More on the Value of Ronald Richter’s Work

Winterberg replies: I wrote what Wolfgang Meckbach had told me after he had inspected Richter’s laboratory to see if some of the equipment there could be used for his experiments. He told me what he saw: A magnetically insulated and acoustically after-heated high-temperature electric arc. I do not need, as Mayo suggests, any “secret” unavailable information to recognize that as a credible high-temperature plasma physics experiment. Wound into a closed ring, Richter’s device becomes a tokamak-like configuration.

Richter’s claim to have achieved fusion was wrong, of course, but so was the later, also widely publicized British claim that fusion had been achieved with the Zeta device. Unlike the British team, Richter worked in a vacuum. That makes his ingenuity remarkable, because it was not even known then that plasma physics might provide a road toward controlled fusion; I doubt that any of the Argentinean physicists Mayo names knew much about plasma physics. In Germany around 1952, Otto Hahn, the discoverer of fission, was asked by reporters about the feasibility of fusion. He said that colleagues had told him it was technically impossible. And in America many years earlier, around 1935, at a time when it was already known that stars are driven by fusion energy, Albert Einstein said the same.

Richter, of course, had grossly underestimated the technical difficulties of achieving controlled fusion, but so had everybody else. According to Mayo, Richter had spent $300 million, but according to Juan Roederer (Physics Today, January 2003, page 32 ), it was 62 million pesos, or less than $10 million in US dollars. Regardless which figure is right, the amount is small in comparison to the expenditures for the so far unsuccessful worldwide efforts.

What, according to hearsay, Richter as a young student with little knowledge may have proposed as a PhD thesis topic is irrelevant.