News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor by ben_w on Friday October 11, 2019 @07:18AM (#21223245)
I can’t quite work out what they’re doing here.

> According to the patent, Pais’ plasma chamber contains several pairs of these dynamic fusors, which rapidly spin and vibrate within the chamber in order to create a “concentrated magnetic energy flux” that can squish the gases together.

If you will excuse the analogy, this sounds a bit like an electromagnetic equivalent to a Lagrange point. Is that a reasonable comparison for me to make?

Re:The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor by ShinyRice on Friday October 11, 2019 @07:40AM (#21223349)
They're both points of equilibrium; Lagrange points are both stable (like a ball rolling in a half-pipe) and unstable (like a pencil standing on its tip) equilibriums. A stable equilibrium means that when an object in that point is displaced, it starts oscillating around that point, and unstable means that an object at that point, when displaced, will uncontrollably move away from it, unless you push it back onto that point.

Well, the Newtonian gravitational potential is far more simple to deal with than something like super hot plasma confined by a strong magnetic field. But yeah, you typically do not want that moving around the place, so I presume it's a stable equilibrium.

Re:The Navy's Patent for a Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor by noodle_face_ on Friday October 11, 2019 @09:21AM (#21224060)
Does the reasoning behind it all seem to make sense, or does it seem like meaningless sci-fi word-salad? I don't understand enough to know.