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Dennis Whyte

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
1833 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And what this does is it produces a magnetic field which goes through it by the laws of electromagnetism.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So that's how we make the magnetic field in these configurations.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And the key there is that it's not limited by the magnetic property of the material.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

The magnetic field amplitude is set by the amount of the geometry of this thing and the amount of electric current that you're putting through.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And the more electric current that you put through, the more magnetic field that you get.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

The closest one that people maybe see is one of my, one of my favorite skits actually was Super Dave Osborne on, it's probably, probably past years, like in a show called Bizarre.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Super Dave Osborne, which is a great comedian called, he was a stunt man.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And one of his tricks was that he was, he gets into a car and then one of those things in the junkyard comes down, you know, and picks up the car and then puts it into the, into the crusher.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

This is his stunt and

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Which is pretty hilarious.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Anyway, but that thing that picks him up, like how does that work?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

That's actually not a permanent magnet.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

It's an electromagnet.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And so you can turn, by turning off and on the power supply, it turns off and on the magnetic field.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

So this means you can pick it up and then when you switch it off, the magnetic field goes away and the car drops.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

Okay, so that's what it looks like.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

yeah sure oh it was it's fun yeah there's a lot to parse there so maybe uh we so we already explained an electromagnet which in general is what you do is you take electric current and you force it to to follow a pattern of some kind typically like a circular pattern around and around and around around it goes the more time the more current and the more times it goes around the stronger the magnetic field that you make okay

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

And as I pointed out, it's like really important in magnetic confinement because it is the force that's produced by that magnet.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

In fact, technically it goes like the magnetic field squared because it's a pressure which is actually being exerted on the plasma to keep it contained.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#353 โ€“ Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy

What are we supposed to imagine?