104
China’s ‘artificial sun’ sets nuclear fusion record, runs 1,006 seconds at 180 million°F
(charmingscience.com)
all the comments are about the temperature units
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Every time a headline comes out of China reporting major progress in fusion power generation I'm like 
"God, please."
how many football fields is this
About twelve AR-15s
think of the crypto mining potential!
lol only way fusion would get funded in the US 🤣
cool, this is the one funded by genshin impact lol
It's charming that the article uses Fahrenheit as a scientific temperature scale, perhaps they should adopt bananas for distance in scientific reports too.
How hot is it in Hot Pocket?
2.5 hot pocket
waow
At least it wasn’t measured in campfires or number of hotcakes.
Damn now I kinda wanna know how many campfires this is equivalent to
A full burning campfire can hit 2000 F, so this would be about 90,000 of those
I don't think temperature works like that though lol
that's honestly less campfires than I'd expect
It's a fuckton.
The ones hot enough for marshmallows?
How many cubits was this sun? At least a furlong right? And how many hogsheads of fuel did it need?
The sun is 3,007,856,729.2152 cubits in diameter
you gotta admire the dedication to using the most absurd measurement system though
We could use rankine just to confuse people more.
farenheit isnt even that bad compared to the other imperial units, what are you talking about lmao
Could be a communication thing. As much as I love the metric system, for frontfacing stuff like articles, scientists have to sometimes use freedom units.
At least that was my experience with school.
And that is precisely why the Mars Polar Lander failed.
https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/
Face it, the USA has defined the inch as 25.4 mm. It did so in 1933. The country is already metric, it's been metric for 92 years.
It's time.
isn't it used by science and the military already lol
Yeah, it's just the rest of the country that needs being brought into the 21st century.
That temperature is hotter than anyone could really imagine to the point that any scale is meaningless
farhenheit makes way more sense than the other imperial measurements imo
how so?
arbitrarily setting the freezing point of water to 32 and the boiling point to 212 and then filling in the rest from there isn't what I'd call "making sense"
I guess they're 180 apart but why 32, why not 0 and 180?
I think it's more about common ambient temperatures we encounter than the freezing point of water. 0 F is absolutely freezing, 100 F is hellishly hot, 50 F is pleasantly cool.
Now for scientific use it's fucked
the freezing point was set to the freezing point of brine, not water. doesnt make a lot of sense, but it makes more sense than inches -> feet -> yard -> mile (not to mention league etc.) what the fuck is an inch? who fucking knows, maybe the distance between your knuckles on one of your fingers??? the point is not that farenheit is good, but that the rest of the imperial measurements are even worse
As someone that learned Celsius first, I can intuit Fahrenheit pretty easily in a day to day setting. Can't imagine doing science with it though
I feel like in the millions of degrees it is fine to use america numbers. Seeing it in C isn't gonna give anyone a more accurate understanding.
lol yeah it's very hot
Or we could use what everyone else uses
At 160.million we may as well just be using kelivn.
Have you considered that it's never okay to use America anything including numbers?
Fahrenheit does have a wider range of whole numbers to express the temperatures in our daily climate. Unfortunately the digital thermostats I had for years, even one in Shanghai, would step in 0.5 deg increments regardless of it being in F or C. I assume it was using K internally throughout the system, so keeping it in F meant more granularity (68, 68.5, 69 being more specific temps than 20, 20.5, 21 could dial in). And it was noticeable enough to where I'd keep it in F (except one time when I was sick and wanted in between the two possible F setpoints).
You can divide by two and be roughly correct (÷1.8 even moreso). The offset is negligible.
Dividing 160million by 1.8 is not gonna help me understand things any better I fear.
I want to see a demo where they approach it with all the trepidation and seriousness that such an advancement deserves, and pull out a perfectly golden toasted marshmallow.