Dennis Whyte

Oh, no.

So, as they get closer, they're pushing harder and harder apart.

Then it gets a little bit more exotic, which maybe you'll like, though, that it turns out that people understood this at the beginning of the age after Rutherford discovered the nucleus.

It's like, oh, yeah.

It's like, how is this going to work, right?

Because how do you get anything within these distances, inquire?

Extraordinary energy.

And it does.

And in fact, when you look at those energies, they're very, very high, right?

But it turns out quantum physics comes to the rescue, because the particles aren't actually just particles, they're also waves.

This is the point of quantum, right?

You can treat them both as waves and as particles, and it turns out if they get in close enough proximity to each other, then the...

Particle pops through basically this energy barrier through an effect called quantum tunneling, which is really just the transposition of the fact that it's a wave so that it has a finite probability of this.

By the way, you talk about like, do you have a hard time like conceptualizing this?

This is one of them.

This is like throwing a ping pong ball like at a piece of paper and then every like, you know, 100 of them just like magically show up on the other side of the paper without seemingly breaking the paper.

I mean, to use a physical analogy.

Yes, for all kinds of fusion.

So this is the reason why stars can work as well, too.

Stars would have to be much, much hotter, actually.