The quotation is from the summary lecture presented by Lev Artsimovich at the 1961 IAEA Conference in Salzburg. Here then is our continuing Report from Purgatory, Issue number 7, Chapter 1, Magnetic Confinement Experiments.
Books by scientists about science usually fall into one of two
distinct types: technical or popularizations. The technical category
includes texts, collections, and monographs where, in physics at
least, equations and data are the meat. In popular books, by contrast,
it is said that each equation halves the readership: these books are
written to be intelligible to the non-scientist. Nuclear Fusion: half
a century of magnetic confinement fusion research falls into neither
of these categories. Its authors, C M Braams and P E Stott, are
physicists whose distinguished careers span most of the past
half-century of fusion research. They write with both a first hand
experience of the history of the field and an intimate knowledge of
the science. The book might be described as a scientific
history. Equations are unhesitatingly included where they are
necessary to describe the physics, but the main thread of the book is
the description of how fusion research evolved. Introductions to the
physics of various topics are described briefly in `boxes' alongside
the historical narrative. To a plasma physicist these are helpful and
often insightful reminders of the fundamentals. I think that any
professional physicist could benefit from these pithy technical
summaries. But clearly they are not intended as more than pointers to
a systematic understanding of plasma physics; and for a non-physicist
they are doubtless incomprehensible.In giving a physicist's view of fusion history, the authors are
careful to document their sources, with twenty seven pages of
references. This scholarly approach greatly enhances the value of the
work in describing the progress and achievements of fusion research.
It also provides a much-needed reminder, to those who speak lightly
about `innovation', of the tremendous breadth of ideas for plasma
confinement that have already been studied. But it means that the book
reads somewhat like a review article, and definitely not like earlier
fusion popularizations. By comparison Robin Herman's Fusion: the
search for endless energy (CUP 1990) stresses the human interest
angle by using many quotes from interviews, and Ken Fowler's The
fusion quest (Johns Hopkins 1997) is far more in the manner of
personal recollections.While lacking these populist touches, Braams and Stott's book gives
mature and balanced opinions about the reasons and influences,
scientific and social, that have governed fusion's development. They
outline the roots of nuclear energy and plasma physics leading to the
classification of fusion research and its declassification in 1958 at
Geneva. Continuing from the profusion of ideas disclosed at that time,
they deal in succeeding chapters with open systems, pulsed toroidal
configurations and other alternatives, stellarators, and
tokamaks. Each configuration is traced from its earliest ideas to its
modern embodiment-or its demise. In succeeding chapters are described the
development of important techniques and scientific understanding, from the 1980s
on, especially in application to the big to...
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