July 16, 2019 • 42 mins
Will we ever be able to create unlimited energy with cold fusion?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Kay Daniel, you're a big science witch and fan. Right.
Oh yeah, When something new is on Netflix, if it's
science fiction, I'll almost always watch the first five minutes,
even if it's about a giant's bays banana. Hey, you
make that movie, I will watch it. But is that
something you watch with your family? Do you? Is your
wife into science fiction? Ah, that's a bit of a
bone of contention over the remote. I would say her
(00:28):
taste are a bit different. She doesn't like science fiction.
Let's just say she doesn't necessarily choose them for the science.
They don't need to be correct for her to enjoy them.
That's right. I mean, she's also a scientist, but she's
able to suspend disbelief and she finds other things in
these movies to make them appealing. Oh yeah, what's her
favorite science fiction movie? It's kind of embarrassing though, for
(00:48):
me as a physicist, because her favorite science fiction movie
is called Cold Fusion, which has like so many terrible
plot holes in it, but the one redeeming feature is
that it stars he and leaves wearing a U Chicago sweatshirt,
which is her alma matter. Hi am poorhand. I'm the
(01:21):
creator of PhD comics and the co author of the
book We Have No Idea, A Guy to the Unknown Universe. Hi,
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and coincidentally, I'm also
the co author of the book We Have No Idea,
A Guide to the Unknown Universe. What are the chances
what you wrote that book to? I mostly wrote it
together with some guy I was emailing with online. And
(01:42):
how did you meet this this man Tinder? It did
involve the Internet. That's those the only details I'll go into.
And involved something else cold, right, you cold emailed me.
That's right, just a cold email out into the Internet
to look for a creative partner. But welcome to our podcast,
Daniel and or Hey Explain the Universe, a production of
(02:02):
I Heart Radio in which we reach out to you
through the various hot and cold tubes of the Internet
to try to explain to you all the crazy, all
the crazy and amazing things that we find in our
universe and make them make sense to you. All the
amazing processes out there and science and technology and facts
(02:23):
that maybe we can use one day to our advantage
as a human species. That's right. One goal of physics
is to understand the world so that we can tame it, right,
to use it to our advantage, to build new technology,
to transform what it means to be humans, what it's
like to live as a human in the modern world,
and of course at the core of that is energy.
So to be on the program, we'll be talking about
(02:43):
a technology or I guess the physics concept that could
potentially solve all of humanity's problems, right, That's how they've
been selling it since the eighties. Yeah, exactly. It's sort
of the holy grail of physics. If it works, then
everything will change. I mean, imagine if energy was cheap
or even free, almost everything that we do in life
(03:04):
could be made easier with energy. Yeah. Is there something
in our knowledge of physics, like and how the animals
are put together, or the courts, or the particles that
we could use to solve our energy crisis. It seems
like it must be. I mean, we live in such
an energetic universe. We're always talking on this podcast about
particles going at the speed of light, or enormous huge
(03:25):
balls of fire we call the sun, right, or a
crazy black holes squishing things and beaming out jets from galaxies. Like,
there's so many energetic processes out there. So much energy
is just stored in the matter around us. It's still
it's frustrating to me that we have such difficulty tapping
into it, that we're you know, digging up buried plants
and burning them in order to extract the tiny little
(03:47):
bit of energy that's our best idea so far. It
seems Yeah, it seems like we should have figured out
something better by now, given the incredible amounts of energy
all around us and the huge processes. You know, it's
like we're, um, we're at a buffet. We're just like
new building on the crumbs that have fallen off the table.
We're filling up on the salad, which is a rookie
mistake for buffet's exactly if you pay for the buffet,
(04:09):
goes straight for the main course. Exactly. Yeah. So today
we'll be talking about one such technology or piece of
science that could change everything. So today on the program,
we'll be talking about cold fusion. What is it? Is
it cold? Or is it? Is that? The name of
(04:31):
a new sports drink from Gatorade. It's going to be
the name of a new sports drink once we get
off this podcast and go pitch it to Mountain Dew
as part of their Extreme Universe Drink series. Yeah, on
a bottle of dark energy. Nobody wants a bottle of
dark matter though, that's not gonna say, but yeah. Cold fusion.
(04:51):
Cold fusion is a is a topic that's been bouncing
around in physics for decades and decades, and you know,
for a long time it was the dream of scientists
to achieve USUAN without having to build basically the Sun
in miniature. And then for a while it seemed like
maybe it was possible. No, maybe it was impossible. Now
people are saying maybe it's possible again. Yeah, it's been
(05:11):
around for a while, right, I remember, I think it
was a big deal in the seventies and eighties. That's
when they first thought maybe it could be possible. It
was in the late eighties when there was a lot
of media coverage over some experiments that turned out to
maybe not be a scientifically valid and so people sort
of gave up. But recently you're saying, there has been
new things that maybe make people think it is possible.
(05:33):
There's always another opportunity. You know. This is the thing
about physics is that something seems impossible, but there's always
a little window. There's always a little crack. Maybe you
could figure out if you were clever enough, you could
be the one to solve this problem. I like to
fantasize about that. You know that there's like two eras
in history. There's like before I figured out this incredible
(05:53):
problem and after, right, because there are stories like that
people who have cracked long standing problems or come up
with some new ideas, some new technology that really did
change the way things work. And cold fusion, if you
could achieve it would be in that category, would change everything.
Might let us a lift forever as a species, right,
we could maybe go to other stars with it. Yeah,
(06:14):
it would basically solve almost every problem. Like you're worried
about enough fresh drinking water, just use some energy desalinate
the ocean. You're worried about overheating the planet, use some
energy to pump C or two out into space. You know,
everything costs energy in the end, Almost every problem except
for people being mean to each other, cost energy. Even
that one actually because in the end, um you know,
(06:37):
war and and and all those kind of things come
down to competition for resources. But if energy is free
or very very plentiful, then there's enough resource to make
enough food, to dig up enough gold to do almost
everything you want for everybody. Well, for that you need
people fusion. That's a different kind of physics altogether. That's
a not safe for working. So today we'll explain to
(06:59):
you guys and playing to everyone out there, what is
cold fusion. But first we were wondering what people know
about it? How much do they know what it is? Yeah,
it's one of the topics in science that really did
leak out into very broad public and for a while
it seemed like we were on the verge of an
incredible breakthrough. But then again, that was, you know, thirty
years ago, and so I was I really didn't know
(07:20):
whether people had heard of this or had an idea
whether it was possible. So I went into this with
an open mind. So, as usual, Daniel went out and
asked people, random people on the street if they knew
what cold fusion was. Here's what they had to say.
I'm guessing it's doing fusion at lower temperatures. But uh,
I mean, I've heard that fusion in general was really
(07:40):
tough to achieve pressure. I'm not sure on that one.
Cold fusion I have not no no idea so in
order to fuse two metals, you have to heat it up.
But when you're like say, like in a vacuum, like
in space, that there's like electrons just flowing on it.
And but in ace, it's uh, like in a vacuum
(08:02):
like like you don't need the heat, you know, when
you think out the blood, I guess right, fusion is
when you take up the blood so cold you just
do it like frozen animal body or whatever. I don't know,
I've heard the words. I have no idea what they mean.
Where would be your best guess? Um, probably something to
do with producing nuclear energy, right, So a lot of
nose and a couple of confusions, not cold fusions exactly exactly.
(08:28):
Some some people had it sort of mentally adjacent to
other topics. Um, I got a very long explanation of
how cold welding works. You know, how to learn something
I did. I didn't know that you could do welding
in space, right, that you don't necessarily need like oxygen
and air and and fire to join two pieces of metal.
So thank you for the mini lecture I received on
(08:50):
cold welding. And some people thought it meant transfusion like
a blood transfusion. Yeah, and that you know, hey, they
freeze blood, right, and then they have thoughts. So that's
sort of a hold transfusion. It makes some sense, right.
I'm impressed when people don't have any idea what I'm
talking about, but sort of on the fly come up
with something reasonable to say. That's you know, that's creative thinking.
(09:11):
And to be honest, I didn't really know what it
was until a couple of years ago I got hired
to do a comic and a video about Cold Future. Yeah,
you have an excellent video. There's no shame in not
knowing what it is. I see, that's the standard. If
Jore doesn't know about it, then it's acceptable to be ignorant.
If that's a standard, then everyone, uh is pretty safe
(09:31):
because I don't I don't really know that much. But
then everybody needs to have watched every science fiction movie
ever also, right, Yeah, that's right. So in the opening
we talked about the movie with canaries called Cold Fusion.
And you're not a fan of the science in that movie. No,
I um, I've watched it once decades ago, refused to
watch it again, but I remember thinking, oh my god,
(09:52):
that makes no sense. Or they clearly just did that
so some guy could drive a motorcycle through a bunch
of explosions. So the plot of the movie is what
Kenna rees is trying to achieve cold fusion to solve
all of our energy problems. Yeah, I think Keanu Reeves
does achieve cold fusion, and then there's a struggle over
control of it um. But then it basically just you know,
digresses into a bunch of motorcycles driving through explosions, as
(10:16):
does every movie, it seems every movie with Kenna Reeves
in it at least. All right, well, let's get into
it then, Daniel. So there's two words, your cold and fusion,
and somehow you've put it together. Then it's a revolutionary concept.
So what goes through? What is cold fusion? Or let's
(10:36):
start with fusion. What is fusion? Right? So what is fusion?
You see fusion every day every day you go outside
and you bathe yourself in sunlight. You are standing and
being warmed by the fires of an enormous thermonuclear fusion
reactor called the sun. Right, So fusion is what happens
inside the sun. It generates all that heat, which is
a source of all life on Earth. Right, so thank
(10:58):
you fusion. Without fusion, we would have nothing. And fusion
very simply is just a way to release energy. You
take two helium, sorry, you take two hydrogen nuclei, which
are just protons, and you push them together to make
a new element. Right, you're transforming hydrogen into helium. You
push them together, they stick together to make a new
(11:19):
nucleus with two protons in it. And that helium nucleus
has less energy in it than the two hydrogens did.
So what happens is that some energy is released. Are
you make this and there's some energy left over, but
you don't need, right, and so it just gets released
in photons and energy. And that's that's burning, right, that's
the fusion burning. So if I walk outside and I
(11:40):
get a suntan, that's fusion. You were getting burned by fusion.
You're fusion toasted. Well, something I never understood was why
does helium, which is what when you get when you
merge or fuse to hydrogen atoms, why does the combination
of them have less energy? That's a great question, you know,
like what happened to that energy? Why does it? What?
(12:00):
Do you need less energy to make something that's like
one plus one. That's a great question, but you're not
really making one plus one. It's like, um, it's like
one plus one equals one point nine, right, it's um.
You're not just taking those two protons and putting them
next to each other. Those protons are interacting. They're connected,
right because remember this nucleus um holds itself together like
acts like one thing. It's not just like two protons
(12:21):
near each other. They're really they're fused, hence the word
into one thing. On another episode, we talked about how
that stays together because remember these are two protons. They're
positively charged. They should be pushing away from each other. Right, Well,
there's very strong forces that hold these two protons together,
involving how the corks connect and and so the mass
(12:42):
of that nucleus is reflected by the energy of these bonds.
And so you shouldn't think of it as two hydrogen
out and you think of it like the corks that
are inside those hydrogen nuclei being rearranged into a helium nucleus.
And it's all about that arrangement. You know, how those
corks are sitting near each other. Yeah, I guess I
forget that protons are made out of smaller bits, which
(13:04):
are quarks. And so you're saying that in one hydrogen atom,
I need a certain amount of energy to keep in
those quarts together, but once I emerged two hydrogen atoms,
you need less energy to hold all those little bits together,
and so there's extra energy. Yeah exactly, it's like there's
an economy of scale there, right, you can use the
two they sort of help each other. If you take
(13:25):
six quarks, it's easier to build a helium nucleus than
to build two hydrogen nuclei, because then they have to
be independent, they have to be totally colored neutral, all
on their own, whereas if you have a helium nucleus,
there's a lot more options, a lot of ways. You
can configure these quarks into two protons that are sort
of stuck together, but they don't actually kind of the
two protons don't mush together, right, there's still kind of
(13:46):
their own thing, but somehow being stuck together helps each
one of them stay together themselves. Yeah, exactly, they stay
their own thing, but they're connected right there, talking to
each other. The way like when a proton and an
electron come together to make hydrogen, it's still a proton,
and it's still still an electron, but they've made something else,
something which is bound together, which acts like one thing
(14:08):
from the outside. So in the same way, these two
protons they still are protons, but you know, they're interacting
with the quarks inside the other protons, and they've come
together to make this thing which is weirdly less than
some of their parts. It's kind of like, um, you
know how they text married couples more because they assume
there are some efficiencies if you're married, like, oh, you're married,
(14:29):
now you're too you're together, you have a partnership. You
must have extra income or extra disposable income or something.
You can also think of it, like think about the
proton as like a bunch of corks connected with springs,
and there's energy in those springs. You have to like
arrange them in just the right way and put some
energy in those springs to hold them together. Um, and
then when you make the helium nuclei, you can like
(14:51):
reuse one of those springs. You're like, oh, I don't
need all of these, I can just use this one
here twice because they overlap, you know, And so I
have this extra spring which had this your energy in it.
What do I do with that? Well, that just shoots
off and so that's that's the basic process of fusion.
Is pushed two hydrogen nuclei together to make helium plus
some energy and a spring shoots off. Yeah, that's the energy.
(15:12):
And you might think what is that spring? Well, you know,
internal in the nucleus, all this stuff is stored is gluons.
But when these two hydrogen nuclei fuse, which you get
is a photon. It shoots out a bunch of energy. Okay,
So that's what's happening inside of the sun and also
inside of nuclear bombs, right, nuclear fusion bombs. That's basically
what's happening is just you're getting a bunch of hydrogen
(15:33):
squeezed together and having them fuse into hedium. That's right,
And and that should help you appreciate the scale of this, right,
Like an enormous thermonuclear explosion, right, a hydrogen bomb. Those
things are incredibly powerful. They're devastating and kill millions of
people if you dropped one on the city. All of
that comes out of a tiny amount of fuel that
you do not need a huge amount of plutonium to
(15:55):
have that bomb. And that tells you how energy dense
matter is. Like, they is so much energy and matter
that if you're able to release some of it, it's overwhelming.
It's like it's incredible. And we've talked about this several
times in the podcast. If you took like a raisin's
worth of matter and touched into a raisin worth of antimatter,
(16:15):
and the reason we choose those is because they're very
easily able to annihilate all their energy, all their matter
into energy. Then you get a huge nuclear explosion like
the size of Hiroshima, and so there's a huge amount
of energy story and matter, and like we were saying before,
really just often we're scraping just the crumbs off the floor.
When you burn fossil fuels, it's a huge amount of
(16:36):
energy in them before and a huge amount of energy
in them afterwards. You've just taken off a tiny little sliver.
And so fusion is like this this way to tap
into this incredibly dense energy source. And that's why it's
so exciting, because the huge amounts of energy released from
tiny amounts of fuel. It's kind of like if I
if I took a raisin and I threw it at
you that's not a lot of energy. You wouldn't get
(16:58):
hurt by a raison owned by another person. But if
I could somehow, like I don't know, you've been working
out how fast you even? I think even if you
had a major lea, you have a hundred mile raisin
picture throw raising at you, it still wouldn't hurt very much.
But if you somehow I don't know the answer to that,
a hundred mile an hour raisin, would that hurt you
if you ate it? Well, maybe the pensant where it
(17:19):
hits you, you know, if the eyes. But but the
idea is that, you know, if I threw the raising
at you, it wouldn't hurt you or carry a lot
of energy. But if you've somehow was able to like
break apart the raisin, you know, like break apart not
just the atoms of the raisin, but the corks inside
of the atoms of the protons of the raisin, then
(17:41):
there would be a huge amount of energy, right, yeah,
exactly that you would not survive that. Yeah, that one
raisin could power a city, right, I mean we're talking
about huge quantities of energy, and so that's what fusion is.
It's this we're trying to tap into this. And it's
also tantalizing because we see it every day. We see
it happening out there in the sun. Right, it's omnipresent
or you can't it escape it, and so we know
(18:01):
it's happening. It's the universe is primary source of light,
and so we just want to you know, ride that
wave and and use it to get the energy we
need so we can listen to podcasts and make cookies
and all sorts of fun stuff we like to do
with our lives. Eat raisins, eat raisins. But you know
it's not easy, right, those hydrogen atoms they don't like
(18:22):
to come together. They're both positively charged. So what happens
when you bring them near each other is they repel, right,
They resist getting close to each other. So fusion is
not an easy thing you can just like, here's a
scoop of protons, go fuse, right, That's why we mostly
just see them in crazy situations, right, like the center
of the sun and nuclear bombs. That's usually where fusion
(18:45):
likes to happen exactly because these protons resist each other
until they get really really close. Once they get close,
then this strong nuclear force takes over and they confuse
and all that kind of stuff happens. But for that
to happen, they have to get close enough, and it's
you know, they're repelling each other. So it's like you
ever try to push two magnets near each other. They're
like slipping and sliding and going sideways and trying to
(19:06):
avoid it or impossibly or imagine like trying to get
a cat into a bucket of water, right. I mean,
I'm not suggesting anybody to do that, but mentally imagine
you know, it's not easy. It's a cat fusion, feline
fusion um or or if you ever do like mini golf,
you know how there's those holes where it's like the
where you're supposed to get the ball is like at
(19:27):
the top of a little hill. You think, oh, no
big deal, I'll just roll to the top of the
hill and it'll go in. But if you don't roll
it exactly right, then it rolls off to the side
or it skips over the top. Right. Fusion is like that.
You've got to get the hydrogen atoms exactly the right speed,
right at each other for them to get close enough
to sort of fall in the hole and fuse otherwise
they'll just deflect and go in other directions. Is it
(19:48):
kind of like if you take two magnets the positive size,
and you apply super glue on them and you try
to stick them together. Like that would be kind of hard,
but if you do manage to get them to touch
each other, then and they'll stick together. Probably. I haven't
done that experiment. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, um,
you might end up reversing the polarity of one of
them or something. I'm not even sure what would happen,
(20:09):
but yeah, exactly if you can get them close enough together.
And that's what's happening in the sun, right. What is
the sun. It's a huge blob of hydrogen, but it's
such a big blob that it has huge gravity, and
so the gravity is squeezing all these protons together, and
so there's nowhere else to go, right. They'd like to
run away from each other. They're pushing against each other,
but they're like a crowd at some you know, teenage
(20:31):
rock concert. There's nowhere to go. You're in the middle
of the mosh pit, so you have to bump up
against other people. And so that's why fusion happens. In
the sun because there's so much gravitational pressure that the
protons can't avoid each other. That's how you get them
close enough to each other. It's like you need these
extreme conditions kind of like a and in a bomb,
that's what happens to right, Like they they use like
(20:52):
an outer bomb to compress the other the hydrogen, so
that fuses. Right, that's exactly how these thermonuclear bombs work. Right.
