Prometheus Fusion Perfection

Today I start my new full-time job as CEO of Prometheus Fusion Perfection.  Set the controls for the heart of the Sun.

Just noticed Wolfram|Alpha has launched. So far: 2+2 = FAIL. I imagine their servers are overloaded from the world’s curiosity.

I’ll reserve judgement until I actually get some answers back!

UPDATE: false alarm.

I’m toying with idea of buying this decommissioned MRI to extract it’s superconducting cable. I’ve spoke with a few people at Philips to gauge the feasibility of the idea. So far nobody knows. Extreme recycling.

I’ve moved to a cheaper short term (one month) apartment to reduce my burn rate. Also did away with most of my personal possessions to keep light and mobil. So now the lab is my home base. I’ve got it setup:

I must return my work laptop soon, so I got a new macbook with 4G RAM, you can see on the desk.

Just read this excellent talk You and Your Research by Richard Hamming.

It’s an inspiring read. Some excerpts:

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to. 

I think that if you look carefully you will see that often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset.

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer.

If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?

It is a poor workman who blames his tools  the good man gets on with the job, given what he’s got, and gets the best answer he can.

it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it

Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together

You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer

The appearance of conforming gets you a long way

By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help

Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative. I have already given you several examples, and there are many, many more; how, given the situation, by changing the way I looked at it, I converted what was apparently a defect to an asset

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

Kinda made my day actually!

Whenever I tell people about this project, I invariably get the question

“are you building this thing in your apartment?”

Now I can answer NO.

Still working out the details, but it looks like my friend Stuart is going to sublet me space in his machine shop to actually build the reactor. Stuart engineers and builds robots for NASA, is absolutely brilliant with fabrication, and is one cool individual.

Just being there will help me succeed. Did I mention it’s incredibly well equipped?

I’m excited. I feel like I really have a shot at this.

I’m on twitter: famulusfusion

Another nice projection of the superconducting coils: