I'm not saying this to downplay the project (I know very little about it) but the reception among those in the field it's supposedly applicable for has been underwhelming.
The real breakthroughs that I was talking about are for time resolved and "diffract before destroy" experiments for delicate samples. Those ones can't really be done at a synchrotron with long bunches.
I'm especially excited for femtosecond time resolved measurements of chemical reactions. It's going to be so cool to watch chemical reactions occur at an atomic scale.
I guess the other cool application is that there is so much light that you can perform diffraction off of single molecules when you want your sample in solution/gas phase or can't form crystals. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that the intensity of XFELs also enabled that.
The way that the project is being sold from the structural side is that you won't need a crystal, which is obviously huge. However, there's the issue of scale, and also the classic issue of... We can't refocus diffracted X rays so we're still limited by protein we can express in a selenium doped media, since you need the selenium signal to determine phase data from the diffractions. The list of proteins that are soluble but won't crystallize/can't be resolved by Cryo-EM is pretty small, and so it's an incremental upgrade no one will have access to, at best. At least, from the structural side.
Wow, so The Big Bang Theory is actually pretty good documentary about how modern physic departments operate?
All of basic principles that underlie our everyday experiences don't need quarks and gluons. They're governed by standard quantum mechanics which was fleshed out in the 20's. However, just because we have Newton's laws of the subatomic world doesn't mean we can answer interesting scientific questions with them. I'd even say that people that call something like the standard model a "theory of everything" are a little naive since you can never use to it make predictions outside of the most simple systems.
That area (pushing ahead away from model systems) is the complexity frontier of physics and is where I'm most excited for advancements. It's where we can write out the equation that describes high-TC superconductors, but it has so many dimensions that we can't solve it and make one that works at room temperature. Is that engineering or physics? I'd call the scientific problem of figuring out the laws that emerge from quantum mechanics for these complicated systems physics.
In a similar vein, Maxwell "discovered" the free electron laser in the 1800s. He wrote down the laws of E&M and then everything in the world was solved. That's clearly a dumb way to think of it though, and the new physics that was discovered were the emergent laws that fall out of it when you apply those laws to a system of relativistic particles.
In particular, the emergent phenomena that had to be discovered for the free electron laser (FEL) was the micro-bunching instability. It's a subtle interaction between relativistic particles and a field of photons that will feedback and cause them to bunch together while dumping their energy into the field of light producing the coherent laser radiation. It was that phenomena and the realization that it could be used to create a powerful laser that are the new physics here.
On the other side, the advancement of the FEL to the point that it could make x-rays requires a lot of other new physics to create the machine. This is where there is a bit of a blurred line between physics and engineering. However, I'd still call what we're doing (developing new laws of physics that govern complex systems) physics. Just because we use them to build a machine doesn't make them engineering any more than a solid state physicist discovering a new phenomena in semiconductors and then Intel taking advantage of it in their next generation of processors.
In order to REALLY understand our physical world, we can't write down reductionist laws and say that we're done. It's also notable that the two developers of the free electron laser are rumored to be in the running for the Nobel prize in physics, so it's not just me who thinks that they are physicists, not engineers.
Edit: BTW, here is a great paper that reviews the physics that makes a free electron laser work if anyone is interested.
Huang, Z., & Kim, K.-J. (2007). Review of x-ray free-electron laser theory. Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams, 10(3), 034801. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.10.034801
Paul Dirac. The quote is:
"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation."
Consider the famous case of Student's T Distribution - it was discovered via engineering, but it is clearly work that was done in the domain of mathematics rather than engineering.
That which is new is science. That which is re-learning an old lesson is engineering.
If we want to get into the philosophical difference between engineering and physics, engineering at its core is solving problems and science is answering questions. There is obvious overlap and no clear distinction.
In contrast, it is quite hard to be a brilliant scientist without doing something novel.
That's a touch unkind of your friend ... but I think it hits the heart of the problem.
"High-energy physics" is pretty much "uniquely" physics and so is easy to describe to laymen as "physics".