You have a fission reaction which generates, you know, a
huge explosion like Hiroshima, and that compresses the fuel you
need for fusion so that it actually starts to fuse.
So you have to be basically in the middle of
the sun or in the middle of an already exploding
(21:15):
nuclear bomb to make this work. So um, not easy.
Not a place I would recommend visiting. Yeah, okay, so
that's fusion, and that's kind of what we usually see
it as. It's as hot fusion right in the sun
or in a bomb. So now let's get into cold
fusion and how that's gonna change everything if they can
(21:35):
get it to work. But first let's take a quick break.
All right, we're talking about cold fusion and how to
make it. Here on Earth, and we talked about how
(21:56):
it's kind of the process that's going on inside of
suns and nuclear bomb that's right, and that's not typically
the kind of thing you want in your backyard or
in your neighborhood where they're generating energy. Right, if somebody says,
if somebody said, hey, can we put them the sun
down the street will provide a lot of energy, you'd
probably say no. You probably say put into my neighbor's yard.
(22:18):
Depending on how big your yard is, that may not
be far enough away from the Sun. But essentially what
scientists are doing to try to have fusion here on
Earth is recreate those conditions. I mean, in a in
a bomb, it's sort of a runaway reaction, you have
all the energy expended all at once. But for a
fusion react or, what you want is something where it
slowly expands that energy, where can be sort of controlled
(22:39):
but still um in terms of like hot fusion. Here
on Earth, we're basically trying to recreate the conditions of
the sun or a nuclear bomb. But maybe is it
the same as the sun, but maybe just in a
smaller scale like a mini sun. Yeah, you know, if
physicists think big, like I want to make a star.
You know, they're basically making a mini sun, and the
(23:00):
problem is like how do you contain it. Say you
want to make something fuse and you want to get
the energy out, Like what do you put it in? Right?
You can't build it in a glass bottle because it
will destroy the bottle. You can't build it in a
steel bottle because it will destroy it. So they actually
come up with these really cool magnetic bottles because the
thing about the sun is that all the particles in
there have electric charges. They're positive or they're negative, right,
(23:22):
they're all ionized, which means that they can be bent
by magnetic fields. So if you can get them to
like sort of go in a circle, like around a
doughnut shaped magnetic bottle, then maybe they just can just
sort of spin around forever, banging to each other, making
fusion and throwing out heat that you can capture without
ever actually you know, melting the building that you're in,
and then it's more like an engine where you're slowly
(23:45):
adding the fuel in instead of just burning the whole
tank of gas at the same time. The ideas that
you kind of have like a slow control sun explosion
that keeps going and keeps making energy for you. That's right.
The way it would work, as you start out with
something cold and you have to pour energy and to
begin with, right, But then once it gets hot enough
(24:05):
that fusion starts happening. Then the fusion provides enough heat
to keep things going to start to burn the next
bit of fuel. It's sort of like adding a log
to a fire. Right, It's hard to get started, but
once the fire is burning, you just put another log
in and the fire itself starts more fire. So that's
what they call ignition. And a fusion reactor is when
it gets hot enough that you can just keep adding
fuel at the right pace and to keep producing enough energy.
(24:29):
And that's really hard because you have this really hot thing.
It's like millions of degrees, right, basically like a little
slice of the sun, millions of Hey, let's spend some
time talking about temperature poscast episode about who's the hottest
person in the universe. So, so they're trying to do
this on Earth, right, you said, magnetic bottle is one way, uh,
(24:51):
and and it's a hard problem because you have to
contain this kind of explosion that's a million degrees in temperature, right, yeah,
exactly have to manage it. And they've made it work
in smaller scales, they've actually gotten energy out of the
fusion reactor, and in some cases they've even gotten more
energy out than they put in, which is nice um.
(25:12):
And what they're doing now is they're building sort of
a larger scale version to see if you can work
on a commerce for commercial scale, like can you actually
produce enough energy that you could like sell it and
you can convince a power company to spend a billion
dollars building this thing and and and run a business
out of it. And that's called They have really cool
names for these projects, right, Like you like the names.
(25:33):
Oh my gosh, that's quite a standard. I don't think
I've ever heard you said that before. Well, I like
it to say, as a kind of an anime flavor twit. Right,
it's called like a tacomac. Right, that's one name. Yeah,
that comes I think it's a comes from like a
conglomeration of Russian words because the Russians were the first
people to do that, and it comes from it. It's
a toroid, which is like the geometrical name for a
(25:54):
donut um. Yeah, it tookomac exactly, And yeah, it sounds
like a you know, like a giant Japanese enemy robot
that those movies don't always end very well though, so
I'm not sure, but the wisdom of naming your massive
sun creating experiment after an anime movie. But a good robot,
you know, oh yeah, right, okay, it's a friendly, helpful robot.
(26:16):
It's going to come and solve all your energy problems. Um.
But the one they're building is called Eater I T.
E R. And they're building it in France, and it's
supposed to be done, you know, sometime in the next
it's always ten years away, it seems. And that one
might actually work, you know, it costs ten billion dollars,
but it might actually work. But again, that's hot fusion, right,
that's like really hard. It's a huge facility, costs billions
(26:38):
of dollars. It's very difficult, but also a good name.
I think, you know, I support anything related to eating
as long as it doesn't eat the planet, right. Yeah. Yeah,
it's kind of a not a great foreboding name. That's
gonna eat up the world. Maybe we'll solve all of
our eating problems, you know, the sort of problem. But
(27:01):
I heard it's like the biggest science experiment ever. Right,
it's like even more expensive than the one it's earned
a large Hattern collider. Is that true? I know. Yeah,
it's gonna eclipse the Large hage On Collider to be
the biggest, most expensive science experiment ever. It might even
be more expensive than the International Space Station. So yeah,
that's pretty awesome. But it's also ambitious, you know. I
(27:22):
love when people try to do monumental great works. That's
really awesome because it's not the kind of thing one
person can do or two people can do. It's the
kind of thing we can only do when we come
together as a species and put our brains to something
and say, let's make the world a better place by
spending a lot of money on physics. That's all eat together,
so we'll call it eater. Yeah, exactly. Um. And then
(27:44):
there's another way people are trying to do like hot
fusion here on Earth, and that's saying, let's not try
to have a continuous fire, you know, where you have
this like fire that burns and and and generates itself
like a minisan inside of a magnetic bottle. That that's
the tocomac and the eater, But this is a different
There's another approach, which is like let's sort of have
like a bunch of one off fusions. So what they
(28:05):
do is they take a bit of fuel and they
zap it with lasers from like every direction simultaneously, like
a nineties six super powerful lasers zapp it, and they
hope that they get it hot enough that it confused
before it explodes. When it fuses before it explodes, what
does that mean. It means that, like the explosion takes
a while to happen, and so if you can get
(28:28):
it hot enough to get these these hydrogen nuclear hot enough,
then they will fuse because they haven't yet had time
to explode, like that it's gonna explode. But they call
this strategy inertial confinement fusion because it's just like you're
trying to get it to happen fast enough so that
inertia keeps it together for long enough for the diffuse
before it explodes. But then you know, it blows up
(28:49):
and you get another pellet us app that one with
lasers that one blows up. That's the strategy. That one's
kind of like, um, like you're instead of having a
minisun it's like you're stringing a sun out into a
little tiny thread, right, and you're right. Instead of having
like one fire going on, you string it along and
you you burn little bits at the time. Yeah, exactly.
(29:10):
It also seems the most science fiction. I mean, you're
like hundred nineties super lasers focusing on something all at once.
And there's a big facility in California called the National
Ignition Facility that's trying to do this. I've been there
and actually, you know, if any of you have watched
one of the Star Trek movies, you know, the new
ones with all the lens flares, then you have seen
(29:32):
this experiment because I think they used they filmed, or
they replicated it or something. When Scotty see the engine
saying she kind of take anymore, Captain, I think that's
basically either model or the actual thing that they filmed
it in. Oh cool, Well, it's also a cool sounding phrase,
National Cognition Facility. That's well named. So is it as
as good as she cannot take anymore cutting? It's as
(29:55):
good as your Scottish accent is? Yes, maybe we should
have some of our Scottish listener is write in and
rates Jorge Scottish accent. There you go, and also eater
and but all those are what we call hot fusion.
That's sort of trying to replicate the Sun's strategy, get
a bunch of hot hydrogen together and hope it fuses.
But those are hard, right, building a lasers or making
(30:17):
a magnetic bottle for something that's thirty million degrees. Wouldn't
it be awesome if you could do fusion at room temperature? Right,
you didn't need all this crazy apparatus. What if you
could have cold fusion? Exactly? Did I just come up
with that? Yes? Or hey, yes, I've never heard that
phrase before. Congratulations, that was brilliant. Humans are trying to
(30:39):
make fusion here on Earth, but they're both hot fusion strategies,
basically mini sons. And you're saying, there might be a
way to do this cold without like millions of degrees
or giant lasers or enemy robot names. There might be
something easier, exactly, And that's tantalizing. That's the promise of
(31:00):
old fusion. All right, let's get into it, but first
let's take a quick break. Alright, So finally we're going
to get into cold fusion. Daniels, So We've talked about
(31:20):
fusion and hot fusion and hot yoga, and now it's
different than than the hot yoga. It's sort of but
now the idea is that we can maybe create a sun,
but do it in a cold way where it's not
burning or at millions of degrees. Yeah. The idea is,
can we get too hydrogen nuclei to get close enough
together to turn into helium and release their energy without
(31:44):
having to get the hydrogen so hot? Right, we don't
want to create the sun, but we do want to
extract that energy. So the problem, remember, is how to
get the hydrogen close together. If you can just get
them close enough together, they will fuse, but they repel
each other. So you need something to get them close together.
