Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [142]
59
See appendix.
60
A joule is a measure of energy that is related to the watt, which is a measure of power. A 100-watt lightbulb, for example, consumes 100 joules of energy every second. Ten thousand joules isn’t a lot of energy—the amount consumed by a 100-watt lightbulb in less than two minutes—but poured into such a tiny space and over such a short time it becomes a considerable amount of power. And it takes much more than 10,000 joules of energy to produce a laser beam that powerful.
61
Some of the support was unwanted. The conspiracy theorist and presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche was a big supporter of fusion power, and founded an organization, the Fusion Energy Foundation, to support the cause. According to LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review, the foundation was shut down in the late 1980s after a long campaign of harassment by British and Israeli intelligence operatives. According to most other sources, the foundation was shut down when the government went after LaRouche for mail fraud. (He was convicted in 1988.)
62
The dedication ceremony went on as planned, even though the project had been cancelled weeks before. “I thought I was going to a wake,” said one of the ceremony’s attendees.
63
Some wags noted that ITER (pronounced “eater”) was a frighteningly apt name for the device.
64
In 1999, Holt was elected to Congress as the representative for Princeton’s congressional district.
65
At one point, Holt displayed a graph showing life expectancy and energy consumption: the more energy a society consumes, the longer its people live—implying that societies should boost their energy output. Of course, this is a causation-correlation fallacy. A highly industrialized society consumes more power, and it has longer life expectancies because it has better medical care. The increased power consumption doesn’t cause the increased life expectancy, even though the two are correlated.
66
If the fuel is a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the results are even worse; there are more neutrons, and they have more than five times as much energy: 14.1 MeV instead of 2.45 MeV. Advanced fuels, such as ones based on fusing boron-11 with protons or helium-3 with itself, could reduce this neutron problem dramatically, but right now, these are a pipe dream.
67
That way, when we reported about a manuscript that was appearing in Science, as we often did, we would not be influenced by the opinions of the editorial side of the journal. We could criticize an article in our own magazine’s pages or refuse to cover it, regardless of the opinions of Science’s scientific editors.
68
It wasn’t too hard to inquire about the paper without causing any leaks. Just the fact that I was from Science meant that reviewers knew I was likely calling about the Taleyarkhan paper, while those who had not heard of the manuscript would assume that I was calling about something else.
69
Some scientists had a low opinion of Kennedy, a biologist and environmental scientist, long before he arrived at Science. While president of Stanford University in the early 1990s, he was pilloried by Congress and the press for an accounting scandal having to do with Stanford’s research accounts. I think that much of the criticism of Kennedy is unfair, but he was forced out as president, and many in the scientific community blamed him for increased government regulations and scrutiny on their funding. A decade had passed since his resignation, but some in the scientific community still bore him a grudge.
70
Polywater is another notorious case of pathological science from the 1960s. Russian scientists claimed they had found a new form of water, one more viscous than ordinary water. Scientists studied the phenomenon for a while before deciding that the viscosity was caused by contamination.
71
AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the scientific society that publishes Science.
72
I didn’t appear on TV. When I got the first call, I contacted Don Kennedy, telling him that I’d be willing