Conversely, the line between something like "solid state physics" and "solid state engineering" can be really blurry (the solid state EE's and solid state physics folks at my alma mater took almost exactly the same classes at the graduate level). So it's a lot harder to describe the differences to laymen even if you point out that solid-state physics is what gave us semiconductors and computer chips.
Similarly, ITER is going to suck up a hundred billion in science funding that could have gone into a hundred $1B programs intsead of one giant one.
Shuttle is a shining example of efficiency, competence, pragmatism, and execution in comparison.
Also, ITER is a plasma physics experiment. It is being made to learn about plasma behavior. It isn’t going to fail or somehow not produce useful results before DT or high Q campaigns. A fusion reactor does not fall out of the sky. Was the V2 a failure because all it did was eat up a bunch of money and blow up a bunch of expensive equipment? No. The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison.
ITER is supposed to get break-even. Plasma experiments can better be done at smaller, much cheaper facilities (many of which already exist).
ITER, as of 2006, was supposed to be followed almost immediately by DEMO, a power plant capable of producing electricity in 2033. But now ITER is so delayed that it's almost irrelevant. In order to address climate change, we'll have to have transitioned to, say, solar and storage before the 2050s when DEMO might be built, or we'll be stuck with terrible climate consequences.
It's just insane how bad it has been. ITER is so badly delayed that it's almost certainly not going to be a key player in fighting climate change.
As for breakeven: no plasma physicist I’ve talked to see it as some amazing barrier. It is what it’s always been: a publicity thing. It gets people excited so laypeople can point and say “See! It works!” without having to dive deep into physics and economics. The real physics goals of ITER are in testing models when pushed outside of previously measured parameters. You can’t just spend $50 billion on a reactor and hope it works. That’s why increasingly large and expensive science machines are necessary. Once a design is complete you don’t need diagnostics and scientists. You just need a tritium processing facility, some HTS coils, some vessels, and some plasma heaters.
You're conflating ITER with fusion power in general. There're at least half a dozen competing approaches to fusion power with several orders of magnitude lower funding. Several of them are probably more promising than ITER, but ITER is primarily a political project, and only secondarily (at best) a physics project.
Fusion is a technology that's being pursued because it was being pursued, not because it's particularly attractive from a practical point of view.
This is not true. DEMO will not be able to breed Tritium.
Without tritium breeding, there will be no self-suffiency in term of fuel. You can't filter Tritium from sea water because it is not there - it is unstable. There is no fusion experiment which could achieve a Deuterium-Deuterium fusion within the next decades, the required densities are many orders of magnitudes away.
You can generate Deuterium by electrolysis and isotope separation of water, but to day, Tritium can only be produced in heavy-water generators. Which exist only a few in the world, and which are powered by uranium.
In theory, yes, it could be possible to breed tritium within a fusion reactor. But this is as theoretical as somebody in the 17th century saying that you could adapt a steam engine to flap wings and make it just a bit lighter to get a flying machine which could carry a few hundred people with near speed of sound across the Atlantic, at once.
DEMO not only will breed tritium, it will not be feasible without tritium breeding. Otherwise, it would not be able to operate, as it will run out of DT fuel. Even getting enough tritium to start DEMO operations will be difficult, as there will be little left after ITER is done. The primary source of tritium, heavy water power reactors, will not long survive, and even all of those would not provide enough tritium for DEMO operation without DEMO being able to make its own tritium.
The need for breeding to work at DEMO means there's going to have to be an intermediate reactor, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility, between ITER and DEMO to firm up blanket engineering.
I don't think this gets talked about much because, frankly, those in power in the fusion community will be retired by then.
But is that the fault of the scientists and engineers working on it? Or of the politicians writing the checks (and their apathy and/or conflicts of interest)?
I imagine Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters saying this to the Columbia dean as their lab is being disassembled and they are being fired.
Worse. It won't even address the question what could be the so far unknown near magic materials which a breeding blanket would need to be made of. to support sustainable Tritium re-generation, which would be needed a long time before any demonstration could be hoped to produce any electrical power.