And the basic strategy of hot fusion is making you know,
a lot of pressure and a lot of temperature and
(32:05):
these things will go really fast. Another way is to
try to get the hygen closer together without heating it up.
And it turns out that hydrogen likes to get sucked
into this special kind of crystal. It's called palladium. It's
a metal, and hydrogen iss really fits really well into
the gaps between the palladium molecules and and and palladium
sort of squeezes hygen together like packs. It's in the
(32:28):
hydrogen in there, and the hydrogen gets much much closer
in palladium than it will without the palladium. So you're saying,
use something like a crystal to pack them in closer.
But what But they're not going to explode yet. They're
not gonna explode yet. But but you're you're most of
the way there. You know. It's imagine it's like a
big hotel room with really really tiny rooms, right, and
(32:49):
everybody's in their own little room, and they don't yet
notice that there's somebody next door that they really don't
like that they want to run away from, because remember,
hydrogen repels itself and so now, but you've gotten them
really close together, so you have this opportunity for them
to fuse. Yeah, you've got a bunch of people in
a hotel, uh with tightly packed rooms. What could possibly
happen while you're you're looking for an explosive situation? Right,
(33:12):
you just have to persuade all these people to get
together if you want something interesting to happen. That's one
way to do it. Put a bunch of people in
a hotel, a bunch of people who hate each other
into tiny little hotel rooms next to each other exactly. Um.
And then you apply a little bit of energy, right,
and the idea is you probably just enough energy and
maybe the hydrogens will fuse into helium because you've already
(33:34):
gotten them so close together that maybe they'll like you know,
pop out of their little rooms and fuse because they're
near each other. That was the idea, like maybe little jostle,
jostle around and accidentally bumping to each other. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All you have to do is get the hydrogen close
enough together, so it's not a terrible idea. And then
in nine these two guys in Utah, Ponds and Fleishman,
(33:56):
they set up an experiment to try this, and they
claim aimed that more energy came out of the experiment
than they put in. Right, you have to put it
a little bit of energy, a little bit of electrical
energy to sort of get these hydrogens out of the
cells that you've crammed them in. And they claimed that
they saw a huge amount of energy come out of
their experiment. So they did that. They put a bunch
(34:16):
of hydrogen inside of a pollatium crystal and then you
should They just put it over a fire and they
noticed it was getting harder than it should have been. Yeah,
they put a bunch of hydrogen inside this palladium and
then they put it inside a bath of heavy water
and they put um electrodes in it, which released, which
broke up the heavy water, so you get deterium. Deterium
banged in the hydrogen, and hydrogen came out of the cells.
(34:39):
And what they were hoping for was that the hydrogen
would fuse with the deterium, which is just a heavier
version of hydrogen, would fuse and they would get a
huge amount of energy. And it's all in a water bath.
So what they were doing was just measuring the temperature
of the water and they claimed to have a huge
amount of unexplainable amount of energy, unexplainable by any way
(34:59):
other than and cold fusion. And remember they didn't build
a huge reactor. There's just like something sitting on a tabletop.
The whole thing costs, you know, tens of thousands of
dollars to build. You didn't need a magnetic bottle, you
didn't need a hundred nine lasers. It was cheap, but
it's good. Somehow they claimed extract all this energy from
the nucleus of the atoms, and of course they got
(35:21):
a huge amount of publicity. Was like on the cover
of magazines, and everybody thought, this is the energy revolution.
But but then nobody could reproduce it. You know, people
were excited, and people in Japan and people in Texas
and people in Boston, all sorts of folks try to
reproduce this experiment because it seemed pretty simple. And at first,
you know, some groups said, oh yeah, we see a
(35:41):
little of this, always see a little bit of that.
But it was all done sort of a little too quickly,
and you know, everybody was excited to be the second
people to to make cold Frusian work, or the third
person to make cold fusion work. People really wanted to
believe it, and so there was a lot of signs
done that wasn't really like up to the standard that
you would backed. And in the end, when the dust cleared,
(36:03):
it only took a few months, but people realized nobody
could reproduce their result, and then they started getting not
even the first people who did it, they couldn't do
it again. Well, they claimed to have done it again, right,
and they wanted more money to ask the government for
millions of dollars to fund a larger experiment, but they
never let people like examine their apparatus, and the results
didn't make sense, and they wouldn't answer questions about it
(36:25):
um And so that's not suspicious scientific behavior at all,
I know, I know. And so it became a sort
of an embarrassment, you know, um to the physics community, like,
oh my gosh, we got all this attention from the
media and from the public, and people got excited about
this possibility. Then it turns out it was just shoddy experiments,
and later people discovered that probably they did get a
(36:48):
little bit of extra heat out of their reaction, but
it was just a normal chemical reaction like hydrogen oxygen
coming back together to make water releases some heat. So
they weren't getting any nuclear fusion at all. They weren't
get nearly as much energy as you would get you
actually had nuclear fusion, And if they had, their whole
thing would have exploded right there. They had released enough
energy if they had actually achieved fusion, it would have
(37:10):
demolished their building. So but did they actually you know,
pretend on purpose, or were they also fooled themselves. That's
a great question, and I'd love to see an in
depth interview by like a really hard interviewer. But they
famously clammed up after they were shown to be basically frauds. Um,
and they insisted that what they had done was right,
(37:32):
but they never really gave enough details for anybody to
validate it or to understand whether they were outright lying
or just sort of overly hopeful and confused by their results.
And uh, you know, you want to on one hand,
try to be generous in your interpretation and think, oh,
they just got wrapped up in the excitement of their
potential discovery and skipped a few steps. On the other hand, um,
(37:54):
you know, maybe they were Maybe there were frauds. So
so that particular idea for cold fusion didn't seem to
have work. But does that mean that's that it's impossible,
or that that idea can never work, or that do
you think there are other ideas out there for cold
fusion that could work. It's definitely not impossible, right, somebody
could make it work. There's probably a way for it
(38:15):
to happen. The problem is, once a field has such
an embarrassing public implosion, like that nobody wants to work
on it. Like you don't see young smart people saying
I'm going to go into the field of cold fusion
because it's a laughing stock. So currently it became synonymous
with like confusion, confusion, confusion, Keanu Reeves exactly, like bad
(38:37):
became synonymous with bad signs. I mean, like nobody wants
to be a cold fusion physicist anymore. Exactly, Um, but
that doesn't mean it's not possible. Those guys sort of
ruined for everybody. It may it may not be practical,
but you know, there might be a way to do it,
And there are some other ideas, and there are some
things that people have sort of made work, Like they've
tried this idea with muans. If you take hydrogen and
(38:58):
instead of having electrons going around the nucleus, if you
have muans going around the nucleus. Remember, muans are just
heavier versions of electrons. What happens is the muans they're
sort of orbit is much smaller than the electrons orbit
because muans are heavier. And what this means is that
it lets the hydrogens get closer together and so that
(39:19):
can make fusion happen. Well, I think you guys just
have a branding problem again, you know, like you just
call it something else and then have people work work
on it. Extreme fusion, no tepid fusion maybe, or warm fusion.
Nobody's gonna get excited about something named tepid. It's like
limp fusion, yeah, or not so hot fusion, you know,
(39:42):
just that it's not as embarrassing cryo fusion, fusion, oh
my god, nano fusion. Just call it nan know something.
So I like to believe that it's still possible. First
of all, I hope that they get hot fusion to work.
That would be awesome, but I'd love to believe the
cold fusion as possible. Um. You know, none of the
experiments out there are practical. This muan idea does work,
(40:05):
but it's very difficult to make muans and to make
it happen, so it's not energetically practical. But I'd like
to believe that somewhere out there is somebody with a
really clever idea that could actually make this work and
could really revolutionize the way energy is produced. Yeah, it
could be. It could. Then you could have like a
fusion reactor in your home right or your car and
your DeLorean like they did then back to the future. Yeah,
(40:28):
or you could have you could even miniaturize it, you know,
you could have your iPhone could uh, you know, you
could just add a drop of water and you could
run for days or weeks. Right, it would be incredible
what could be achieved if we had cold fusion, if
we had small, compact, non dangerous sources of energy that
were ubiquitous that just a water is fuel. That would
be amazing. Yeah, So to those of you who are listening,
(40:50):
there's a whole field out there open in physics for
you to maybe be the next great inventor, as long
as you call it something else else cry fusion. All
the smart people have run away from it, so the
ground is very fertile for you to make some breakthrough. Yeah,
you could change the world or the universe or the
future of humanity. And if you do, you know, give
(41:12):
us some credit or at least one percent of your profits.
And if you're lying in a fraud, don't mention us
at all, that's right, we will not. We will claim
to know nothing about your research. We'll think you were
talking about cold yoga or our new energy drink line,
dark energy and cold fusion. All right, well, we hope
(41:35):
you guys enjoyed that and learn a little bit more
about this interesting Candarese movie, I mean idea. Thanks for
tuning in, and if you have questions about how things
do or do not work, please send them to us
at Questions at Daniel and Horney dot com. We love
hearing from you. See you next time. Before you still
(42:01):
have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
(42:23):
my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Kay Daniel, you're a big science witch and fan. Right.
