David Kirtley

But other things will happen.

You don't want to touch that high velocity particle with any kind of material because it will collide with that material, damage that material, and usually like blow off some chunks of that material.

So we don't do that.

We keep those charged particles in a magnetic field.

So they just bounce around and they don't ever touch anything.

And that's really important.

And so it's less thinking about it from the way we normally think about hot and cold and more thinking about it from a velocity point of view.

So if temperature is velocity...

that means they're moving quickly over a given amount of space.

Speed is distance divided by time.

And so if you have a machine of a certain size and it's moving very fast, that tells you the time that that particle is moving from place to place in that machine.

And in fact, if it's a million miles per hour, these are on the order of 100 kilometers per second, which you can flip that around and you can say you're moving at meters per microsecond.

So feet per millionth of a second.

And so that fundamentally tells you, and we've known this, as soon as you say, I want to do fusion, you know, you need to react to the universe in microseconds and be able to understand the system in that speed.

And if you get it hotter, it goes even faster and you have to go faster.

And so we look at those and that's how we think about the systems.

We measure everything in microseconds, not in seconds.

And so when you do fusion, it's pretty wild.

It's literally a flash.

Fusion happens.