…I can’t help but get oogy when I read something like “scientists plan to ignite a tiny, man-made star.”
Look, I know how fusion energy theoretically is supposed to work and I know that the “star” will be tiny and not innately self-sustaining. But even so, scientists really have to come up with a better way to explain fusion energy, because I’m the sort of person predisposed to be on their side, and when I hear “we’re going to ignite a star right here on Earth,” my gut reaction is “places to ignite a star that would be better than Earth = anywhere else in the galaxy.”
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Oddly, that sort of thing makes me support a project MORE.
I guess I just love really bad ideas.
They’ve actually done things like this a number of times before.
Even RJ Brande isn’t dumb enough to do that!
Meh, it is a standard stunt in science, sadly. If you can grab headlines, you can grab sweet money. I recall a scientist explaining how his team had released some research results in a pretty honest way. No one was interested.
Then they released the same result, claiming that they had found “The Finger of God” and THEN they got their press coverage and, of course, the sweet money.
A friend of mine is a professional journalist, who is rare in the respect that he has real scientific knowledge, having in fact studied molecular biology once. He tells me that no one among the papers he has worked dares to write about science, because the journalists do not understand squat, and they risk damaging their credibility. Therefore, they go for this pop with easy headlines.
In short…I don’t really blame the scientists.
They can put the star in the tiny black hole the LHC will make! Problem solved! I misremember, was it here I first heard the LHC rap?