Oh yeah, When something new is on Netflix, if it's
science fiction, I'll almost always watch the first five minutes,
even if it's about a giant's bays banana. Hey, you
make that movie, I will watch it. But is that
something you watch with your family? Do you? Is your
wife into science fiction? Ah, that's a bit of a
bone of contention over the remote. I would say her
(00:28):
taste are a bit different. She doesn't like science fiction.
Let's just say she doesn't necessarily choose them for the science.
They don't need to be correct for her to enjoy them.
That's right. I mean, she's also a scientist, but she's
able to suspend disbelief and she finds other things in
these movies to make them appealing. Oh yeah, what's her
favorite science fiction movie? It's kind of embarrassing though, for
(00:48):
me as a physicist, because her favorite science fiction movie
is called Cold Fusion, which has like so many terrible
plot holes in it, but the one redeeming feature is
that it stars he and leaves wearing a U Chicago sweatshirt,
which is her alma matter. Hi am poorhand. I'm the
(01:21):
creator of PhD comics and the co author of the
book We Have No Idea, A Guy to the Unknown Universe. Hi,
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and coincidentally, I'm also
the co author of the book We Have No Idea,
A Guide to the Unknown Universe. What are the chances
what you wrote that book to? I mostly wrote it
together with some guy I was emailing with online. And
(01:42):
how did you meet this this man Tinder? It did
involve the Internet. That's those the only details I'll go into.
And involved something else cold, right, you cold emailed me.
That's right, just a cold email out into the Internet
to look for a creative partner. But welcome to our podcast,
Daniel and or Hey Explain the Universe, a production of
(02:02):
I Heart Radio in which we reach out to you
through the various hot and cold tubes of the Internet
to try to explain to you all the crazy, all
the crazy and amazing things that we find in our
universe and make them make sense to you. All the
amazing processes out there and science and technology and facts
(02:23):
that maybe we can use one day to our advantage
as a human species. That's right. One goal of physics
is to understand the world so that we can tame it, right,
to use it to our advantage, to build new technology,
to transform what it means to be humans, what it's
like to live as a human in the modern world,
and of course at the core of that is energy.
So to be on the program, we'll be talking about
(02:43):
a technology or I guess the physics concept that could
potentially solve all of humanity's problems, right, That's how they've
been selling it since the eighties. Yeah, exactly. It's sort
of the holy grail of physics. If it works, then
everything will change. I mean, imagine if energy was cheap
or even free, almost everything that we do in life
(03:04):
could be made easier with energy. Yeah. Is there something
in our knowledge of physics, like and how the animals
are put together, or the courts, or the particles that
we could use to solve our energy crisis. It seems
like it must be. I mean, we live in such
an energetic universe. We're always talking on this podcast about
particles going at the speed of light, or enormous huge
(03:25):
balls of fire we call the sun, right, or a
crazy black holes squishing things and beaming out jets from galaxies. Like,
there's so many energetic processes out there. So much energy
is just stored in the matter around us. It's still
it's frustrating to me that we have such difficulty tapping
into it, that we're you know, digging up buried plants
and burning them in order to extract the tiny little
(03:47):
bit of energy that's our best idea so far. It
seems Yeah, it seems like we should have figured out
something better by now, given the incredible amounts of energy
all around us and the huge processes. You know, it's
like we're, um, we're at a buffet. We're just like
new building on the crumbs that have fallen off the table.
We're filling up on the salad, which is a rookie
mistake for buffet's exactly if you pay for the buffet,
(04:09):
goes straight for the main course. Exactly. Yeah. So today
we'll be talking about one such technology or piece of
science that could change everything. So today on the program,
we'll be talking about cold fusion. What is it? Is
it cold? Or is it? Is that? The name of
(04:31):
a new sports drink from Gatorade. It's going to be
the name of a new sports drink once we get
off this podcast and go pitch it to Mountain Dew
as part of their Extreme Universe Drink series. Yeah, on
a bottle of dark energy. Nobody wants a bottle of
dark matter though, that's not gonna say, but yeah. Cold fusion.
(04:51):
Cold fusion is a is a topic that's been bouncing
around in physics for decades and decades, and you know,
for a long time it was the dream of scientists
to achieve USUAN without having to build basically the Sun
in miniature. And then for a while it seemed like
maybe it was possible. No, maybe it was impossible. Now
people are saying maybe it's possible again. Yeah, it's been
(05:11):
around for a while, right, I remember, I think it
was a big deal in the seventies and eighties. That's
when they first thought maybe it could be possible. It
was in the late eighties when there was a lot
of media coverage over some experiments that turned out to
maybe not be a scientifically valid and so people sort
of gave up. But recently you're saying, there has been
new things that maybe make people think it is possible.
(05:33):
There's always another opportunity. You know. This is the thing
about physics is that something seems impossible, but there's always
a little window. There's always a little crack. Maybe you
could figure out if you were clever enough, you could
be the one to solve this problem. I like to
fantasize about that. You know that there's like two eras
in history. There's like before I figured out this incredible
(05:53):
problem and after, right, because there are stories like that
people who have cracked long standing problems or come up
with some new ideas, some new technology that really did
change the way things work. And cold fusion, if you
could achieve it would be in that category, would change everything.
Might let us a lift forever as a species, right,
we could maybe go to other stars with it. Yeah,
(06:14):
it would basically solve almost every problem. Like you're worried
about enough fresh drinking water, just use some energy desalinate
the ocean. You're worried about overheating the planet, use some
energy to pump C or two out into space. You know,
everything costs energy in the end, Almost every problem except
for people being mean to each other, cost energy. Even
that one actually because in the end, um you know,
(06:37):
war and and and all those kind of things come
down to competition for resources. But if energy is free
or very very plentiful, then there's enough resource to make
enough food, to dig up enough gold to do almost
everything you want for everybody. Well, for that you need
people fusion. That's a different kind of physics altogether. That's
a not safe for working. So today we'll explain to
(06:59):
you guys and playing to everyone out there, what is
cold fusion. But first we were wondering what people know
about it? How much do they know what it is? Yeah,
it's one of the topics in science that really did
leak out into very broad public and for a while
it seemed like we were on the verge of an
incredible breakthrough. But then again, that was, you know, thirty
years ago, and so I was I really didn't know
(07:20):
whether people had heard of this or had an idea
whether it was possible. So I went into this with
an open mind. So, as usual, Daniel went out and
asked people, random people on the street if they knew
what cold fusion was. Here's what they had to say.
I'm guessing it's doing fusion at lower temperatures. But uh,
I mean, I've heard that fusion in general was really
(07:40):
tough to achieve pressure. I'm not sure on that one.
Cold fusion I have not no no idea so in
order to fuse two metals, you have to heat it up.
But when you're like say, like in a vacuum, like
in space, that there's like electrons just flowing on it.
And but in ace, it's uh, like in a vacuum
(08:02):
like like you don't need the heat, you know, when
you think out the blood, I guess right, fusion is
when you take up the blood so cold you just
do it like frozen animal body or whatever. I don't know,
I've heard the words. I have no idea what they mean.
Where would be your best guess? Um, probably something to
do with producing nuclear energy, right, So a lot of
nose and a couple of confusions, not cold fusions exactly exactly.
(08:28):
Some some people had it sort of mentally adjacent to
other topics. Um, I got a very long explanation of
how cold welding works. You know, how to learn something
I did. I didn't know that you could do welding
in space, right, that you don't necessarily need like oxygen
and air and and fire to join two pieces of metal.
So thank you for the mini lecture I received on
(08:50):
cold welding. And some people thought it meant transfusion like
a blood transfusion. Yeah, and that you know, hey, they
freeze blood, right, and then they have thoughts. So that's
sort of a hold transfusion. It makes some sense, right.
I'm impressed when people don't have any idea what I'm
talking about, but sort of on the fly come up
with something reasonable to say. That's you know, that's creative thinking.
(09:11):
And to be honest, I didn't really know what it
was until a couple of years ago I got hired
to do a comic and a video about Cold Future. Yeah,
you have an excellent video. There's no shame in not
knowing what it is. I see, that's the standard. If
Jore doesn't know about it, then it's acceptable to be ignorant.
If that's a standard, then everyone, uh is pretty safe
(09:31):
because I don't I don't really know that much. But
then everybody needs to have watched every science fiction movie
ever also, right, Yeah, that's right. So in the opening
we talked about the movie with canaries called Cold Fusion.
And you're not a fan of the science in that movie. No,
I um, I've watched it once decades ago, refused to
watch it again, but I remember thinking, oh my god,
(09:52):
that makes no sense. Or they clearly just did that
so some guy could drive a motorcycle through a bunch
of explosions. So the plot of the movie is what
Kenna rees is trying to achieve cold fusion to solve
all of our energy problems. Yeah, I think Keanu Reeves
does achieve cold fusion, and then there's a struggle over
control of it um. But then it basically just you know,
digresses into a bunch of motorcycles driving through explosions, as
(10:16):
does every movie, it seems every movie with Kenna Reeves
in it at least. All right, well, let's get into
it then, Daniel. So there's two words, your cold and fusion,
and somehow you've put it together. Then it's a revolutionary concept.
So what goes through? What is cold fusion? Or let's
(10:36):
start with fusion. What is fusion? Right? So what is fusion?
