David Kirtley

than the initial one did, the initial uranium or plutonium.

And in that process, again, E equals mc squared, a tremendous amount of energy is released.

There's a very famous curve in atomic physics, fusion or fission, looking at the periodic table, going from the lightest elements, hydrogen, to the heaviest elements, those uranium, plutonium, and others.

And fusion happens up to iron.

Iron is the magical point in between where lighter elements than iron fuse together

and heavier elements fizz or fizzile and break apart and release energy.

I think about and I look at that process in stars, in that our star is fundamentally an early-stage star that's burning just hydrogens.

But when it burns and does fusion, those hydrogens combine into heliums, and later-stage stars can then burn those heliums.

And they can fuse those together to form even heavier elements and carbons.

And those carbons can fuse together and form heavier elements.

And that whole stellar process is something that inspires us at Helion to think about what are fusion fuels, not just the simplest ones, but more advanced fusion fuels that we see in stars throughout the universe.

E equals MC squared is a fundamental relationship that a patent clerk, Einstein, discovered and unlocked an entire new realm of physics and engineering and has shown us a

Atomic physics, what happens inside the nucleus, and unlocked our understanding of the universe and paved the way for many of the physics advancements that came after that we think about mass as these particles.

But in reality, also, at the same time, they're energy.

And there's a direct quantitative relationship between how much energy is in all of that mass.

And in fact, all of the energy that is released...

even by atomic physics, certainly in atomic reactions, is equals MC squared.

And that I think most people have heard of and are used to.

But also in chemistry and in chemical bonds, that in those chemical bonds, there is a change in mass.

When you take a hydrogen and an oxygen and you burn them and you combine them into water, there's a change in mass.