Medusa sunning herself in Buenos Aires
Cognition hazards, also called medusa weapons or infohazards are a science fictional psychology concept referring to an image or phrase that causes a person’s brain to bluescreen when exposed to the information. The 1988 short story BLIT by David Langford is an excellent example of the trope, and explicitly equates the human mind to a computer (which was intellectually en vogue at the time) but the basic concept can be traced back to the works of people like HP Lovecraft and Robert W Chambers among others. There is even a Monty Python sketch about ‘the world’s funniest joke’ that causes anyone who hears it to die of laughter. In fiction these types of ideas typically introduced via visual or audio means kill characters or at least drive them to madness. Fortunately, as far as we know, this is an impossibility in real life and the human brain just doesn't quite work that way. However, I would argue that there are very much infohazards in the real world, but they don’t quite work the same way or produce the same results as they do in fiction. This is going to be a bit of a meander but hold tight.
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, so says the song. The sun is nuclear powered of course, fusing protons through a succession of steps into helium and making energy via Einstein's famous E=mc2. The area of extreme density at the center of the sun has a density on the order of 150,000 kg/m3 (lead by contrast has a density of 11,340 kg/m3) and a temperature of 15 million degrees centigrade. Of course, it also has the energy density of a compost pile. Around 300 W/m3. But the sun is powered by ATOMIC ENERGY I hear you saying, how on earth can it have the power density of a pile of peat and old vegetables? It’s weird at first glance, but it’s because the fuel in the sun burns so slowly. For any proton in the sun’s core, zipping around at 15 million degrees it will collide with another proton, overcome the electrostatic barrier and fuse in five billion years. That’s five billion years of zipping around, being hot and getting deflected. So, the reaction rate is pretty low for any given proton. But remember, the sun is gigantic and so the total energy output is vast. This slow reaction rate is why the sun has been cheerfully burning for four and a half billion years and is expected to not run out of hydrogen fuel for another five billion years. In short, the sun is the sun because it’s massive, with a lot of fuel to burn and the gravitational confinement of nuclear reactions keep it going for a long time. Keep this in mind.
Let’s snap ahead to a post-war ideology known variously as Third Worldism, Non-Aligned Politics or Developmentalism. As an ‘ideology’ it had many flavors and variations, but the core idea was that former colonial nations and the ‘global south’ could and should chart their own course in the world as the age of formal colonialism wound down in the late 1940’s and through the 1950’s. Moscow, Washington, Brussels and Beijing might have some interesting ideas went the thinking, but a nation does not have to fall into line with them. Although typically associated with people like Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Nehru in India or Tito in the Former Yugoslavia, an argument can be made that it began with Juan Peron of Argentina. Peron, an ambitious former Argentine army officer who became El Presidente in 1946 had big ideas for his country. To help make Argentina a technical powerhouse, he took a page from the play books of the US and Soviet Union and sought to offer former Nazi technical experts safe haven south of the equator.
Although the US and SU snapped up most of the good shit, some of the lower tier researchers did quietly percolate their way to Buenos Aires, including an Austrian electrical engineer named Ronald Richter. Richter was an eccentric, a mad scientist if you will. In a way he reminded me of a more sinister version of Tesla (without the Tito backed mid 20th century PR campaign), clearly brilliant in his own way but overly ambitious, immune to criticism and prone to confidently overselling some highly speculative ideas. During the second world war he had worked on various projects and some of them overlap with the German nuclear program which is a whole ‘nother topic far beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice to say, Richter had noticed that deuterium gas, squirted into an electric arc would produce neutrons. Somehow, the electrical forces were such that it was driving the deuterium ions to energies where they would undergo nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion (using the deuterium isotope of hydrogen) had been discovered experimentally in 1932 by Mark Oliphant working with a particle accelerator in England. That’s before the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939. At the time and up through the war years and into the late 1940’s, fusion was considered a laboratory tool or as a source of neutrons but not for the production of power. The reason for this is because of the repulsive nature of ions. Protons, deuterons, tritons, alpha particles and whatever else have a positive charge. This means they want to repel each other and an enormous amount of energy has to be put into them to get them over the electrostatic repulsion barrier to fuse at an appreciable rate. The amount of energy needed to drive the fusion reactions was far greater than one got out of the resultant fusion energy.
The sun can do it because it is massive and the gravity of the system holds the fuel and at a pressure and temperature just high enough to allow a modest rate of fusion to occur at a tremendous scale, thus lighting and heating the earth. Although some researchers like Edward Teller and Andrei Sakharov were discussing using fission bombs to provide a massive jolt of energy to drive a rapid fusion reaction as an explosive (yes that would be the H-bomb) nobody circa 1950 was talking about fusion as an energy source to light your home. Nobody except an Austrian eccentric named Ronald Richter.
Richter armed as he was with the gift of gab convinced President Peron that based on his extremely tentative electric arc fusion experiments he could build a full-scale working fusion power plant. This would at once power Argentina while also demonstrating that Argentina could compete with and even leapfrog the superpowers technologically. Peron was wowed and agreed to fund the full-scale construction of a pilot power plant based on this electrical arc induced fusion principle. Mind you, Richter had merely observed the effect in his laboratory and had gotten a modest neutron count, he was nowhere close to getting more power out than he put in. The laboratory housing the reactor was built in total secrecy on a small lake island named Huemul. The Argentine army was called in to perform the construction to Richter’s specifications and in late 1950 or early 1951 experiments began. In March of the latter, the Argentinian government held a press conference, claiming that Richter had defied the common wisdom and built a fusion reactor that was capable of producing electric power.
