David Kirtley

And so they were able to show at that time the highest performing fusion systems.

They got to temperatures, they didn't get to 100 million degrees, not quite then, but they got to 50 million degrees.

They were outperforming everything else in fusion, but they reached a technical limit where they just could not build it anymore.

And so they, those pioneers, went in a different direction.

And they started down the laser inertial path of saying like, okay, well, we can't do these electromagnetic pinches, but we now have this new thing has invented the laser, which turns on in a nanosecond.

It's fast.

It's interesting.

Let's go down that path.

And it's not, you have to fast forward a couple of decades to researchers found with some of these theta pinches, when they're operated in a very specific way, something else happened, something new happened.

And that these plasmas where before they squeezed them,

very hard, and just like squeezing a tube of toothpaste, they squirted out the ends.

Now it didn't squirt out the ends.

It actually pushed back.

It stayed confined.

It stayed trapped inside that linear topology.

Even though the ends were open, the plasma didn't leave.

And so there was a large amount of programs of like, what is happening here?

This is an accidental discovery in plasma physics that something new is happening.

And what we discovered is we now call the field reverse configuration.

There's numerous programs of...