You see fusion every day every day you go outside
and you bathe yourself in sunlight. You are standing and
being warmed by the fires of an enormous thermonuclear fusion
reactor called the sun. Right, So fusion is what happens
inside the sun. It generates all that heat, which is
a source of all life on Earth. Right, so thank
(10:58):
you fusion. Without fusion, we would have nothing. And fusion
very simply is just a way to release energy. You
take two helium, sorry, you take two hydrogen nuclei, which
are just protons, and you push them together to make
a new element. Right, you're transforming hydrogen into helium. You
push them together, they stick together to make a new
(11:19):
nucleus with two protons in it. And that helium nucleus
has less energy in it than the two hydrogens did.
So what happens is that some energy is released. Are
you make this and there's some energy left over, but
you don't need, right, and so it just gets released
in photons and energy. And that's that's burning, right, that's
the fusion burning. So if I walk outside and I
(11:40):
get a suntan, that's fusion. You were getting burned by fusion.
You're fusion toasted. Well, something I never understood was why
does helium, which is what when you get when you
merge or fuse to hydrogen atoms, why does the combination
of them have less energy? That's a great question, you know,
like what happened to that energy? Why does it? What?
(12:00):
Do you need less energy to make something that's like
one plus one. That's a great question, but you're not
really making one plus one. It's like, um, it's like
one plus one equals one point nine, right, it's um.
You're not just taking those two protons and putting them
next to each other. Those protons are interacting. They're connected,
right because remember this nucleus um holds itself together like
acts like one thing. It's not just like two protons
(12:21):
near each other. They're really they're fused, hence the word
into one thing. On another episode, we talked about how
that stays together because remember these are two protons. They're
positively charged. They should be pushing away from each other. Right, Well,
there's very strong forces that hold these two protons together,
involving how the corks connect and and so the mass
(12:42):
of that nucleus is reflected by the energy of these bonds.
And so you shouldn't think of it as two hydrogen
out and you think of it like the corks that
are inside those hydrogen nuclei being rearranged into a helium nucleus.
And it's all about that arrangement. You know, how those
corks are sitting near each other. Yeah, I guess I
forget that protons are made out of smaller bits, which
(13:04):
are quarks. And so you're saying that in one hydrogen atom,
I need a certain amount of energy to keep in
those quarts together, but once I emerged two hydrogen atoms,
you need less energy to hold all those little bits together,
and so there's extra energy. Yeah exactly, it's like there's
an economy of scale there, right, you can use the
two they sort of help each other. If you take
(13:25):
six quarks, it's easier to build a helium nucleus than
to build two hydrogen nuclei, because then they have to
be independent, they have to be totally colored neutral, all
on their own, whereas if you have a helium nucleus,
there's a lot more options, a lot of ways. You
can configure these quarks into two protons that are sort
of stuck together, but they don't actually kind of the
two protons don't mush together, right, there's still kind of
(13:46):
their own thing, but somehow being stuck together helps each
one of them stay together themselves. Yeah, exactly, they stay
their own thing, but they're connected right there, talking to
each other. The way like when a proton and an
electron come together to make hydrogen, it's still a proton,
and it's still still an electron, but they've made something else,
something which is bound together, which acts like one thing
(14:08):
from the outside. So in the same way, these two
protons they still are protons, but you know, they're interacting
with the quarks inside the other protons, and they've come
together to make this thing which is weirdly less than
some of their parts. It's kind of like, um, you
know how they text married couples more because they assume
there are some efficiencies if you're married, like, oh, you're married,
(14:29):
now you're too you're together, you have a partnership. You
must have extra income or extra disposable income or something.
You can also think of it, like think about the
proton as like a bunch of corks connected with springs,
and there's energy in those springs. You have to like
arrange them in just the right way and put some
energy in those springs to hold them together. Um, and
then when you make the helium nuclei, you can like
(14:51):
reuse one of those springs. You're like, oh, I don't
need all of these, I can just use this one
here twice because they overlap, you know, And so I
have this extra spring which had this your energy in it.
What do I do with that? Well, that just shoots
off and so that's that's the basic process of fusion.
Is pushed two hydrogen nuclei together to make helium plus
some energy and a spring shoots off. Yeah, that's the energy.
(15:12):
And you might think what is that spring? Well, you know,
internal in the nucleus, all this stuff is stored is gluons.
But when these two hydrogen nuclei fuse, which you get
is a photon. It shoots out a bunch of energy. Okay,
So that's what's happening inside of the sun and also
inside of nuclear bombs, right, nuclear fusion bombs. That's basically
what's happening is just you're getting a bunch of hydrogen
(15:33):
squeezed together and having them fuse into hedium. That's right,
And and that should help you appreciate the scale of this, right,
Like an enormous thermonuclear explosion, right, a hydrogen bomb. Those
things are incredibly powerful. They're devastating and kill millions of
people if you dropped one on the city. All of
that comes out of a tiny amount of fuel that
you do not need a huge amount of plutonium to
(15:55):
have that bomb. And that tells you how energy dense
matter is. Like, they is so much energy and matter
that if you're able to release some of it, it's overwhelming.
It's like it's incredible. And we've talked about this several
times in the podcast. If you took like a raisin's
worth of matter and touched into a raisin worth of antimatter,
(16:15):
and the reason we choose those is because they're very
easily able to annihilate all their energy, all their matter
into energy. Then you get a huge nuclear explosion like
the size of Hiroshima, and so there's a huge amount
of energy story and matter, and like we were saying before,
really just often we're scraping just the crumbs off the floor.
When you burn fossil fuels, it's a huge amount of
(16:36):
energy in them before and a huge amount of energy
in them afterwards. You've just taken off a tiny little sliver.
And so fusion is like this this way to tap
into this incredibly dense energy source. And that's why it's
so exciting, because the huge amounts of energy released from
tiny amounts of fuel. It's kind of like if I
if I took a raisin and I threw it at
you that's not a lot of energy. You wouldn't get
(16:58):
hurt by a raison owned by another person. But if
I could somehow, like I don't know, you've been working
out how fast you even? I think even if you
had a major lea, you have a hundred mile raisin
picture throw raising at you, it still wouldn't hurt very much.
But if you somehow I don't know the answer to that,
a hundred mile an hour raisin, would that hurt you
if you ate it? Well, maybe the pensant where it
(17:19):
hits you, you know, if the eyes. But but the
idea is that, you know, if I threw the raising
at you, it wouldn't hurt you or carry a lot
of energy. But if you've somehow was able to like
break apart the raisin, you know, like break apart not
just the atoms of the raisin, but the corks inside
of the atoms of the protons of the raisin, then
(17:41):
there would be a huge amount of energy, right, yeah,
exactly that you would not survive that. Yeah, that one
raisin could power a city, right, I mean we're talking
about huge quantities of energy, and so that's what fusion is.
It's this we're trying to tap into this. And it's
also tantalizing because we see it every day. We see
it happening out there in the sun. Right, it's omnipresent
or you can't it escape it, and so we know
(18:01):
it's happening. It's the universe is primary source of light,
and so we just want to you know, ride that
wave and and use it to get the energy we
need so we can listen to podcasts and make cookies
and all sorts of fun stuff we like to do
with our lives. Eat raisins, eat raisins. But you know
it's not easy, right, those hydrogen atoms they don't like
(18:22):
to come together. They're both positively charged. So what happens
when you bring them near each other is they repel, right,
They resist getting close to each other. So fusion is
not an easy thing you can just like, here's a
scoop of protons, go fuse, right, That's why we mostly
just see them in crazy situations, right, like the center
of the sun and nuclear bombs. That's usually where fusion
(18:45):
likes to happen exactly because these protons resist each other
until they get really really close. Once they get close,
then this strong nuclear force takes over and they confuse
and all that kind of stuff happens. But for that
to happen, they have to get close enough, and it's
you know, they're repelling each other. So it's like you
ever try to push two magnets near each other. They're
like slipping and sliding and going sideways and trying to
(19:06):
avoid it or impossibly or imagine like trying to get
a cat into a bucket of water, right. I mean,
I'm not suggesting anybody to do that, but mentally imagine
you know, it's not easy. It's a cat fusion, feline
fusion um or or if you ever do like mini golf,
you know how there's those holes where it's like the
where you're supposed to get the ball is like at
(19:27):
the top of a little hill. You think, oh, no
big deal, I'll just roll to the top of the
hill and it'll go in. But if you don't roll
it exactly right, then it rolls off to the side
or it skips over the top. Right. Fusion is like that.
You've got to get the hydrogen atoms exactly the right speed,
right at each other for them to get close enough
to sort of fall in the hole and fuse otherwise
they'll just deflect and go in other directions. Is it
(19:48):
kind of like if you take two magnets the positive size,
and you apply super glue on them and you try
to stick them together. Like that would be kind of hard,
but if you do manage to get them to touch
each other, then and they'll stick together. Probably. I haven't
done that experiment. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, um,
you might end up reversing the polarity of one of
them or something. I'm not even sure what would happen,
(20:09):
but yeah, exactly if you can get them close enough together.
And that's what's happening in the sun, right. What is
the sun. It's a huge blob of hydrogen, but it's
such a big blob that it has huge gravity, and
so the gravity is squeezing all these protons together, and
so there's nowhere else to go, right. They'd like to
run away from each other. They're pushing against each other,
but they're like a crowd at some you know, teenage
(20:31):
rock concert. There's nowhere to go. You're in the middle
of the mosh pit, so you have to bump up
against other people. And so that's why fusion happens. In
the sun because there's so much gravitational pressure that the
protons can't avoid each other. That's how you get them
close enough to each other. It's like you need these
extreme conditions kind of like a and in a bomb,
that's what happens to right, Like they they use like
(20:52):
an outer bomb to compress the other the hydrogen, so
that fuses. Right, that's exactly how these thermonuclear bombs work. Right.
