Raul: >Of course I might be wrong about that. But we certainly seem to be
>investing a lot of money into making sure that academics are... >well... academic, and so specialized that we do not accomplish much of >anything useful. IMO, this is just something that happens in the late stages of bureaucratization. Though I am no expert, other than a few grad school courses, and talking to real experts, I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with QM. Maybe there will be something more satisfying one day, but at present, there seems no reason to doubt the results. Stuff like string theory, or doing decades of "research" on programming imaginary quantum computers, though: this is just an academic glass bead game. If it's not physical, as in, you can do an experiment with physical objects, it's not physics. The experimental side is the hard part. A lot of theory is just collecting a paycheck for being smart. Easy living if you can get the work though; I considered it as a career path before coming to my senses. >My take is that we do have a huge optical computing infrastructure >already built. And that our government is so twisted around its own >structure that it can't admit, yet, to having built it, nor what its >capabilities are. >And I think I know why. And I'm trying to work up enough courage to >express those thoughts. I'd be curious what you're thinking here. The spooks certainly have stuff we don't specifically know about (crazy space planes, big computers, big ASIC things for doing crypto, weird ECM doodads), but it seems to me a large scale revolutionary invention like a useful optical computer would be difficult to hide. You can infer a lot about spooky government priorities going through the SBIR funny papers; all the "total information awareness" successors were pretty obvious looking at these some years ago. You could also tell the F-35 was doomed back in 2006 or so. It seems like a big optical computer would require infrastructure and new doodads that you'd hear about from time to time. You'd probably also see things from Coherent and Newport (and, I dunno, maybe Cisco) which could be used for such a beast. FWIIW, I think this project has the best chances of turning Fusion into an energy technology. I'll eventually be going through some of the patents on my blog, but they seem like serious people with some really good ideas. http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/the-secret-us-russian-nuclear-fusion-project/19039 -SL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
