Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [105]
On November 21, 2006, representatives of the seven ITER partner states signed the formal agreement. Everybody took the opportunity to wax poetic about what fusion power meant for the future. French president Jacques Chirac bubbled about ITER as a “hand held out to future generations”:
The ambition is huge! To control nuclear fusion. To control the tremendous amount of energy generated at one hundred million degrees and to design sufficiently resistant materials for the purpose. To produce as much energy from a litre of seawater as a litre of oil or a kilo of coal.
It is a glorious vision. Unlimited energy—a tiny star bottled in a magnetic jar—would liberate mankind from the fear of global warming and from the impending energy crisis.
If ITER fails, it will probably mean the end of tokamaks. The likelihood of using magnets to confine and heat a plasma would seem slimmer than ever. However, there’s no reason to assume that ITER, like generations of machines before it, will be a disappointment. If nothing goes wrong, ITER will begin experiments in 2018 or so.80 And if ITER works as planned when scientists turn it on, it will light the way to a fusion reactor. If, miraculously, no more instabilities crop up that prevent scientists from bottling their plasma, fusion energy will be within reach. Scientists would then build a demonstration fusion power plant that would begin operations in 2035 or 2040. After five decades of broken promises, lies, delusions, and self-deception, it will finally be true. Fusion energy will be thirty years away.
CHAPTER 10
THE SCIENCE OF WISHFUL THINKING
When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!
—WILLIAM JAMES, “THE WILL TO BELIEVE”
We see what we want to see. That is why science was invented.
Science is little more than a method of tearing away notions that are not supported by cold, hard data. It forces us to discard ideas that we cherish. It eliminates some of our hopes, some of our dreams, and some of our wishes. This is why science can be so soul crushing to even its most devoted adherents.
Every scientist, at least on some level, has a vision of the way nature should behave. Every scientist, at least on some level, is wrong. And that means that scientists, sometimes subtly and sometimes unsubtly, occasionally try to wrestle the scientific narrative in the wrong direction. Like the mythmakers of old, they try to craft nature in their image.
The true power of science comes from its ability to withstand the wishful thinking of the humans who craft its stories. Individual scientists err. They deceive themselves—and they can deceive others. They might even lie or cheat in an attempt to win fame or glory or immortality. But the whole point of the scientific method is to try to insulate the scientific story from the whims and frailties of the scientists who write it.
The mechanisms of science are, essentially, protection against wishful thinking. This protection takes many forms, but the strongest come from the scientific community itself. Published scientific research is peer reviewed and vetted by rivals