You have a fission reaction which generates, you know, a
huge explosion like Hiroshima, and that compresses the fuel you
need for fusion so that it actually starts to fuse.
So you have to be basically in the middle of
the sun or in the middle of an already exploding
(21:15):
nuclear bomb to make this work. So um, not easy.
Not a place I would recommend visiting. Yeah, okay, so
that's fusion, and that's kind of what we usually see
it as. It's as hot fusion right in the sun
or in a bomb. So now let's get into cold
fusion and how that's gonna change everything if they can
(21:35):
get it to work. But first let's take a quick break.
All right, we're talking about cold fusion and how to
make it. Here on Earth, and we talked about how
(21:56):
it's kind of the process that's going on inside of
suns and nuclear bomb that's right, and that's not typically
the kind of thing you want in your backyard or
in your neighborhood where they're generating energy. Right, if somebody says,
if somebody said, hey, can we put them the sun
down the street will provide a lot of energy, you'd
probably say no. You probably say put into my neighbor's yard.
(22:18):
Depending on how big your yard is, that may not
be far enough away from the Sun. But essentially what
scientists are doing to try to have fusion here on
Earth is recreate those conditions. I mean, in a in
a bomb, it's sort of a runaway reaction, you have
all the energy expended all at once. But for a
fusion react or, what you want is something where it
slowly expands that energy, where can be sort of controlled
(22:39):
but still um in terms of like hot fusion. Here
on Earth, we're basically trying to recreate the conditions of
the sun or a nuclear bomb. But maybe is it
the same as the sun, but maybe just in a
smaller scale like a mini sun. Yeah, you know, if
physicists think big, like I want to make a star.
You know, they're basically making a mini sun, and the
(23:00):
problem is like how do you contain it. Say you
want to make something fuse and you want to get
the energy out, Like what do you put it in? Right?
You can't build it in a glass bottle because it
will destroy the bottle. You can't build it in a
steel bottle because it will destroy it. So they actually
come up with these really cool magnetic bottles because the
thing about the sun is that all the particles in
there have electric charges. They're positive or they're negative, right,
(23:22):
they're all ionized, which means that they can be bent
by magnetic fields. So if you can get them to
like sort of go in a circle, like around a
doughnut shaped magnetic bottle, then maybe they just can just
sort of spin around forever, banging to each other, making
fusion and throwing out heat that you can capture without
ever actually you know, melting the building that you're in,
and then it's more like an engine where you're slowly
(23:45):
adding the fuel in instead of just burning the whole
tank of gas at the same time. The ideas that
you kind of have like a slow control sun explosion
that keeps going and keeps making energy for you. That's right.
The way it would work, as you start out with
something cold and you have to pour energy and to
begin with, right, But then once it gets hot enough
(24:05):
that fusion starts happening. Then the fusion provides enough heat
to keep things going to start to burn the next
bit of fuel. It's sort of like adding a log
to a fire. Right, It's hard to get started, but
once the fire is burning, you just put another log
in and the fire itself starts more fire. So that's
what they call ignition. And a fusion reactor is when
it gets hot enough that you can just keep adding
fuel at the right pace and to keep producing enough energy.
(24:29):
And that's really hard because you have this really hot thing.
It's like millions of degrees, right, basically like a little
slice of the sun, millions of Hey, let's spend some
time talking about temperature poscast episode about who's the hottest
person in the universe. So, so they're trying to do
this on Earth, right, you said, magnetic bottle is one way, uh,
(24:51):
and and it's a hard problem because you have to
contain this kind of explosion that's a million degrees in temperature, right, yeah,
exactly have to manage it. And they've made it work
in smaller scales, they've actually gotten energy out of the
fusion reactor, and in some cases they've even gotten more
energy out than they put in, which is nice um.
(25:12):
And what they're doing now is they're building sort of
a larger scale version to see if you can work
on a commerce for commercial scale, like can you actually
produce enough energy that you could like sell it and
you can convince a power company to spend a billion
dollars building this thing and and and run a business
out of it. And that's called They have really cool
names for these projects, right, Like you like the names.
(25:33):
Oh my gosh, that's quite a standard. I don't think
I've ever heard you said that before. Well, I like
it to say, as a kind of an anime flavor twit. Right,
it's called like a tacomac. Right, that's one name. Yeah,
that comes I think it's a comes from like a
conglomeration of Russian words because the Russians were the first
people to do that, and it comes from it. It's
a toroid, which is like the geometrical name for a
(25:54):
donut um. Yeah, it tookomac exactly, And yeah, it sounds
like a you know, like a giant Japanese enemy robot
that those movies don't always end very well though, so
I'm not sure, but the wisdom of naming your massive
sun creating experiment after an anime movie. But a good robot,
you know, oh yeah, right, okay, it's a friendly, helpful robot.
(26:16):
It's going to come and solve all your energy problems. Um.
But the one they're building is called Eater I T.
E R. And they're building it in France, and it's
supposed to be done, you know, sometime in the next
it's always ten years away, it seems. And that one
might actually work, you know, it costs ten billion dollars,
but it might actually work. But again, that's hot fusion, right,
that's like really hard. It's a huge facility, costs billions
(26:38):
of dollars. It's very difficult, but also a good name.
I think, you know, I support anything related to eating
as long as it doesn't eat the planet, right. Yeah. Yeah,
it's kind of a not a great foreboding name. That's
gonna eat up the world. Maybe we'll solve all of
our eating problems, you know, the sort of problem. But
(27:01):
I heard it's like the biggest science experiment ever. Right,
it's like even more expensive than the one it's earned
a large Hattern collider. Is that true? I know. Yeah,
it's gonna eclipse the Large hage On Collider to be
the biggest, most expensive science experiment ever. It might even
be more expensive than the International Space Station. So yeah,
that's pretty awesome. But it's also ambitious, you know. I
(27:22):
love when people try to do monumental great works. That's
really awesome because it's not the kind of thing one
person can do or two people can do. It's the
kind of thing we can only do when we come
together as a species and put our brains to something
and say, let's make the world a better place by
spending a lot of money on physics. That's all eat together,
so we'll call it eater. Yeah, exactly. Um. And then
(27:44):
there's another way people are trying to do like hot
fusion here on Earth, and that's saying, let's not try
to have a continuous fire, you know, where you have
this like fire that burns and and and generates itself
like a minisan inside of a magnetic bottle. That that's
the tocomac and the eater, But this is a different
There's another approach, which is like let's sort of have
like a bunch of one off fusions. So what they
(28:05):
do is they take a bit of fuel and they
zap it with lasers from like every direction simultaneously, like
a nineties six super powerful lasers zapp it, and they
hope that they get it hot enough that it confused
before it explodes. When it fuses before it explodes, what
does that mean. It means that, like the explosion takes
a while to happen, and so if you can get
(28:28):
it hot enough to get these these hydrogen nuclear hot enough,
then they will fuse because they haven't yet had time
to explode, like that it's gonna explode. But they call
this strategy inertial confinement fusion because it's just like you're
trying to get it to happen fast enough so that
inertia keeps it together for long enough for the diffuse
before it explodes. But then you know, it blows up
(28:49):
and you get another pellet us app that one with
lasers that one blows up. That's the strategy. That one's
kind of like, um, like you're instead of having a
minisun it's like you're stringing a sun out into a
little tiny thread, right, and you're right. Instead of having
like one fire going on, you string it along and
you you burn little bits at the time. Yeah, exactly.
(29:10):
It also seems the most science fiction. I mean, you're
like hundred nineties super lasers focusing on something all at once.
And there's a big facility in California called the National
Ignition Facility that's trying to do this. I've been there
and actually, you know, if any of you have watched
one of the Star Trek movies, you know, the new
ones with all the lens flares, then you have seen
(29:32):
this experiment because I think they used they filmed, or
they replicated it or something. When Scotty see the engine
saying she kind of take anymore, Captain, I think that's
basically either model or the actual thing that they filmed
it in. Oh cool, Well, it's also a cool sounding phrase,
National Cognition Facility. That's well named. So is it as
as good as she cannot take anymore cutting? It's as
(29:55):
good as your Scottish accent is? Yes, maybe we should
have some of our Scottish listener is write in and
rates Jorge Scottish accent. There you go, and also eater
and but all those are what we call hot fusion.
That's sort of trying to replicate the Sun's strategy, get
a bunch of hot hydrogen together and hope it fuses.
But those are hard, right, building a lasers or making
(30:17):
a magnetic bottle for something that's thirty million degrees. Wouldn't
it be awesome if you could do fusion at room temperature? Right,
you didn't need all this crazy apparatus. What if you
could have cold fusion? Exactly? Did I just come up
with that? Yes? Or hey, yes, I've never heard that
phrase before. Congratulations, that was brilliant. Humans are trying to
(30:39):
make fusion here on Earth, but they're both hot fusion strategies,
basically mini sons. And you're saying, there might be a
way to do this cold without like millions of degrees
or giant lasers or enemy robot names. There might be
something easier, exactly, And that's tantalizing. That's the promise of
(31:00):
old fusion. All right, let's get into it, but first
let's take a quick break. Alright, So finally we're going
to get into cold fusion. Daniels, So We've talked about
(31:20):
fusion and hot fusion and hot yoga, and now it's
different than than the hot yoga. It's sort of but
now the idea is that we can maybe create a sun,
but do it in a cold way where it's not
burning or at millions of degrees. Yeah. The idea is,
can we get too hydrogen nuclei to get close enough
together to turn into helium and release their energy without
(31:44):
having to get the hydrogen so hot? Right, we don't
want to create the sun, but we do want to
extract that energy. So the problem, remember, is how to
get the hydrogen close together. If you can just get
them close enough together, they will fuse, but they repel
each other. So you need something to get them close together.