In short, D-T fusion - the only process which can be imagined to be accessible by magnetic inclusion - needs a supply of Tritium and this needs a working Tritium breeding system, with a neutron loss factor below 1. It is completely unknown how to achieve that.
I'm not saying you're wrong btw, just that I had high hopes.
If you say solar or wind, I'll tell you not without solid state physics experiments to multiply battery capacity by at least 10x. (Not impossible, but as much pie in the sky as fusion.) Or a global electric network. Or space solar with concomitant energy sending infrastructure.
Nuclear is good for maybe 300 years. (And not exclusive with other sources.) Hydro, geothermal are nice where we can have them.
Anything else, we don't even know where to start.
Given reasonable projections of where renewables, batteries, and electrolysers will be in 10 years, one will be able to synthesize artificial baseload sources at a lower cost than nuclear fission, anywhere in the world (in some places much less). And fusion will have a very hard time being competitive even with fission.
I'm not sure you understand the scale involved. We're talking billions tons sodium. Millions tons aluminum and steel.
Hence the 10x.
If you meant sodium compounds, not sodium metal, note that annual world production of sodium chloride is about 200 million tonnes.
Oh, and about "millions of tons of aluminum and steel": 2019 world steel production was 1.89 BILLION tonnes. Aluminum production in 2018, 60 million tonnes. The world economy is very large. An energy infrastructure capable of powering that economy will also be large, be it renewable, nuclear, or unicorn power.
Sodium chloride is useful for many things beside batteries, if we were to use that as the source. Say, sulphur as well, other traces too.
10x batteries make this a no brainer and super easy to implement, and economical. Heck, 3x batteries even.
You need to make and place enough panels too, doable but needs a lot of political will. And will of course take some time as well.
I think we shouldn't put the cart before the horse though. Fix the immediate problem with a few smaller nuclear plants and work real hard on our own pace to replace them with renewables. If fusion comes in the meantime, great. In the meantime, we can use the spare resources to remove other sources of GHG vent. (Say optimize transportation.)
See the other branch on how I view fusion. I see DD or enhanced DT fusion as endgame and mostly a space technology. (Fusion engines would be rather nice. Think 50x better ion engines, the technology is related.) Few hundred years of work.
Yes, any global energy system will be extremely expensive. Trillions of dollars worth of expensive. That it is a lot of work is not a showstopper.
I don't see nuclear being part of that solution, though. Why waste money on something that is demonstrably inferior? It had its chance. We don't need to invest in losers.
Fusion is not an endgame. Fusion is bullshit. It's Rube Goldberg on stilts. From an engineering point of view, it's pretty much the opposite of attractive. Keep It Simple, Stupid is not just a slogan.
DT fusion makes no sense in space. The energy comes out as neutrons, which get turned to heat. You can make heat with fission in space much more easily, and with much less reactor mass, than you can with fusion. The notion that fusion is somehow good for space comes from science fiction more than anything. It's a trope, not a good idea.
Especially because the Tritium fuel problem is not solved, and nobody has the faintest idea how to solve it. The materials needed to breed Tritium in something different from the Sun (or thermonuclear weapons) just do not exist for now.
Not only cheap, but also sustainable.
Coal is plenty cheap.
Even redox batteries are, as you need rather pure salts. Even pump storage, cheapest option, would require tons of concrete, which means we'd have serious lime shortage. (Once we run out of natural mountains to use.) Plastics cannot be used as they're either not strong enough or require too much fossil fuels.
Any of these problems can be attacked, and they're all about as easy and solvable. Prediction would give about 40 years until that battery capacity is reached. Fusion could be there just as soon.
This is not to say we should stop developing renewables, but we need 100% clean power yesterday. Or rather 20 years ago. Currently the only open path is nuclear with enough other renewables (expected 25%-33% is doable depending on location).
We're talking gigawatthours of battery capacity installed and running per city. Even if you have everyone an electric car with best available batteries, that would maybe come close. (And the network would have to be heavily as adapted. I've accounted for battery wear and manufacturing with recycling of said batteries.)
