Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security delayed the International Entrepreneur Rule to next March, and it is currently accepting comments on plans to rescind it altogether. The agency cited logistical challenges in vetting these new visas. The International Entrepreneur Rule was designed by the Obama Administration to support Silicon Valley and the high tech industry’s need for immigrant entrepreneurs and engineers. Immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. account for 44% of all startups. The news has prompted a backlash from immigrant entrepreneurs like PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and leadership at the National Venture Capital Association, who argue that rolling back the rule will drive would-be job creators to other, more welcoming nations. This is already happening.
Canadian and French Policies to Attract Entrepreneurs and Researchers Impacting Silicon Valley
Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security delayed the International Entrepreneur Rule to next March, and it is currently accepting comments on plans to rescind it altogether. The agency cited logistical challenges in vetting these new visas. The International Entrepreneur Rule was designed by the Obama Administration to support Silicon Valley and the high tech industry’s need for immigrant entrepreneurs and engineers. Immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. account for 44% of all startups. The news has prompted a backlash from immigrant entrepreneurs like PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and leadership at the National Venture Capital Association, who argue that rolling back the rule will drive would-be job creators to other, more welcoming nations. This is already happening.
Canada’s Global Talent Stream Visa Program For Immigrant Entrepreneurs Targets U.S. Immigration Policy
To Silicon Valley observers, Canada has always seemed incapable of igniting a technology-driven economy, despite years of the government support for telecommunications, and a byzantine maze of government grant programs for research and development. Canada has remained a laggard in R&D investment compared to other OECD industrialized nations. Venture capital and government tax policy in Canada seemed to have a focus on short-term tax deductions rather than long-term gains as in California. Then there was the demise of Nortel and the decline of Blackberry. There may be a new opportunity to bootstrap Canada into the high-tech industry big league: Trump Administration immigration policies that are already impacting Silicon Valley. Not long after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power in 2015, Trudeau sensed the opportunity to exploit Trump’s anti-immigration stances and the Liberal government swung into action to create the Global Talent Streamvisa program specifically designed for rapid immigration for entire entrepreneurial teams. Since that time Trump has fulfilled his promises by slashing the H1-B visa program and announcing the end of the Obama Administration’s Startup Visa Program. Immigrant enrollments at U.S. universities is already down over 40%. Startup Genome, the acknowledged global leader in entrepreneurial ecosystems rankings, currently ranks Vancouver and Toronto 15th and 16th globally in its 2017 study, but those in the know acknowledge that Canada still lacks crucial technology ecosystem capabilities. Nevertheless, Canada may be on the verge of a technology tidal wave.
Macron Determined To Make France “A Startup Nation” With Major Technology Initiatives
In 2015, long before Emmanuel Macron’s launched his campaign for the Presidency of France, as a minister in the Hollande government, Macron launched a significant new technology initiative, The Camp, on a seventeen-hectare campus just outside Aix-en-Provence, designed to inspire new thinking on crucial technology issues, and to incubate new entrepreneurial companies. The Camp will open officially this Autumn. Now that Macron has swept the country in a stunning Presidential victory, it is clear that technology and entrepreneurship are crucial elements of his vision for France, backing it up with a 10B € technology-based economic development fund. The South of France generally, the Cote d’Azur and Provence are emerging as France’s technology center. France’s nuclear research facility, Cadarache, just northeast of Aix-en-Provence, is the equivalent of California’s Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the home of ITER, the European nuclear fusion project. Prior to Macron’s 2015 launch of The Camp, the government had already established the Sophia Antipolis technology park near Nice, as a center for advanced telecommunications research and entrepreneurial start-ups.
The Camp, Aix-en-Provence
As if to underscore France’s rise on the global stage, France has recently leapfrogged the U.S. and Great Britain as the world’s new leader in “soft power,” the ability to harness international alliances and shape the preferences of others through a country’s appeal and attraction.
I previously posted WRT the fact that we are approaching the limits of our ability to achieve physical proof of quantum physics. Why should we care? Where do we go after the CERN Hadron Super Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs-boson particle, proving the role of dark matter? That said, two separate teams at CERN are debating the results of further experiments that suggest the possible existence of a new sub-atomic particle. This particle, if it exists, and can be confirmed, may support the existence of additional dimensions of space and time. The MIT Technology Review has also suggested that the CERN Hadron Super Collider could potentially prove the validity of the Star Trek hyperdrive technology. We should care because it is the future of the technology that will continue to change our lives.
