Eric Weinstein

The goal is to save normal people.

And to save normal people, you need extraordinary people.

You see, who endangered these normal people?

It was two guys, Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller.

And these two guys came up with a piece of geometry.

Do you know how the thermonuclear weapon works?

Okay, so the first thing is, why didn't we have these crazy weapons during the Civil War?

The Civil War was very close to World War II in human history, and if you look at one, it's clearly fought in antiquity, and then suddenly you've got jet planes, and you can have the ability to drop bombs.

Key issue is that we didn't understand that there was something called the neutron.

We knew about protons and electrons before we knew that there were neutrons.

At 1911, I think, Ernest Rutherford said, maybe there's a neutral version of the proton inside of the atom.

And that was the most dangerous idea, in my opinion, any human ever had, just that one idea.

Maybe there's a neutral version of the proton.

Why is that?

Because if you send a proton as a bullet into a very large

atomic nucleus.

That's a lot of protons stuck together.

So as magnets, they're all trying to run away from each other.

But there's some extra force called the strong force that is even crazier than the super strong force of electromagnetism.

But if you send this proton in, as it gets closer and closer, it gets repelled