Top end sodium-sulphur batteries would work too, in equivalent amount. (They do like 250 kWh per bank. Car lithium-ion do ~120 kWh, but you probably want to drive them in the morning.) Mind you the renewables to power them won't materialize overnight either. You get to pay energy and material to make them and modify the grid to adapt to them.
Since we're late as all hell, the only way right now is to nuclear. We can decommission it in 50 years easily enough as needed.
We had the technology to go full renewable since 80s...
That ARC reactor design, if extended to world energy demand, would require 100x known beryllium resources.
It will be very useful when we get to space, for example, unless we figure out something better. Much fewer problems with it than with nuclear up there. (Especially with getting fuel.)
I'd disagree that they are there to pump money into administrators. Some of these problems are just really hard and requires monstrously large organizations to make headway. At worst, I'd say that they are misguided/focusing on the wrong scientific questions or in the case of ITER stuck on a path that should have been abandoned a while ago.
A stellarator like Wendelstein 7-X looks like a much more promising design.
That doesn’t mean backing out of ITER 15 years ago would have been a good idea. It would be an even worse idea to back out of it now.
That said, I do recollect mostly condescending attitudes from the HEP folks.
After finishing my Ph.D., I moved on to a successful career with building, deploying, supporting supercomputers, and the codes that run on them. My friend meanwhile, wound up working in condensed matter physics, modeling semiconductors (which is what I wrote my thesis on) for a large chip company.
It seems reality sometimes has a sense of humor.
I'm really looking forward to what XFEL can do for material science. Perhaps we can finally replace plastics with something like eutectic systems, bulk metallic glass, or the classic transparent aluminum.
This is because all observations are theory-laden. They don’t tell you anything without a framework to interpret them in.
> physics has a communication problem
It puzzles me how in 2020 it's still common to believe that the world is a fully deterministic place. That kind of proves that the results stay inside Universities despite a lot of popular science publications.
Solid state phishing sees some advances, but they are not earth shattering, compared to biology. The day where there will be a substance you put on a cavity of a tooth and it cleans the wound and settles will be something worth of news (that's just an example).
At some point, with limited funding, one must make a choice on "fundamental studies" and study what has a chance of having a practical use.
Just in case : I have a PhD in particle physics done at CERN and I regret not having taken a field which makes more sense than such impractical studies.
I got told that by a professor when I was looking at PhD options, I ended up in the maths department physics group because it was much nicer.
It's an odd kind of self selection. People who aren't there to feel smart don't sign up for the course so high energy theoretical physics gets ever more filled with insufferable assholes.
Not to say that the whole group was, but while every other group had the one token dickhead everyone avoided it seemed that the high energy theoretical group was run by them and the non-dickheads in the group were barely tolerated and mainly there to boost citations.
This is not rhetorical. There are some works for which there is a concrete positive answer (which might not be simple). But there is much more for which the answer is simply nothing.
I left the field years ago because it was clear that most of the work being done is not physics.
For instance, in just this decade human kind turned on the first x-ray free electron laser and increased the state of the art in the brightness of x-ray sources by 10 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE!!! I'm not sure I can fully explain how transformational that level of improvement was because I work on the accelerator side, not the user side. But, at least understand that there are entire subfields that now exist which didn't before. Not just physics, but in biology, chemistry, materials science, and numerous other fields. It's an instrument so powerful that every other scientifically advanced nation is now building their own. That instrument was developed by physicists and not high energy physicists.
I feel that this also gets at a sort of toxic notion that I've noticed some high energy physicists in my own department have (not all, but you probably know the people that I'm talking about). The notion is that if you aren't working on 12 dimensional quantum theories of gravity or the holographic principle and black hole physics, then you aren't a real physicist. Somehow they think that if your work has a real world impact, then it's tainted in some way. I'm not sure how it's gotten this way, but I've actually been told as much by another grad student that my field should be moved to the engineering department because we aren't doing real physics.