Ed Moses departs from Giant Magellan Telescope Organization:
The GMTO Board would like you to know that, effective immediately, Dr. Ed Moses
is on leave for substantial and significant family matters
that require his attention.
Dr. Moses will not return to GMTO. The GMTO Board thanks Dr. Moses for his
important service to the GMTO.
The GMTO Board has appointed Dr. Pat McCarthy as interim President and looks
forward to his leadership of the GMTO project.
A public statement will be made at a later date.
The GMTO Board would like you to know that, effective immediately, Dr. Ed Moses
is on leave for substantial and significant family matters
that require his attention.
Dr. Moses will not return to GMTO. The GMTO Board thanks Dr. Moses for his
important service to the GMTO.
The GMTO Board has appointed Dr. Pat McCarthy as interim President and looks
forward to his leadership of the GMTO project.
A public statement will be made at a later date.
Comments
Who posted this announcement ? Forum moderator, any comments !
Agree with 6:38 PM, Moses did nothing but make enemies *except* with a handful of key people who enabled and empowered him because he kissed their asses. Miller was a key one, Lindl was another. That only worked in special circumstances, and only continued to work because he so totally controlled everything that he ensured he was indispensible. One it was discovered that he had no clothes, nor any protectors anymore (except the syncophants below him, who he accumulated), he was deposed without mercy.
I suspect he didn't get away with that at GMTO, and his arrogance and quickness to make enemies sank him. I don't believe the "family matters" reason, that's a standard graceful-exit for someone who's been fired.
http://www.gmto.org/2015/07/leadership-change/
Dr. Moses gets a very positive review from the GMTO organization. The last three rather stupid comments above on this blog from July 28th and 29th not withstanding.
Incidentally, I can't speak for AVLIS, but the NIF design, engineering and construction was a unquestioned success by those that are qualified to judge, and on the LIFE Project, substantial progress was made in understanding the optics and physics issues in designing a very large (384 beam) high average (20 MW) and high peak power (> 500 TW) laser system to operate in the UV for ICF.
As for LIFE, doing ignition capsules at 15 Hz was a joke. First, it was impossible. Second it could never be cost efficient to be a power plant. Again, physics goals could not be reached.
Is canceling LIFE stupid? That's what happened. NIF can't be cancelled because of the "fixed cost" argument.
Moses is widely despised. He's be thrown out of Forrestal for his behavior.
Well we learned that ICF is really hard. Maybe requires a bomb to do it. And certainly not a cost efficient way to build a power plant in this century. I've seen estimates that the LIFE target costs would have to be less than $0.25/each for LIFE to be a competitive energy solution at the GW plant scale.
Should LIFE have been cancelled in 2012. Maybe, but only because NIF showed that ignition requires either more target precision or more laser energy than we could afford starting in the late '90s, early 2000's.
But as a conceptual design test bed for high-average power lasers and UV generation, the LIFE effort was well worth the cost to LLNL, in my opinion, and significantly advanced our knowledge.
http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2015/07/abrupt-move-president-giant-magellan-telescope-resigns
Usual sour (New York) grapes. McCrory is jealous that his people where not working on the technology development for LIFE. LLE has tried to get into the high average power laser business for at least the last 20 years, but has been overshadowed by Aerospace and our latest developments at Livermore - many ideas of which come out of the LIFE project.
I often wonder if these individuals ever realized just how little respect they had with their fellow coworkers.
A memo sent on 29 September 2013 by Ed Moses describes a fusion shot that took place at 5:15 a.m. on 28 September. It produced 5×1015 neutrons, 75% more than any previous shot. Alpha heating, a key component of ignition, was clearly seen. It also noted that the reaction released more energy than the "energy being absorbed by the fuel", a condition the memo referred to as "scientific breakeven".[104] This received significant press coverage as it appeared to suggest a key threshold had been achieved, which was referred to as a 'milestone'.[105]
However, a number of researchers pointed out that the experiment was far below ignition, and did not represent a breakthrough as reported.[106] Others noted that the definition of breakeven as recorded in many references, and directly stated by Moses in the past, was when the fusion output was equal to the laser input. In this release, the term was changed to refer to the energy deposited in the fuel, not the energy of the laser.[107] The method used to reach these levels, known as the "high foot", is not suitable for general ignition, and as a result, it is still unclear whether NIF will ever reach this goal.[108]
A woman that built NIF would surely have received the Nobel Prize.
