Fusion would be similar.
Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more compute power will give them back than ?
It is called a paradox because seeing it in action usually catches people by surprise. And this is true whether you're talking about the consumption of coal to power factories, or the consumption of electricity to power computing (and in each case the myriad of new uses that efficiency promoted).
In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle. You see that in Asimov's work, in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and so on. Basically nobody anticipated ubiquitous computing. For instance in the Foundation series you see that a computer run by the Second Foundation can predict the future course of history...and people are calculating their courses with slide rules.
As for the killer app of computing, email, I'm only aware of one pre-1970 work correctly anticipating what it would be actually like. (James H. Schmitz has a memorable scene in one of his Telzy stories where she catches up on her messages at a terminal. He doesn't say "email", but the scene is notable for unobtrusively getting it right.)
Now compare with Franchise, Jokester, All the Troubles of the World, The Last Question and many more stories that feature as a plot device a very powerful centralized computer named Multivac. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac for a more complete list.)
How the same mind could have come up with the idea of androids with positron brains following the three laws of robotics, and yet missed pocket calculators baffles me.
In many ways we're doing that exact thing. The computer at my desk is powerful but somewhat useless; the grand oracle in the form of Google et. al. does the real heavy lifting of giving me useful information. Whether it's a single computer or a bunch of separate ones acting as a whole is pretty immaterial in that sense.
For example, in 1964, the ATLAS computer went fully online in Manchester, England. It was the most powerful computer in the world, took up a floor of a university, and the word “supercomputer” was invented to describe it.
The requirements for the Apollo Guidance Computer were to make something with those approximate specs, but take up only 24×12.5×6.5 inches (61×32×17 cm), use 55 watts of power and be ready to fly in 1967. It was a crazy, impossible task.
I’m convinced the AGC was the biggest computing advance after the move general purpose computers.
"Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more electric power will give them back than ?"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgO4HtWIJjQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape
It was just an enormous challenge to build this thing. Things like building and validating the field coils required a lot of effort and some novel approaches that they had to come up with along the way.
Source for that?
Looking at the German Wikipedia entry, the HELIAS method was invented in the late 80s. I don't see anything about the 7-X design actually having been computed back then. In fact, even the 2002 experiment Wendelstein 7-AS wasn't fully optimised.
Also, Tokamaks were invented in the 1950s. JET started operating in 1983. ITER was proposed in 1987. Given even just a little bit of path-dependency, there really wasn't any realistic overlap.
This paper published in 92 mentions that the 7-X was being designex at that time. I remember having seen images of the proposed field coil configuration in 91 or 92. So I might have bern off by a few years. But the plans must have bern complete for the project start in 1994.
I do research at W7-X, so I can confirm that to the best of my knowledge, the design was computed a long time ago. Building the actual device took a while.
Would you happen to know what kind of compute power was required? Was it run on a colleague's PC or workstation or did it require supercomputer time?
By the way, the unusual shapes of the coils can be understood intuitively from this picture: https://imgur.com/a/Bq3ABfQ. A plasma needs to be confined with a magnetic field in order to be heated to extreme temperatures, and a toroidal field (produced by the currents in the red coils) is unstable due to particle orbit drifts. You need to add a twist to the field for it to be stable (using the green coils). But if you unroll the surface of the torus, you can approximate the currents in both green and red coils using the discrete blue coils, and they're easier to build.
[1] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.860481 [2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/27/5/018...
http://epsppd.epfl.ch/Sofia/pdf/P4_192.pdf
Alas, it "just" seems to talk about extending the coil design for a reactor, not the rest. I am guessing most of that would be similar as for other fusion reactors, see for example MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy:
Though I don't really understand the significance of the "pebbles" in this system.
> the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power.
does not square with Wikipedia:
> Stellarator ... The first Model A started operation in 1953 ...
It wasn't the computational revolution that made SpaceX possible, the basic technology is more or less the same as it was in the 60s. The Merlin engine has it's roots in the '90s NASA Fastrac design, evolved for performance and reusability.
SpaceX's success relates to things like market incentives, lean business practices, a fail early and iterate quickly attitude as opposed to "too big to fail" public projects, and so on.
I refer to Friction Stir Welding, the wonderful technique that welds aluminum alloys by plastic deformation below their actual melting points.
The landing algorithms for the F9 first stage make use of advances in optimization algorithms that weren't available 40 years ago as well (as well as exploiting faster processors).
