A lot of them been so indoctrinated into mistrusting authorities and instutions, that they basically disbelieve anything they say on principle.

And al the evidence, all the scientists telling them they’re wrong just ends up reinforcing their belief in some giant conspiracy.

It’s sadly been shown in more than one study that changing the mind of conspiracy theorists with reason, argumens or evidence is basically impossible. It’s almost a self preservation instict against cognitive dissonance. They were so sure they were right, and now so one is telling them they’re not. That feels shit, and it feels shit to accept you were wrong about something you so fervently insisted was true. So their brains basically go into self defense mode, and just reject and attack anything that threatens the shaky fundamentals of their entire belief system. The best thing you can attmept to do is to distract them. Get them to talk and think about other things. When they mention the conspiracy, don’t engage, don’t argue how they’re wrong, they’ll just dig their heels in deeper, just change the topic to something else. Force them to spend less time in their delusions. Eventually, if you’re lucky, they might gain enough distance to the topic, and stop caring about it enough that they’re ready to start accepting how batshit insane those conspiracies are.

To quote Hbomberguy:

“The anti vaccine movement had next to no evidence [27] years ago, and they have even less today”

Ok, that is a fair point I hadn’t previosuly considered. Though disclaiming a patent doesn’t loose you all legal recourse.

If someone else tries to repatent it, even if it gets approved, you can still file a challenge against the new patent with the PTO. You (or anyone else, really) would also have a virtually guaranteed court win, even if someone got the patent through and tried to enforce it. All you’d have to prove in court is that prior art of the invention exists, therefore the patent is invalid and unenforceable, granted or not, so it’s unlikely someone would even bother trying to enforce such a patent. A previous, diclaimed patent, of literally the identical technology being on record is pretty iron clad and unavoidable evidence that the patent isn’t original.

Most common fission reactions today release most of their energy in the form of neutrons. The only way to extract energy from neutrons is heat. But there are fission reactions which release a large portion of their energy in the form protons. And since protons are charged, their energy can be electromagnetically converted directly into electricity, with no need for intermediate process steps.

There’s already at least one company building prototypes like this, Helion, using D+He3 fusion, rather than the more common D+T fusion in other reactortypes like Tokamaks.

Real engineering has a video on Helion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38

I mean, that’s better than selling to a private person, still feels weird, since disclaiming a patent is absolutely possible, and has a 100% chance of leading to the desired outcome, vs whatever small chance there may be that the University starts taking profits on it. Or even just sees themselves forced to sell the patent, because of potential financial issues.

Yeah, the risk is small, but eliminating it in it’s entirety would’ve been easily possible, so it just feels a bit weird he didn’t do it.

If he wanted it to be freely available, why did he even sell the patent ? Just disclaim at the patent office. Selling is just asking the new holder to start enforcing.