I previously posted WRT the fact that we are approaching the limits of our ability to achieve physical proof of quantum physics. Why should we care? Where do we go after the CERN Hadron Super Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs-boson particle, proving the role of dark matter? That said, two separate teams at CERN are debating the results of further experiments that suggest the possible existence of a new sub-atomic particle. This particle, if it exists, and can be confirmed, may support the existence of additional dimensions of space and time. The MIT Technology Review has also suggested that the CERN Hadron Super Collider could potentially prove the validity of the Star Trek hyperdrive technology. We should care because it is the future of the technology that will continue to change our lives.
Physicists in Europe Find Tantalizing Hints of a Mysterious New Particle
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Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are smashing together protons to search for new particles and forces.
One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.
At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.
It is, however, far too soon to shout “whale ahoy,” physicists both inside and outside CERN said, noting that the history of particle physics is rife with statistical flukes and anomalies that disappeared when more data was compiled.
A coincidence is the most probable explanation for the surprising bumps in data from the collider, physicists from the experiments cautioned, saying that a lot more data was needed and would in fact soon be available.
“I don’t think there is anyone around who thinks this is conclusive,” said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist from New York University who works on one of the CERN teams, known as Atlas. “But it would be huge if true,” he said, noting that many theorists had put their other work aside to study the new result.
When all the statistical effects are taken into consideration, Dr. Cranmer said, the bump in the Atlas data had about a 1-in-93 chance of being a fluke — far stronger than the 1-in-3.5-million odds of mere chance, known as five-sigma, considered the gold standard for a discovery. That might not be enough to bother presenting in a talk except for the fact that the competing CERN team, named C.M.S., found a bump in the same place.
“What is nice is that it is not a particularly crazy signal, in a quite clean channel,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., speaking before the announcement. “So, while we are nowhere near moving champagne even vaguely close to the fridge, it is intriguing.”
Physicists could not help wondering if history was about to repeat itself. It was four years ago this week that the same two teams’ detection of matching bumps in Large Hadron Collider data set the clock ticking for thediscovery of the Higgs boson six months later. And so the auditorium at CERN, outside Geneva, was so packed on Tuesday that some officials had to sit on the floor for a two-hour presentation about the center’s recent work that began with the entire crowd singing “Happy Birthday” to Claire Lee, one of the experimenters, from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
At one point, Rolf Heuer, the departing director-general of CERN, tried to get people to move off the steps, declaring they were a fire hazard. When they did not move, he joked that he now knew he was a lame duck.
When physicists announced in 2012 that they had indeed discovered the Higgs boson, it was not the end of physics. It was not even, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the beginning of the end.
It might, they hoped, be the end of the beginning.
The Higgs boson was the last missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains all we know about subatomic particles and forces. But there are questions this model does not answer, such as what happens at the bottom of a black hole, the identity of the dark matter and dark energy that rule the cosmos, or why the universe is matter and not antimatter.
The Large Hadron Collider was built at a cost of some $10 billion, to speed protons around an 18-mile underground track at more than 99 percent of the speed of light and smash them together in search of new particles and forces of nature. By virtue of Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, the more energy poured into these collisions, the more massive particles can come out of them. And by the logic of quantum microscopy, the more energy they have to spend, the smaller and more intimate details of nature physicists can see.
Parked along the underground racetrack are a pair of mammoth six-story conglomerations of computers, crystals, wires and magnets: Atlas and C.M.S., each operated by 3,000 physicists who aim to catch and classify everything that comes out of those microscopic samples of primordial fire.
During its first two years of running, the collider fired protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of about four trillion electron volts, in the interchangeable units of mass and energy that physicists prefer. By way of comparison, the naked proton weighs in at about one billion electron volts and the Higgs boson is about 125 billion electron volts.
Since June, after a two-year shutdown, CERN physicists have been running their collider at nearly twice the energy with which they discovered the Higgs, firing twin beams of protons with 6.5 trillion electron volts of energy at each other in search of new particles to help point them to deeper laws.
The main news since then has been mainly that there is no news yet, only tantalizing hints, bumps in the data, that might be new particles and signposts of new theories, or statistical demons.