I think it's also possible that technological process happens in fits and starts instead of at a continuous or even a continuously changing rate. Often there's an individual discovery that leads to a spurt of innovation that consists mostly of applying that singular discovery to different problems.
For example:
* The late 19th and early 20th century saw very fast innovation in vaccines and antibiotics, because the discovery of effective vaccines and antibiotics was general enough to solve entire classes of problems all at once. It seems like a lot of innovations all at once when you manage to find extremely effective treatments against polio, smallpox, measles, syphilis, chlamydia, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, etc., etc., etc., but really that was just from a couple of extremely general inventions playing themselves out.
* Steam engines led to large-scale mechanization while electrical power led to small-scale mechanization in two relatively fast and concentrated chunks. In both cases, the invention of a general technique for powering machines led to lots and lots and lots of machines.
* Marconi's wireless telegraph was invented in 1896, leading to different varieties of radio, television, and radar.
* Airplanes might be another example. I don't want to dismiss the huge difference between a Wright Flyer and a Boeing 737, but "make the airplane out of aluminum" and "have a tube that the crew and passengers can be inside of" are both pretty obvious improvements once you've figured out large-scale manufacturing and the Bayer process, both of which we had ahead of time. I guess jet engines were another breakthrough, although we kind of had them already and they're basically just rockets except they consume oxidizer from the air instead of carrying their own.
* Rockets. There were less than three decades between the V-2 and the moon because it turns out "building a big rocket" is the hard part. OK, there are a lot of other hard parts to landing on the moon, but they're hard in the way that they're achievable by any sufficiently well-funded and motivated group of people with rockets, but nearly impossible without rockets. As you point out, Falcon 9 is significantly more advanced in certain ways than Saturn V, but the low-hanging fruit was reaped by Werner von Braun.
* Computers: just like the Saturn V is basically a very, very, very large V-2 and so is the Falcon 9, we're basically using very, very, very large (logically large; physically small) versions of the computers we had in the 1970's. The fundamental discoveries in computing are all basically done; the rest is just playing itself out. The reason it seemed to take longer to play itself out is because computers are a self-compounding invention: you can use computers to design computers, and you can use better computers to design better computers. Also, having computers makes a lot of other things easier, so you get a lot of innovation from that, too.
Fusion, promisingly enough, also seems to be one of those technologies that will just unlock a bunch of really, really powerful innovations, seemingly all at once, because of how many problems we could solve by just throwing lots and lots and lots of energy at them. (Some discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pmgr6FtYcY . Also, the excellent book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" develops rough upper bounds on the amount of sustainable energy that the UK could produce and the amount of energy the UK consumes, ultimately leading to the bar graph Figure 18.1 here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml. Later discussion of nuclear fusion places the same bar graph, to scale, next to the sustainable level of fusion power production on Figure 24.17 here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_173.shtml.)
At the same time, it's amazing how computing is helping every single field there. Even if the core discoveries are already made, the efficiency gains in the recent decades are tremendous:
* Classic windmills vs modern aerogenerators
* Analog transmissions vs highly multiplexed, high bandwidth digital transmissions
* First modern passenger planes vs more aerodynamic, more efficient planes
* Straight jet engines vs turbofans
* Saturn V vs Falcon 9 & Falcon Heavy
* Mainframes vs modern computing devices
We live in an era of refinement, where the old discoveries are being improved in ways that enable new uses that were in the realm of science-fiction not so long ago.
You should do a Netflix series, Phil!
Plus: GPS, Combustion Engine, The Web / Networking, Plastics/Chem revolution, and maybe soon AI?
Edit: found Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
Personally, I think one of the answers to "tech seems to have stalled" is that it's easy to underestimate how important cheap computational power is, even without "AI", to moving forward. For another example, as fantastic as the 1960s space projects may have been, I think they just weren't economically sustainable, so it isn't that amazing that they didn't become a self-sustaining industry right away. I think it's easy to look at SpaceX and say "Gee, there's nothing that we couldn't have done there fifty years ago", but again, I suspect you miss just how much of the Falcon rocket is a result of extensive cheap computation abilities. Even if you could use modern computers to produce a design that could have worked fifty years ago, there's still not necessarily a practical path to that design using only tech from fifty years ago. (And of course the Falcon is full of stuff that couldn't exist fifty years ago.)
Modern tokamak designs are of course run through all kinds of computations nowadays too (because everything is), but the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power.