Dennis Whyte

So it turns out when you go through the math of this, the average velocity or energy of the particles must be very high to have any significant probability of the reactions happening.

And so the center of our sun is at about 20 million degrees Celsius.

And on Earth, this means it's one of the first things we teach, you know, entering graduate students.

You can do a quick, you can do a quick basically power balance and you can determine that on Earth it requires a minimum temperature of about 50 million degrees Celsius on Earth.

To perform fusion.

Yeah.

To get enough fusion that you would be able to make, get energy gain out of it.

So you can trigger fusion reactions at lower energy, but they become almost vanishingly small at lower temperatures than that.

And this was one of them.

So it's interesting because as a scientist, I see the universe through that lens of essentially the interesting things that we do are through the forces that get used around those.

And everything works because of that.

Richard Feynman had... I don't know if you've ever read Richard Feynman.

It's a little bit of a tangent, but...

He's never been on the podcast.

He was unfortunately passed away, but like a hero to almost all physicists.

And part of it was because of what you said.

He kind of looked through a different lens at these, what typically look like very dry, like equations and relationships.

And he kind of, I think he brought out the wonder of it in some sense, right?

For those...

he posited what would be, if you could write down a single, not even really a sentence, but a single concept that was the most important thing scientifically that we knew about, that in other words, you had only one thing that you could transmit like a future or past generation.