The most intriguing result so far, reported on Tuesday, is an excess of pairs of gamma rays corresponding to an energy of about 750 billion electron volts. The gamma rays, the physicists said, could be produced by the radioactive decay of a new particle, in this case perhaps a cousin of the Higgs boson, which itself was first noticed because it decayed into an abundance of gamma rays.
Or it could be a more massive particle that has decayed in steps down to a pair of photons. Nobody knows. No model predicted this, which is how some scientists like it.
“The more nonstandard the better,” said Joe Lykken, the director of research at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a member of one of the CERN teams. “It will give people a lot to think about. We get paid to speculate.”
Maria Spiropulu, a professor at Caltech and member of one of the detector teams, said, “As experimentalists, we see a 750-billion-electron-volt beast decaying to two photons.” Explaining it, she added, is up to the theorists.
The new results are based on the analysis of some 400 trillion proton-proton collisions.
If the particle is real, Dr. Lykken said, physicists should know by this summer, when they will have 10 times as much data to present to scientists from around the world who will convene in Chicago, Fermilab’s backyard.
Such a discovery would augur a fruitful future for cosmological wanderings and for the CERN collider, which will be running for the next 20 years. It could also elevate proposals now on drawing boards in China and elsewhere to build even larger, more powerful colliders.
“We are barely coming to terms with the power and the glory” of the CERN collider’s ability to operate at 13 trillion electron volts, Dr. Spiropulu said in a text message. “We are now entering the era of taking a shot in the dark!”
My biggest complaint with venture capital and the current entrepreneurial landscape is the lack of Big Ideas— the superficiality of the technology sector. “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” –Peter Thiel. We also got corporate greed masquerading as “the sharing economy.” Many other well-known observers of this industry share my complaint. Some argue that these Big Ideas are too big for private investment, and can only be funded by governments with the resources and vision to accomplish such large long term projects. I disagree.
My biggest complaint with venture capital and the current entrepreneurial landscape is the lack of Big Ideas— the superficiality of the technology sector. “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” –Peter Thiel. We also got corporate greed masquerading as “the sharing economy.”
Many other well-known observers of this industry share my complaint. Some argue that these Big Ideas are too big for private investment, and can only be funded by governments with the resources and vision to accomplish such large long term projects. I disagree. The semiconductor industry, on the bleeding edge of quantum mechanics, was funded almost exclusively by private venture investors. Another example may be nuclear fusion. Large-scale projects, like ITER, funded by the European Union at the Cadarache facility in southern France, and the National Ignition Facility in Livermore California, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy are being seriously challenged by Canadian and U.S. startups funded by private venture capital, and seeking to beat the large projects to the goal of renewable solar energy.
Tim Draper of Draper Ventures at General Fusion
Start-Ups Take On Challenge of Nuclear Fusion
Michl Binderbauer of Tri Alpha Energy, a fusion start-up.
A group of start-ups is promising a new and virtually unlimited source of power, one that produces none of the gases scientists say contribute to global warming.
The only problem? A way to harness the energy source, nuclear fusion — the reaction that gives birth to sunlight — still needs to be invented.
Such an achievement has long evaded government scientists and university researchers, despite decades of work and billions of dollars in research. But backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and some of the wealthiest people in the technology industry, a handful of young companies say they can succeed where government has fallen short.
Nuclear fusion is one of many areas of science and energy now getting the backing of venture capitalists. The investor dollars coming into fusion start-ups, like those in many areas of science, still pale in comparison with the money spent by governments. But signs of progress, including some results that have eclipsed government projects, have generated hope among some scientists that the companies could help develop a fusion reactor within their lifetimes.
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The C-2U machine at Tri Alpha Energy
At the very least, they talk a confident game — even though the history of fusion science is littered with frustration and false starts. Some fusion scientists, unable to evaluate the start-ups’ unpublished scientific results, doubt the companies’ chances.
“The fusion era is here and coming,” said William D. Lese, a managing partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm with a stake in General Fusion, one of the leading start-ups in the field. “The increase in activity in this space is perhaps a sign of that.”
Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms are squeezed together so tightly that they merge. That single, larger atom releases a tremendous amount of energy.
This happens naturally at the center of the sun, where gravity easily crushes hydrogen into helium, spewing forth the sunlight that reachesEarth. But on Earth, making hydrogen hot and dense enough to sustain a controlled fusion reaction — one that does not detonate like a thermonuclear bomb — has been a challenge.
