Source: www.schneier.com – Author: Bruce Schneier
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not important • July 25, 2025 7:22 PM
“Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you
collect it.” ~ Mark Twain
@ALL Have a good weekend!
Clive Robinson • July 25, 2025 10:19 PM
@ Bruce,
When you lookup “stellarator” on Wikipedia you get,
“It is one of many types of magnetic confinement fusion devices. The name “stellarator” refers to stars because fusion mostly occurs in stars such as the Sun.”
There is a little bit of irony there… Because “stars” achieve and maintain the conditions for “fusion” not by “magnetic confinement” but by the constriction effects of “gravity”.
The fun thing to note is that “magnetic confinement” has never achieved sustainable fusion.
Some think it never will because it is not stable. That is magnetic confinement is an external force that “pushes in”. Rather than gravity which is effectively an internal force that “pulls in” which is stable.
I suspect none of us reading this today will be around when sustainable stable fusion goes into commercial production of electricity or other way to efficiently transmit energy to the home etc.
So up there in the Unobtainium stakes along with AGI, Quantum Computing, World Peace and day trips to Mars 😉
lurker • July 26, 2025 1:28 AM
@Clive
When you lookup “stellarator” on Wikipedia you see –
pictures of star-shaped objects, surely difficult to contain magnetic fields within. And further irony, they should have known back then, that such magnetic containment as exists in the sun is unstable and leaks frequently, hurling blobs of solar material at us, causing pretty lights in the sky and comms and nav blackouts …
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Original Post URL: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/07/friday-squid-blogging-stable-quasi-isodynamic-designs.html
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