If they have a good result, they should publish it in a peer reviewed journal with all the details.
There were quite a few results in the last two decades that were announced by a press conference and turned out to be completely false.
And I'm not even taking about the details of this specific result.
Press conferences are not
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVSJLUIQrA0
BICEP2 was a respected scientific collaboration, and it ended up like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iasqtm1prlI
The even took a touching video of one of the participants notifying the theorist that predicted the result about their achievement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA
Just a two off the top of my mind.
I am inclined to believe a publication unless other plasma physicist come out with a contradictory information.
It's easy to be cynic...
The minimum is to wait for the publication.
Even then, scientific skepticism is the rule, not the exception. Especially in fields that are price to hype.
You can mess with stats and so on ( especially in social fields ), but it may be nigh impossible to present results in energy field that are not replicable and still claim a win.
Are we being distracted from something?
Also two observations to be optimistic: it seems that the sensors were damaged because it exceeded its specifications (so we only know the lower bound of the produced power), and the NIF laser is old (which means it's inefficient). The only (skeptical) worry is that this announcement might lead to another fraud positive investigation event a la Ninov or Schön. I honestly hope not.
Basically, the very big and undeniable shit hits you, immediately, right now, with regularity, while the hypothetical bits of maybe good news always are touted as breakthrough even though they will just be "for some times later".
Also, if I read the few cheerful comments correctly, this type of fusion basically means that ITER is a waste of time (so the lesson is, even in science, "internationnal cooperation ? shmooperation".)
Also, it's depressing to know that I'm too dumb to really help in any of the good fights, but that I'm constantly contributing to the shit.
So, yeah, kudos to the researchers, let them keep up the good work, but, maybe, only call it a "breakthrough" and have the press conference when it lights a bulb somewhere ?)
This just seems like an argument against transparency in research which I think is the wrong direction to take things since it's more helpful to the overall direction of research to publish incremental results so others can build on them sooner. You may be misconstruing the reporting of small, incremental steps as something akin to crying wolf when really you're just seeing all the hard work that goes into solving big problems that eventually produces "very big undeniable shit". It's all part of the same thing, small steps move you towards a big goal, it's hard to get as excited about them as it is about the final product but you can't have the latter without the former.
Sorry if that sounded this way. As I said, "kudos to the researchers". They probably have good reasons to be happy, and we can cheer them for that - but the expections for the word "breakthrough" to be used for the layman are not met, sorry.
Does ignition fall into the same category? We'll see
Maybe the pandemic that we completely failed to handle ? The "breakthrough" vaccines / meds that kinda help but don't solve the issues as much as "we got lucky at the mutation lottery this time, but wait until millions of Chinese breed the next variant" ?
The war in Europe that was "never supposed to happen anymore because it would be insane because trade etc..." and yet... just does ?
The energy crisis that will be "solved" by piling coal on top of not reducing emissions ?
The fires and floods that can't be dealt with because it would be "catering to liberal propaganda ?"
Social media burning the minds of a generation, including the mind of the one guy that was kinda inspirational once in a while, but is now going the full "James bond vilain" road ?
Now, don't get me wrong, none of this is "new", "unprecedented", "the end of the world", etc... All of this shall pass, and in the long run, somewhere in the distant future, the small steps will accumulate to create a vague form of "good news".
Someday, an actual fusion reactor will be ready to light a bulb. And then...
...then, you'll get protests and FUDs and corruption and NIMBYism to make sure the plant opens somewhere else.
I would suggest reflecting on that, I do not think the things you are naming are unique.
mRNA vaccines were absolutely a breakthrough therapy.
Oh I wholeheartedly agree that it's neither unique, nor new, nor the first or last times we fucked things up. My pronouns are pessimistic/stoic/sleepy.
> mRNA vaccines were absolutely a breakthrough therapy.
...a "breakthrough" that was incorrectly touted a fix for the pandemic, that would also be used to cure all disease, etc... (Again, not by the researchers themselves, but by pretty much everyone else.)
In the end, it definitely bought time for the elderly (and unhealthy), until Omicron actually changed the game.
If we had not got this particular mutation "winning ticket", given the disappointing efficiency of mRNA vaccines on infection and transmission, I'm unfortunately convinced that we would still have to show proof of a recent vaccination to get a coffee. (And since I'm in a particularly bad mood, let's not talk about the long term societal effects of mandates and restrictions and penalization of "not blindly trusting your government", which will reveberate.)
At least, we learnt that "maaaaybe it's worth testing our medecines on the half of humanity that has a functioning uterus" [1], which is a "breakthrough discovery" that almost arrived _after_ nuclear fusion.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/vaccine-trials-...
The big results do not come right away. But they tend to follow an unexpected result, especially one that involves new or state of the art methods.
Bohr's atom was wrong in every conceivable way and yet it is one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of all tine.
In mathematics, even the slightest advance can be monumental if it involves progress in an area using new techniques.
Optimization is a separate problem which depends on a small improvement to unleash the flood gates of research, investment, and let's face it: greed and ambition.
This may turn out to be no improvement at all: just an indication that with enough power and energy, we get a slight energy payback. Or, this may be a method that can be greatly improved. We'll see.
For me, this is why science, math, and engineering are so exciting!