The potential upsides of the power, though, provide a huge incentive. Fusion reactions release no carbon dioxide. Their fuel, derived from water, is abundant. Compared with contemporary nuclear reactors, which produce energy by splitting atoms apart, a fusion plant would produce little radioactive waste.
The possibilities have attracted Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. He has invested in General Fusion, a start-up in British Columbia, throughBezos Expeditions, the firm that manages his venture capital investments. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, is betting on another fusion company, Tri Alpha Energy, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles, through his venture arm, Vulcan Capital.
Peter Thiel — the co-founder of PayPal, who once lamented the superficiality of the technology sector by saying, “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” — has invested in a third fusion start-up,Helion Energy, based near Seattle, through Mithril Capital Management.
Government money fueled a surge in fusion research in the 1970s, but the fusion budget was cut nearly in half over the next decade. Federal research narrowed on what scientists saw as the most promising prototype — a machine called a tokamak, which uses magnets to contain and fuse a spinning, doughnut-shape cloud of hydrogen.
Today’s start-ups are trying to perfect some of the ideas that the government left by the wayside.
After earning his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1990s, Michl Binderbauer had trouble securing federal funds to research an alternative approach to fusion that the American government briefly explored — one that adds the element boron into the hydrogen fuel. The advantage of the mixture is that the reaction does not fling off neutrons that, like shrapnel, can wear down machine parts and make them radioactive.
Mr. Binderbauer, along with his Ph.D. adviser, Norman Rostoker, founded Tri Alpha Energy, eventually raising money from the venture capital arms of Mr. Allen and the Rockefeller family. The company has raised over $200 million.
“We basically said, “What would an ideal reactor look like?’ ” said Mr. Binderbauer, who is now the company’s chief technology officer. Mr. Rostoker died late last year.
General Fusion is pursuing an approach that uses pistons to generate shock waves through the hydrogen gas. Compressed hard enough, the hydrogen atoms will begin to fuse. General Fusion has raised about $74 million from private investors and another $20 million from the Canadian government.
Its reactor concept, like that of Tri Alpha Energy, would yield power plants much smaller than a commercially viable tokamak, which would need to be larger than many stadiums are in order to work. General Fusion’s idea to compress a ball of hydrogen, too, is borrowed from a government project aborted decades ago. The company’s innovation on that approach is to use cannon-size pistons for the compression.
Critics in the nuclear physics field say it is unlikely start-ups will succeed with these alternative approaches.
“They just keep pounding on the same dead horse,” said Edward C. Morse, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “What happens in fusion is that the same ideas pop up every two decades. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.”
In addition, private funds cannot match those of the most ambitious government fusion energy project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, a stadium-size tokamak being built in France by the European Union, along with the United States and five other nations, for about $14 billion. The United States is committed to funding about 9 percent of the project.
Still, the Energy Department is also hedging its bet, granting $30 million to alternative fusion projects, including Helion Energy, which received $4 million.
“In all of our selections, it’s not about a start-up versus something else,” said Eric A. Rohlfing, deputy director for technology of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the government agency that made the grants. “It’s about the quality of the idea.”
The start-ups counter critics by saying that they can be more efficient than government projects.
When Tri Alpha Energy’s panel of outside advisers visited the construction site of the company’s lab in 2007, the concrete was still being poured. Some advisers doubted the company would be conducting experiments within a year, as Mr. Binderbauer said they would.
But by the following year, the machine was ready. “When I walked these guys out there to see that, their jaws dropped,” Mr. Binderbauer said.
“I do recall being surprised by how fast they said they would get the facility ready,” said Burton Richter, a professor emeritus at Stanford and Nobel laureate in physics who advised Tri Alpha Energy.
This past June, Tri Alpha reached a new milestone: Its machine superheated a ball of hydrogen to 10 million degrees Celsius and held it for five milliseconds — much longer than government projects achieved using the same method.
“You may ask: ‘Five milliseconds? That’s nothing.’ Certainly, that’s the blink of an eye to a layperson,” Mr. Binderbauer said. “But in our field, that’s half an eternity.” His next goal is to increase that temperature tenfold.
Other fusion efforts have set even more ambitious goals. When Lockheed Martin announced its own fusion project last year, the company said it expected to build a prototype within five years.