Anybody disagree?
Had the high-foot capsule shown more promise or ability to attain higher yields, LIFE would have stuck around.
Don't blame that malparido Tomas. ALL UPPER LEVEL MANAGEMENT BELIEVED IN AND PROMOTED LIFE, including the current head of WCI. This including trying to get money from the VC world. I believe many of these people thought they would be joining spin offs headed by Moses and Tomas. You could see the $$$ in their eyes when this was going on. I heard that Moses and Co. at one point were trying to get $5 billion in VC investment.
Also Parney and Moses wanted to personally run all HEDP facilities in the complex including ZR and Omega. They put in a proposal to the NNSA for their plan.
Big plans. Big failure.
By the way, Moses encouraged people to read this rumors blog.
What do you think about that?
Yes we know who you are. You got the "high foot". The "low foot" would have hurt more.
It's not a good thing that Ed did that to you, but many of us also wanted to attend that meeting (that were not invited), so we had to walk away when the room was packed. I don't think Ed's kicking you out was personal.
the "high foot" would have hurt more than the "low foot" !
July 29, 2015 at 3:30 PM
Yup. How many of you remember his eminence Dr. Lowell Wood?
A more recent disaster was the diamond ramp wave work. For about a decade, LLNL claimed it was getting ramp wave data just as good, or better, than the Z machine. They used a diamond as an ablator to drive tantalum, for instance, to high pressure. In these experiments they claimed they saw a phase transition at about 3-4 Mbars. Again, just like the D2 work, this was disproven on Z. After an internal review, it was concluded that diamond had failed as an ablator material and there were other problems. One of these problems was the fact that laser driven shock work cannot be modeled. Another problem is that the technique is not really ramp loading as large shocks are introduced into the sample.
Some of the results and conclusions are described here:
http://www.trivalleycares.org/new/Path%20to%20High-Z%20on%20NIF%20-%20A%20Working%20Group%20Summary%206-13-2013.pdf
All this doesn't matter, of course. NIF is a big ticket item with tons of sunk costs. It will continue indefinitely.
Some of the LLNL manufactured press is truly nauseating, particularly the Mount Everest comparison:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/experimental-highlights
This self-congratulatory comment was in Popular Mechanics:
But with our bootstrapping breakthrough, we actually swung the pendulum the other way. When I originally published the paper on it, the paper's reviewers actually thought I was downplaying our findings too much. But I think it was the right thing to do, and even our critics said, wow, it looks like they've made some real progress and are also embracing a cultural change.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a10297/has-fusion-finally-solved-its-hype-problem-16675762/
July 29, 2015 at 3:30 PM
Yup. How many of you remember his eminence Dr. Lowell Wood?
August 6, 2015 at 4:13 AM
Is Bruce "God"win still at LLNL?
Why is Adam Rowen no longer the manager of the Materials Chemistry department at Sandia National Laboratories? does not have a Ph.D. ?
Any evidence to back up that assertion other than hearsay ?
"In queso emergency, I pray to cheeses"
"In queso emergency, I pray to cheeses"
August 17, 2015 at 5:23 PM
Ai cabron Rubia!
Within the first three months of Eds arrival three of the original GMT staff had left. Two other staff members that had been with GMT for four years also left. Some retired but all left due to changes Ed instituted that showed little respect for the GMT staff or any understanding of telescope design or observatory operations.
The experience lost will be hard to replace as these people each had perhaps 20 years of experience in telescope design and construction and had a deep understating of the design and proposed operations of GMT.
The changes to the telescope and operations plan that Ed produced will need extensive review if they are kept. The original design had already been through a number of reviews.