Dennis Whyte

It is, of course, possible to make a Sun, although you wouldn't have stars.

But it is not impossible on Earth because for the simple reason that it takes... The gravitational force is extremely weak, and so it takes something like the size of a star to make fusion occur in the center.

You can't.

There's not enough hydrogen around.

Yeah, I mean, the forces and energy that it takes to assemble that is just mind-boggling.

Yeah, to be continued.

So what are we doing it with?

So in the one that I just described, it's like you say, so you have to replace this with some force which is better than that.

And so what I mean by that is it's stronger than that.

So when I talked about the laser fusion, this is coming from the force, which is enormous compared to gravity, like from the rocket action of pushing it together, right?

So in magnetic confinement, we use another force of nature, which is the electromagnetic force.

And that's very, it's orders and orders of magnitude stronger than the gravitational force.

And the key force that matters here is that if you have a charged particle, that namely it's a particle that has an electric, net electric charge, and it's in the proximity of a magnetic field, then there is a force which is exerted on that particle.

So it's called the Lorentz force for those who are keeping track.

So that is the force that we use to replace physical containment.

So this, again, how do you hold something at 100 million degrees?

It's impossible in a physical container.

This is not like, you know, it's not this plastic bottle holding in this liquid or a gas chamber.

What you're doing is you're immersing the fuel in a magnetic field that basically exerts a force at a distance.

This comes back again to, again, like why plazas are so strange.