Alex McColgan

speaker

29,301 appearances 104 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard yesterday

Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.

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Astrum Space · What We Detected in the Strangest Quantum Experiments on Earth · 7 Sep 2026 podcast

In a 1920 paper, physicist Arthur Eddington wrote, If the contraction theory were proposed today as a novel hypothesis, I do not think it would stand the smallest chance of acceptance. voice-verified

He argued that contraction would be hopelessly inadequate for powering a body that radiates as much energy as our sun. voice-verified

Suspecting that stars were places in which hydrogen atoms were cobbled together into heavier elements, Eddington proposed a different source of energy, drawing on experiments carried out by fellow scientist Francis Aston. voice-verified

Aston had shown that the mass of a helium nucleus was ever so slightly less than that of four hydrogen nuclei, so if a helium atom was just four hydrogens fused together, some mass was missing. voice-verified

Eddington believed that this missing mass was converted into energy by Einstein's E equals mc squared. voice-verified

And because c, the speed of light, is such a large number, voice-verified

the energy generated from even a tiny amount of mass is huge, meaning fusing hydrogen into helium would

provide more than enough energy to power the sun. voice-verified

Eddington's ideas were bold and unproven, but they soon inspired serious theoretical work, and in 1929, the first calculations of stellar nuclear fusion were published by Robert Descourt Atkinson and Fritz Hautemans. voice-verified

It turned out that the Sun and all stars were giant fusion reactors, taking the most common element in the universe, hydrogen, and fusing it into other elements, starting with helium. voice-verified

Now, replicating this process on Earth would be hugely advantageous, especially when compared to nuclear fission, the process that is used in nuclear power plants today. voice-verified

Where fission relies on splitting large and rare unstable isotopes such as uranium-235 and plutonium-239, stellar nuclear fusion relies on hydrogen, an element that is widely available on Earth through the electrolysis of seawater. voice-verified

And unlike the radioactive byproducts of fission, voice-verified

that create a huge disposal problem for modern nuclear power stations, the byproduct of stellar fusion is helium, an extremely useful element. voice-verified

Thanks to its exceptionally low boiling point, helium is used to cool the magnets in MRI machines, voice-verified

for scientific research projects like CERN, as well as in the production of microchips. voice-verified

It's an essential element that we actually need more of. voice-verified

So how exactly do stars achieve this alchemy of fusing hydrogen into helium? voice-verified

And how are scientists going about trying to replicate the process? voice-verified

Well, the first thing to consider is the reaction medium, the stuff stars are made of. voice-verified

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