| View Larger Image | Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking | Hardcoverby Charles Seife (Author)
| List Price: | $25.95 | | Price: | $17.13 | | You Save: | $8.82 (34%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Viking Adult | | Page Count: | 304 Pages | | Publication Date: | October 30, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 535,699th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780670020331
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
The author of Zero looks at the messy history of the struggle to harness fusion energy . When weapons builders detonated the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, they tapped into the vastest source of energy in our solar system--the very same phenomenon that makes the sun shine. Nuclear fusion was a virtually unlimited source of power that became the center of a tragic and comic quest that has left scores of scientists battered and disgraced. For the past half-century, governments and research teams have tried to bottle the sun with lasers, magnets, sound waves, particle beams, and chunks of meta. (The latest venture, a giant, multi-billion-dollar, international fusion project called ITER, is just now getting underway.) Again and again, they have failed, disgracing generations of scientists. Throughout this fascinating journey Charles Seife introduces us to the daring geniuses, villains, and victims of fusion science: the brilliant and tortured Andrei Sakharov; the monomaniacal and Strangelovean Edward Teller; Ronald Richter, the secretive physicist whose lies embarrassed an entire country; and Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the two chemists behind the greatest scientific fiasco of the past hundred years. Sun in a Bottle is the first major book to trace the story of fusion from its beginnings into the 21st century, of how scientists have gotten burned by trying to harness the power of the sun. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 25 reviews)
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Extremely informative about several different topics by Lemas Mitchell (Chengdu, Sichuan (China))  5 Stars
November 02, 2009
My first exposure to Seife was with his book "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea." It was so wonderful, that I thought I'd read something else by him to see if the first book was a fluke. It was not.
In order to keep the interview readable, I have only dealt with about 1/2 dozen of the points that Seife made in this wonderfully readable/ entertaining book.
1. He documented the fact that nuclear treaties are reliably unreliable. He gave names, dates, and places of where treaties had been signed-- only to be ignored some time later. It's a very interesting thing to know for people who believe that some nuclear problem will be solved *just* because a treaty has been signed.
2. We already knew the Chemistry (since that is what my degrees are in) behind what he described, and so I can comment and say that the quality of his description was easy enough to follow and re (and reread) in the event that you want to understand all that he is saying. From this, I can surmise that his discussion of the Physics was of the same quality/ ease of following.
3. It was interesting to note that the pseudo-scientific aspect of fusion of various types was something that could be turned into a whole book. Robert Park discussed this topic in his book "Voodoo Science" (in his typical wonderfully acerbic way), but this book flushed out the topic and showed that if anything, the amount of pseudoscience/ foolishness involved in fusion up to this point is actually even *worse* than Park gave it credit for.
4. Heretofore, I'd never known about the damage that can be done to a nuclear arsenal by simply *letting it sit* and not be maintained too long. Apparently, the nuclear capability of the United States doesn't have to be actively dimished by any particular starry eyed administration (ahem!): It is enough to just let the equipment sit and rot and nuclear capability will destroy itself.
5. There was a good case made for fission materials as a source of nuclear energy. And a lot of people have not given this a very serious cost-benefit analysis (neither did Seife, actually, but he got much further than most people who take any position on fusion). What we know so far is that fusion leaves behind just as much nuclear waste as fission-- and scientists have spent billions and billions of dollars even in light of this information.
6. Very few people know about the scientific review process. (Think of how many times you can hear people say stupid things like "It is just some scientists opinion" or "Chinese Traditional Medicine is equal to Western Medicine and no one can prove otherwise.") The author really hammered home the point of how new information is created/ tested/ authenticated. Even just the understanding of this information alone (for those of us who didn't already know it) makes the book worth reading. The information about how bitter the review process can become was non essential for a lay reader, but if it were taken out, there would be some diminishment.
This book was well worth the second hand purchase price.
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Doesn't know what he doesn't know by Zeitgeist (Nevada City, CA)  1 Stars
July 22, 2009
Mr Seife manifests the kind of arrogance I usually see in adolescents - "I know all about that!" It is somewhat strange, considering his lack of any direct experience in experimental science, that when writing about the attempts of others to create nuclear fusion using acoustically driven cavitation, his voice is that of the experienced experimental physicist criticizing from the perspective of long years in the lab. In fact, there are no years in experimental science and it seems that his judgment (like so many science journalists) is that of the armchair dilettante.
The entire book appears to be written from `on high' and is nothing less than a diatribe in which he expresses his negative feelings about all attempts to develop a method for generating energy from controlled fusion. His overall endeavor is more akin to a campaign against the imagined folly of what he presents as delusional scientists, meanwhile revealing his own foolishness--thinking that he knows, while remaining ignorant of how his lack of knowledge distorts his perspective.
