David Kirtley

Why don't we squeeze it?

And so rather than just holding it constantly, let's now crush it.

So we built this solenoid, we pinched the ends, and then we crushed it.

And what I mean by crushing it is not actually like crushing any magnets or changing the topology or moving any parts, but just rapidly increasing the magnetic field.

And so going from a magnetic field that's just holding it to now taking all those particles, if you imagine they were streaming around together, and then rapidly increasing the magnetic field so that those particles get closer and closer and closer together.

So you increase the density.

And now fusion starts to really happen.

But they ended up hitting a technological limit.

So this is the part that I look back and I look at the pioneers that in 1958, there was some pioneering work done.

And this was in California, what later became Livermore Labs.

There was also some work done at other national labs, too.

These were all federally funded programs to explore this theta pinch topology.

Can you just squeeze the plasma down fast enough, hard enough?

This was 1958.

The transistor was sitting in the laboratory and they were commuting.

They were turning on millions of amps of electrical current.

And they were doing it.

We haven't talked about the timescales, but they were doing it in millionths of a second.

microseconds, megahertz speeds.

And this was in 1958, no transistor, no CPUs, and no electrical switches, none of the things that I take for granted every day.