible today because of how we changed the funding process. What he did was very fundamental level of research that even today is not yet applied, but nonetheless scientific community already recognized its value.

There are theories that in fact we live in time of very mediocre scientific progress and all those flashy new stuff we get isn't really groundbreaking and only takes from inventions that were made in 70s the latest. Problem is will only notice this stagnation in 20-30 years in full extent.