|
Mobile/PDA| Books| Onion Merchandise & Subscriptions| National Distribution |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 April 2003 |
|
Garching, Germany--President Bush met with members of the
International Thermonuclear Engineering Reactor (ITER) design team
Monday to discuss a mathematical error he recently discovered in the
famed laboratory's "ITER, The Next Burning Plasma Experiment"
proposal. The President had asked for the meeting after he
announced that the U.S. would be joining the the ITER negotiations ,
saying "He wanted be sure that France and Germany would support
his analysis of the situation."
|
|
|
|
Above: Bush shows ITER scientists where they went wrong in their projections of plasma confinement. |
"I'm somewhat out of my depth here," said Bush, a longtime ITER follower who describes himself as "something of an armchair fusion physicist." "But it seems to me that, when calculating self-organized criticality threshold, one must carry out a renormalized perturbation theory to 10th order including a Direct Interaction Approximation to provide a subleading treatment of the Krommes-Hahm-Biglari-Callen-Carreras-Terry-Diamond-Waltz gyrokinetic clump effect. Essentially what I did was to employ the same Wiener-Hopf transformation for the integro-differential equations that Rosenbluth used when he solved the variational problem that arose in calculating fusion yields for project Orion many years ago. The ITER folks' error, as I see it, was omitting that easily overlooked mathematical transformation and, therefore, acquiring incorrectly re-summed logarithmic corrections for the turbulent decorrelation rates, which led to what appeared to be an avalanche spectrum characteristic of sandpile dynamics. Obviously, such a miscalculation will result in a small over estimate of just a little greater than 250% in predicting the expected plasma energy confinement time."
The Bush correction makes it possible for scientists to further study edge plasma turbulence to all orders in the clump expansion parameter, including the effects of nonlinear coupling of torodal Alfven eigen-modes with photon backscatter from the plasma-wall interface.
Bush resisted criticizing the ITER scientists responsible for the error, saying it was "actually quite small" and that "anyone could have made the mistake."
"Fusion physics is a complex and demanding field, and even top scientists drop a decimal point or two every now and then," Bush said. "Also, I might hasten to add that what I pointed out was more a correction of method than of mathematics. Experimental results from my proposed Fusion Simulation Project would have exposed the error in the next 35 years, anyway."
ITER Director and noted French physicist Robert Aymar said the
President was being too modest "by an order of magnitude."
|
|
|
|
Above: Bush circles the crucial misstep. |
"In addition to gently reminding us that even the "best and brightest minds" in the world are occasionally fallible, President Bush has saved the ITER partners several billion dollars," Aymar said. "We would have taken more than a decade to build a more than five billion dollar reactor with faulty data before figuring out what was wrong. But, thanks to Mr. Bush, we're back on track, and now, the train can leave the station."
"It's true, I dabbled in fusion during my Yale days," said Bush, who spent three semesters as an assistant to Dr. Ira Bernstein at Yale's renowned Sloane High-Energy Physics Lab. "But I didn't have the true gift for what Gauss called 'the musical language in which is spoken the very universe. If I have any gift at all, it's my instinct for process and order."
Continued Bush: "As much as I enjoyed studying fusion physics at Yale, by my junior year it became apparent that I could far better serve humanity through a career in statecraft."
While he says he is "flattered and honored" by the fusion research team's request that he review all subsequent ITER publications on turbulence induced transport and chair the International Tokamak Physics Task Force on Transport, Bush graciously declined the "signal honor."
"This sort of thing is best left to the likes of Marshall [Rosenbluth] and Bill [Dorland], not a dilettante such as myself," Bush said. "I just happened to have some time on the plane coming back from the European G8 summit, decided to catch up on some reading, and spotted one rather small logarithmic correction for the turbulent decorrelation rate in an otherwise flawless piece of scientific scholarship. Anyone could have done the same."
© Copyright 2001 Onion, Inc., All rights reserved. http://www.theonion.com/
|
|
|
1 April 2003 |
|
© Copyright 2003 Onion, Inc., All rights reserved. |