But history would suggest that struggles lie ahead. For example, the American government’s other major approach to fusion, used by a California lab that fires 192 giant lasers at a container holding hydrogen to compress and fuse it, missed a 2012 deadline for producing more energy than the lasers put in.
That checkered past is not stopping the start-ups.
“We’re moving very quickly,” said Michael Delage, vice president for strategy at General Fusion. “Is it two years away? Three years away? Four years away? Maybe. We’ll let you know when we get there.”
Maybe three years ago, I recall hearing something about a “nuclear fusion” company starting up in Burnaby. In my mind, the thought of a nuclear fusion company in Burnaby was outlandish and preposterous. Growing up in southern California, and later northern California, I had grown up close and personal with the Space Program, and nuclear physics at UC Berkeley Lawrence Nuclear Labs and the super secret Lawrence Livermore National Labs.
California venture capitalist, Steve Jurvetson, Riding the General Fusion Containment Vessel
Maybe three years ago, I recall hearing something about a “nuclear fusion” company starting up in Burnaby. In my mind, the thought of a nuclear fusion company in Burnaby was outlandish and preposterous. Growing up in southern California, and later northern California, I had been “up close and personal” with the Space Program, and nuclear physics at UC Berkeley Lawrence Nuclear Labs and the super secret Lawrence Livermore National Labs. My next door neighbor in Moss Beach, California worked at Livermore Labs. I learned of this only because an FBI agent called on me to politely inquire about him (just a routine update of their files, apparently). My notion was that something like nuclear fusion might “someday” be real, but would require the scale of a Manhattan Project, probably after I was long gone. Nuclear fusion was pure Star Trek, so beyond current science as to be completely fantastical.
As it happens, there has already been an enormous amount of work on nuclear fusion, at enormous expense. The United States has been working on a project at Livermore National Labs, known as The National Ignition Facility (https://lasers.llnl.gov/#), which even uses the Star Trek imagery on their website. The other major project is a United Nations sponsored project, involving many nations, at the largely secret French nuclear research facility in Haute Provence, Cadarache. I happen to know the Cadarache nuclear research site extremely well, because it is situated on the main road to my wife’s home village, we know people who work there, and there are almost always Greenpeace demonstrators at the main gate. Known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, it is expected to be operational in 2022, but only after the expenditure of multiple Billions of Euros, at a time when Euros are in short supply.
Unfortunately, as often happens in such visionary research and development, both the U.S. National Ignition Facility and the Cadarache ITER projects have run into major technical and financial problems that are threatening their futures.
But then we have General Fusion, a very small startup company in Burnaby, on an infinitesimally smaller budget than the United States or the United Nations. apparently competing with the U.S. Department of Energy and the United Nations ITER project at Cadarache. How can this be? Why does this also sound like the other Big Idea startup in Burnaby, D-Wave, perfecting quantum computing, despite the enormous odds against it?
This is not to say that General Fusion is going to necessarily change the World. What it does say is that enough informed people and brave investors believe that it is possible, that they are willing to risk their careers and that major institutional investors are prepared to risk their capital on it. That is the Big Idea in action. That is what innovation in Canada needs more than anything. Money and bravery.
Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite in Vancouver, another of the shining new companies, has recently posted on LinkedIn that Canada is creating a “Maple Syrup Gang”of promising startups that are redefining entrepreneurship in Canada, his company being prominent among them. The “Maple Syrup Gang” is an amusing analogy to the real-life hijacking of millions of dollars of maple syrup by a criminal gang in Quebec. Holmes has also gone on to rhetorically ask the question, “Is Silicon Valley‘s Heyday Over?” Regrettably, Holmes articles are embarrassing hyperbole. Vancouver has had earlier promising high tech booms that have fizzled and died. Unfortunately, the complex matrix of issues affecting Canadian innovation and the potential success of Canadian startups are still daunting.
I am very encouraged by the early successes of General Fusion and D-Wave in Vancouver, for many reasons. But it is extremely premature to declare victory over Silicon Valley. I came here in 1987 to join a promising startup, pioneering wireless data.. The company died from mismanagement, when it could have been a World power in wireless data. It is a case study in how Canada has historically shot itself in the foot, or is unable to capitalize, every time it gets a good idea.
Let’s celebrate General Fusion and D-Wave and continue working to help Canadian Big Ideas succeed….here in Canada.
mayo615 