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A decent read by J. Dykstra (Roswell, NM)  3 Stars
July 22, 2009
this is a fairly entertaining book. As many have pointed out in the reviews, it spends a lot of time on the development of fusion bombs and Dr. Teller and then quite a bit of time on spectacular claims that led to spectacular failures. Still, I think this book does portray a couple hard realities of fusion. First of all, fusion research has been a long hard road that has promised much and fallen short. Second, any usable fusion technology is still quite a ways off. Third, fusion has fallen on somewhat of hard times when it comes to government funding. I suppose none of these things really mean that fusion-generated electricity is an impossibility, and the author doesn't really suggest that either. I think the problem with fusion at this point is that there does not appear to be any easy way to get around the difficulties such as the requirement for high temperatures and pressures. One theme of this book is that in the end, any real progress is more likely to come with bigger and better versions of hot, magnetically-confined plasma reactors and not some miraculous discovery like cold fusion or bubble fusion. I am sure that those who are actually involved in fusion research might find this book to be lacking from a scientific perspective and in the sense that it seems to sort of sell the idea of fusion short. However, I don't think the point of this book is to give a strong scientific treatise on the topic. Rather I think the author's goal is to give laypersons a realistic assessment of the chances of fusion becoming a quick-fix for energy problems. Between the technical hurdles that remain and the political-economic problems facing fusion research, I don't think it's unrealistic to claim that a functional fusion reactor that can produce energy is probably at least 30 years away. With all of the spectacular claims for things like hydrogen, domestic drilling and wind energy as solutions for the country's energy problems, I don't think it's bad to have a book once in a while that throws a bit of cold water on the euphoria, even if it is a bit unduly pessimistic and slanted towards spectacular failures rather than solid, ongoing research.
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A good summary about the frustrating quest for controlled fusion by G. Stelzenmuller 5 Stars
June 23, 2009
The book's dust jacket correctly describes the various personages involved in the turbulent history of nuclear fusion as the many "geniuses, villains and victims of fusion science." This history is shown to be "frustrating" because controlled nuclear fusion (useful power plants) always seemed (and seems today) just out of reach, and with just a little more push, and with just a little more money.... The number of "justs" mounts up. Useful fusion, like the philosopher's stone of medieval times, contains such huge rewards that people pursue an illusive goal feverishly, usually to their detriment. The possibility of making lots of money, and the dead certainty of becoming instantly and permanently famous is so irresistible. Certainly, coming up with a way to control fusion will reduce the problem of supplying power to the entire world to a minor matter. But it must be actually made practical. The author defines that practical threshold as a fusion reaction creating more power going out, than power put in to make the reaction go. Simple, understandable explanations like that make this an interesting book to read.
Perhaps the core of all problems in designing controlled nuclear fusion can be best summed up by the "Rayleigh-Taylor instability," a phenomenon very well described and illustrated by the author. In fact, the reader is encouraged to open the book to the drawing of the upside-down glass of water, in the first third of the book (easy to find by flipping pages), and reading quickly about this instability. This explanation can be kept in mind through the rest of the book as an excellent way to visualize the fusion-engineering problem.
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, of course, receive a good part of the book. These are the unfortunate and foot-shooting scientists caught in that infamous 1989 bollixed announcement about their "successful cold fusion" discovery. After being proved an example of bad experimental data, the two continued more or less covering up their mistakes. Their careers plummeted right after that and never recovered, maybe reminding other scientists to check and recheck their data. The author dislikes Edward Teller. Sort of. The reader is encouraged to take the Teller-bashing with some suspicion. Nevertheless, "Sun in a Bottle" is a fine recent-history work, well worth reading.
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Head in the sand by J. Candy (San Diego, CA USA) 1 Stars
April 21, 2009
What is most remarkable about this book is that little to no coverage is given to what a researcher would consider the most relevant events in the history of controlled thermonuclear fusion. Instead, the book combines what are effectively a handful of "mini biographies" (of Edward Teller, Rusi Taleyarkhan, and other infamous characters) with a disastrously poor summary of technical issues and historical events. One must surely wear dark welding goggles and -20db earplugs to miss the continuous progress that has been made in fusion performance since the 1960s:
http://www.efda.org/fusion_energy/fusion_research_today.htm
In fact, it is impossible to reconcile Seife's journalistic account of fusion energy research with the figure shown in the link above. It has been a decade since near-breakeven (power-in equals power-out) conditions were reached in both the JET (UK) and JT-60 (Japan) tokamaks. So where, you may wonder, are the subsequent post-Y2K points on the graph? Answer: inadequate funding for next-generation experiments. Why weren't these experiments done in the USA? Answer: inadequate funding for next-generation experiments. Why is there inadequate funding for next-generation experiments? Perhaps, in part, because policy-makers who read books like Seife's believe what they read.
Just imagine how far up and to the right the curve would extend if there was a more serious worldwide commitment to fusion energy research.
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This textbook accommodates the two divergent developmental paths which have become solidly established in the field of fusion energy: the process of sequential tokamak development toward a prototype and the need for a more fundamental and integrative research approach before costly design choices are made. Emphasis is placed on the development of physically coherent and mathematically clear characterizations of the scientific and technological foundations of fusion energy which are...
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