This was met with immense skepticism from physicists and radiochemists in the superpowers. Peron’s government and Richter himself were being evasive about the details, and an eventual internal investigation mounted in 1952 found that the research program was nowhere near getting the results Richter had claimed. After Peron’s government fell in 1955 Richter was charged with fraud and the laboratory site dismantled. As scientists had predicted, nuclear fusion wasn’t really practical as a controlled energy source at a scale human beings could use or control peacefully. As a giant light in the sky, sure. As a catalyst for a massive explosion, absolutely. Not as a source of electric power.
But then, something curious happened. Quite suddenly after Richter’s announcement and exposure as a huckster, the scientific consensus changed. Now fusion power was possible they said, it was just that Richter was going about it the wrong way. Nothing fundamental had changed in the physics or engineering, there were no breakthroughs. Electrostatic effects still demanded that a massive amount of energy be delivered to a fusion system, and the confinement mechanism still had to contain energy densities much higher than a star. But the United States Atomic Energy Commission started building Stellarators in a Princeton basement and the British assembled Z-Pinches at some place called Harwell and beyond the Urals Sakharov began fiddling with what would become known as the Tokamak. Eventually scientists at Lawrence Livermore would try to use lasers to do to a tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium what a fission primary did in a hydrogen bomb. Despite ultimately costing many times more in terms of money, materials and man-hours none of these ideas have worked any better than Richter’s little electric spark machine.
Richter was at best delusional and at worst an outright fraud, but he inspired a movement that is eating into your wallet today. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent and thousands of careers have been built around Richter’s zippy little idea. I find this story fascinating because it demonstrates the power of an appealing narrative. At first glance one would assume the Argentinian fusion project would simply cause the academics to nod and chuckle and say something to the effect of ‘we told you so’. Yet somehow the opposite effect occurred. The failure of the research program was taken as evidence that it could be done.
Think about how bonkers this is. Imagine if, in the 1970’s when Yuri Geller was exposed as a fraud on Johnny Carson the governments of all the major powers decided suddenly that psychokinetic spoon bending was real. Geller, they said, was just doing it wrong and as such decided to dump millions and eventually billions of dollars into trying to teach someone to bend spoons with their mind. Entire subfields and PhD theses would grow out of this imaginary field. Materials scientists developing special alloys for better ‘psychic resonance’, Physics departments hosting colloquia on psychometrics and ‘Kirlian radiation’. When results weren't forthcoming, as they hadn’t been for Geller on Carson the community started talking about 20 year time scales that ballooned to half a century and then some as ever larger psychic research programs metastasized and promised spoon bending results were forever just one more funding increase away.
This is what I mean by an infohazard, and idea that causes people’s minds to lock up and veer into personal and institutional insanity for any number of reasons. Physicists were a cool headed bunch, excited by the then-heady promise of The Atomic Age to be sure but until Richter held his little presser in 1951 controlled fusion power was a thought experiment for the distant future at best or at worst viewed as an effective impossibility. After the collapse of his half fraudulent research project, the mind virus of too cheap to meter fusion power he had conjured up entered the brains of researchers (and the politicians who underwrite it all of course) where it lives on to this day. The mere suggestion that someone thought of doing it was taken as proof that it was possible.
I’ve met a number of people, good, hardworking researchers in the fusion energy area. None of them had any idea who Ronald Richter was or how he singlehandedly invented their careers despite being an eccentric and fraud who oversold his pitch. The idea of a ‘star in a jar’ is just so appealing that it can’t be dismissed, despite a fraudulent origin and a total lack of progress over seven decades and a massive increase in complexity and cost. Take ITER as an example; At last count had a total cost of something like 30 billion dollars over 20 odd years, and ‘merely’ seeks to prove that controlled break-even fusion is possible. To make a power plant we’re told, will require an even larger machine. Note this, we’re still not even sure if the fundamental concept of controlled energy producing nuclear fusion outside of a star is even possible and nobody is sure if it is possible, beyond vague promises that more money will somehow cause the desired result to fall out. Even if it is possible, based on the astronomical costs of such reactors, the possibility of it being an economical source of power that can compete with coal, natural gas and oil, never mind fission or solar and wind is very much an open question.
Infohazards are, outside of science fiction a sort of collective mania that grips people and leads them to pursue irrational ends. 30 billion dollars would buy a lot of heat pumps and solar water heaters after all. Human institutions, being what they are are largely immovable once they have been seized by these sorts of intellectual contagions. This sort of crank realism has come to be pervasive in modern science and technology. From high energy physics to public health and biosciences to materials science and computer technology, fantasy technologies and science fictional goals are all too common. I could discuss how terraforming was born as a half joking thought experiment by some astronomers smoking the stickey weed in Ithaca, New York in the early 1970’s and how it is now taken seriously by heavily subsidized billionaires looking for new growth opportunities. Or how HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs said there was life on Mars and the quest to prove their fictional stories at least marginally correct now commands a sizable portion of NASA’s scientific budget despite decades of null results, but that would be belaboring the point.
Scientists, credentialed types, experts, they’re all as vulnerable as anyone else to group pressures and irrational if appealing ideas. And that’s even before careerism and hella cash enters into it. The intended use of the scientific method according to the early modern occultists like Bacon and Newton who invented and popularized it is to provide a means of avoiding preexisting biases and wishful thinking from getting in the way when trying to answer certain types of questions about matter and energy. It is not intended as a tool to make magical machines or hopes and dreams come true and as the tale of Ronald Richter demonstrates, trying to do so will end in disappointment. Letting oneself get caught up in a mania because of an appealing idea is even further removed from the goal of a rational understanding of some aspects of the material world. It’s something to keep in mind when you read the science pages.