David Kirtley

They're 100 million degrees.

You can't put any mechanical things inside them.

And so we have nothing to hold on to it.

And so it's unstable.

So when you learn about the FRC, that's the first thing you learn.

And it took us a number of years to learn about a parameter of how to make them stable.

And that's pretty fundamental.

But most people who've heard of an FRC haven't understood this really key fact.

And so we have a parameter we call S star over E. And we're getting really into the physics weeds here.

But it's really important.

And the good analogy here is a top.

Literally a top, a spinning top.

And so you have a top spinning on your desk.

You know that it'll spin for a little while and then it will fall over.

It is unstable.

However, if you spin it fast enough, if you take a top and you spin it fast enough, put enough angular momentum, enough angular inertia into that system, it'll stay upright.

even though it wants to just fall over, even though it's unstable.

And we do the same thing in an FRC.

If you can drive it fast enough, if you can add enough kinetic energy and inertia to the particles, it will stay stable.

However, you can do another really key thing.