Dennis Whyte

It's like there's no way because we've failed at this.

It's a great story in the history of fusion is that then.

But they insisted and said, no, look, you can see this from our data.

It's like this thing is really hot and it seems to be working.

This is, you know, late 1960s.

And there was a team that went from the United Kingdom's fusion development lab.

And they brought this very fancy, amazing new technology called a laser.

And they used this laser and they shot the laser beam like through the plasma.

And by looking at the scattered light that came from that, they go, basically the scattered light gets more broadened in its spectrum if it gets hotter.

So you could exactly tell the temperature of this.

And even though you're not physically touching the plasma, it's like, holy cow, you're right.

It is like, it is 10 million degrees.

And so this was one of those explosions of like everyone in the world then wanted to build a token back because it was clearly like, wow, this is like so far ahead of everything else that we tried before.

So that actually has a part of the story to MIT and the Plow Science and Fusion Center was why is there a strong fusion and a major fusion program at MIT?

It was because we were host to the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, which is also the National High Field Magnet Laboratory.

Well, you can see where this goes, right?

We're kind of telling the stories backwards almost, but the advent of a tokamak along with the fact that you could make very strong magnetic fields with the technology that had been developed with that laboratory, that was the origins of sort of pushing together the physics of the plasma containment and the magnet technology and put them together.

in a way that I would say is a very typical MIT success story, right?

We don't do just pure science or pure technology.

We sort of set up this intersection between them.