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China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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If China has managed to do something that scientists genuinely thought was impossible why are there several nuclear fusion research facilities all over the planet? If it's impossible that seems like a bad use of resources.
I think maybe that scientists thought it was entirely possible, and that's why they were trying to do it.
Journalist reads "limit" and clickbaits it, typical
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-08-30
Scientist: "Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context."
Newspaper: "Scientist confirms that scientific discoveries are meaningless."
There are a bunch of things to research on fusion. Maybe they just thought this specific thing was out of reach, but were still trying to do other things.
Like the PvsNP computer science problem. Most computer scientists believe its impossible to make a polynomial algorithm that solves the traveling salesman problem, so most dont even try. But we dont know for certain that its actually impossible.