The story of a breakthrough that hasn't broken through - yet. That
New York Times staffer Herman is able to weave an absorbing account
of 40 years of frustration is a tribute to her skills as a reporter
able to capture the science and politics of the struggle. It all
began with a bit of sensationalism on the part of Argentinian
dictator Juan Peron: the (false) announcement in 1951 that fusion
had been achieved; the dream of taking ordinary water with its
abundant hydrogen atoms and fusing them (as happens in the sun) had
supposedly happened in the laboratory, producing the extra energy
that could power generators. No more fossil fuels. A minimum of
radioactive wastes. The Argentinian false claim would not be the
last, as it turned out, but it did serve to spark worldwide
interest in what became the new field of plasma physics: the
behavior of ionized gases at Ultra-high temperatures. Research was
top-secret at first, resulting in years of lost time when
physicists learned they had all been following parallel courses
with parallel defeats. Now, due to the development of the Russian
"tokamak" device, it is possible to reach tens of millions of
degrees, for a moment, but nothing practical has emerged. Hope
springs eternal, nevertheless, which is why the European community
is excited the by huge J(oint) E(uropean) T(orus) and why the world
paid attention to the cold-fusion claims of Pons and Fleischmann -
neatly described and dispatched by Herman. She sums up current
thinking that fusion research may have suffered from caution: too
much theory and not enough gung-ho trying. The bigger the model the
better, it seems. We shall see. (Kirkus Reviews)
The book abounds with fascinating anecdotes about fusion's rocky path: the spurious claim by Argentine dictator Juan Peron in 1951 that his country had built a working fusion reactor, the rush by the United States to drop secrecy and publicize its fusion work as a propaganda offensive after the Russian success with Sputnik; the fortune Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione sank into an unconventional fusion device, the skepticism that met an assertion by two University of Utah chemists in 1989 that they had created "cold fusion" in a bottle. Aimed at a general audience, the book describes the scientific basis of controlled fusion--the fusing of atomic nuclei, under conditions hotter than the sun, to release energy. Using personal recollections of scientists involved, it traces the history of this little-known international race that began during the Cold War in secret laboratories in the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and evolved into an astonishingly open collaboration between East and West.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