And the basic strategy of hot fusion is making you know,
a lot of pressure and a lot of temperature and
(32:05):
these things will go really fast. Another way is to
try to get the hygen closer together without heating it up.
And it turns out that hydrogen likes to get sucked
into this special kind of crystal. It's called palladium. It's
a metal, and hydrogen iss really fits really well into
the gaps between the palladium molecules and and and palladium
sort of squeezes hygen together like packs. It's in the
(32:28):
hydrogen in there, and the hydrogen gets much much closer
in palladium than it will without the palladium. So you're saying,
use something like a crystal to pack them in closer.
But what But they're not going to explode yet. They're
not gonna explode yet. But but you're you're most of
the way there. You know. It's imagine it's like a
big hotel room with really really tiny rooms, right, and
(32:49):
everybody's in their own little room, and they don't yet
notice that there's somebody next door that they really don't
like that they want to run away from, because remember,
hydrogen repels itself and so now, but you've gotten them
really close together, so you have this opportunity for them
to fuse. Yeah, you've got a bunch of people in
a hotel, uh with tightly packed rooms. What could possibly
happen while you're you're looking for an explosive situation? Right,
(33:12):
you just have to persuade all these people to get
together if you want something interesting to happen. That's one
way to do it. Put a bunch of people in
a hotel, a bunch of people who hate each other
into tiny little hotel rooms next to each other exactly. Um.
And then you apply a little bit of energy, right,
and the idea is you probably just enough energy and
maybe the hydrogens will fuse into helium because you've already
(33:34):
gotten them so close together that maybe they'll like you know,
pop out of their little rooms and fuse because they're
near each other. That was the idea, like maybe little jostle,
jostle around and accidentally bumping to each other. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All you have to do is get the hydrogen close
enough together, so it's not a terrible idea. And then
in nine these two guys in Utah, Ponds and Fleishman,
(33:56):
they set up an experiment to try this, and they
claim aimed that more energy came out of the experiment
than they put in. Right, you have to put it
a little bit of energy, a little bit of electrical
energy to sort of get these hydrogens out of the
cells that you've crammed them in. And they claimed that
they saw a huge amount of energy come out of
their experiment. So they did that. They put a bunch
(34:16):
of hydrogen inside of a pollatium crystal and then you
should They just put it over a fire and they
noticed it was getting harder than it should have been. Yeah,
they put a bunch of hydrogen inside this palladium and
then they put it inside a bath of heavy water
and they put um electrodes in it, which released, which
broke up the heavy water, so you get deterium. Deterium
banged in the hydrogen, and hydrogen came out of the cells.
(34:39):
And what they were hoping for was that the hydrogen
would fuse with the deterium, which is just a heavier
version of hydrogen, would fuse and they would get a
huge amount of energy. And it's all in a water bath.
So what they were doing was just measuring the temperature
of the water and they claimed to have a huge
amount of unexplainable amount of energy, unexplainable by any way
(34:59):
other than and cold fusion. And remember they didn't build
a huge reactor. There's just like something sitting on a tabletop.
The whole thing costs, you know, tens of thousands of
dollars to build. You didn't need a magnetic bottle, you
didn't need a hundred nine lasers. It was cheap, but
it's good. Somehow they claimed extract all this energy from
the nucleus of the atoms, and of course they got
(35:21):
a huge amount of publicity. Was like on the cover
of magazines, and everybody thought, this is the energy revolution.
But but then nobody could reproduce it. You know, people
were excited, and people in Japan and people in Texas
and people in Boston, all sorts of folks try to
reproduce this experiment because it seemed pretty simple. And at first,
you know, some groups said, oh yeah, we see a
(35:41):
little of this, always see a little bit of that.
But it was all done sort of a little too quickly,
and you know, everybody was excited to be the second
people to to make cold Frusian work, or the third
person to make cold fusion work. People really wanted to
believe it, and so there was a lot of signs
done that wasn't really like up to the standard that
you would backed. And in the end, when the dust cleared,
(36:03):
it only took a few months, but people realized nobody
could reproduce their result, and then they started getting not
even the first people who did it, they couldn't do
it again. Well, they claimed to have done it again, right,
and they wanted more money to ask the government for
millions of dollars to fund a larger experiment, but they
never let people like examine their apparatus, and the results
didn't make sense, and they wouldn't answer questions about it
(36:25):
um And so that's not suspicious scientific behavior at all,
I know, I know. And so it became a sort
of an embarrassment, you know, um to the physics community, like,
oh my gosh, we got all this attention from the
media and from the public, and people got excited about
this possibility. Then it turns out it was just shoddy experiments,
and later people discovered that probably they did get a
(36:48):
little bit of extra heat out of their reaction, but
it was just a normal chemical reaction like hydrogen oxygen
coming back together to make water releases some heat. So
they weren't getting any nuclear fusion at all. They weren't
get nearly as much energy as you would get you
actually had nuclear fusion, And if they had, their whole
thing would have exploded right there. They had released enough
energy if they had actually achieved fusion, it would have
(37:10):
demolished their building. So but did they actually you know,
pretend on purpose, or were they also fooled themselves. That's
a great question, and I'd love to see an in
depth interview by like a really hard interviewer. But they
famously clammed up after they were shown to be basically frauds. Um,
and they insisted that what they had done was right,
(37:32):
but they never really gave enough details for anybody to
validate it or to understand whether they were outright lying
or just sort of overly hopeful and confused by their results.
And uh, you know, you want to on one hand,
try to be generous in your interpretation and think, oh,
they just got wrapped up in the excitement of their
potential discovery and skipped a few steps. On the other hand, um,
(37:54):
you know, maybe they were Maybe there were frauds. So
so that particular idea for cold fusion didn't seem to
have work. But does that mean that's that it's impossible,
or that that idea can never work, or that do
you think there are other ideas out there for cold
fusion that could work. It's definitely not impossible, right, somebody
could make it work. There's probably a way for it
(38:15):
to happen. The problem is, once a field has such
an embarrassing public implosion, like that nobody wants to work
on it. Like you don't see young smart people saying
I'm going to go into the field of cold fusion
because it's a laughing stock. So currently it became synonymous
with like confusion, confusion, confusion, Keanu Reeves exactly, like bad
(38:37):
became synonymous with bad signs. I mean, like nobody wants
to be a cold fusion physicist anymore. Exactly, Um, but
that doesn't mean it's not possible. Those guys sort of
ruined for everybody. It may it may not be practical,
but you know, there might be a way to do it,
And there are some other ideas, and there are some
things that people have sort of made work, Like they've
tried this idea with muans. If you take hydrogen and
(38:58):
instead of having electrons going around the nucleus, if you
have muans going around the nucleus. Remember, muans are just
heavier versions of electrons. What happens is the muans they're
sort of orbit is much smaller than the electrons orbit
because muans are heavier. And what this means is that
it lets the hydrogens get closer together and so that
(39:19):
can make fusion happen. Well, I think you guys just
have a branding problem again, you know, like you just
call it something else and then have people work work
on it. Extreme fusion, no tepid fusion maybe, or warm fusion.
Nobody's gonna get excited about something named tepid. It's like
limp fusion, yeah, or not so hot fusion, you know,
(39:42):
just that it's not as embarrassing cryo fusion, fusion, oh
my god, nano fusion. Just call it nan know something.
So I like to believe that it's still possible. First
of all, I hope that they get hot fusion to work.
That would be awesome, but I'd love to believe the
cold fusion as possible. Um. You know, none of the
experiments out there are practical. This muan idea does work,
(40:05):
but it's very difficult to make muans and to make
it happen, so it's not energetically practical. But I'd like
to believe that somewhere out there is somebody with a
really clever idea that could actually make this work and
could really revolutionize the way energy is produced. Yeah, it
could be. It could. Then you could have like a
fusion reactor in your home right or your car and
your DeLorean like they did then back to the future. Yeah,
(40:28):
or you could have you could even miniaturize it, you know,
you could have your iPhone could uh, you know, you
could just add a drop of water and you could
run for days or weeks. Right, it would be incredible
what could be achieved if we had cold fusion, if
we had small, compact, non dangerous sources of energy that
were ubiquitous that just a water is fuel. That would
be amazing. Yeah, So to those of you who are listening,
(40:50):
there's a whole field out there open in physics for
you to maybe be the next great inventor, as long
as you call it something else else cry fusion. All
the smart people have run away from it, so the
ground is very fertile for you to make some breakthrough. Yeah,
you could change the world or the universe or the
future of humanity. And if you do, you know, give
(41:12):
us some credit or at least one percent of your profits.
And if you're lying in a fraud, don't mention us
at all, that's right, we will not. We will claim
to know nothing about your research. We'll think you were
talking about cold yoga or our new energy drink line,
dark energy and cold fusion. All right, well, we hope
(41:35):
you guys enjoyed that and learn a little bit more
about this interesting Candarese movie, I mean idea. Thanks for
tuning in, and if you have questions about how things
do or do not work, please send them to us
at Questions at Daniel and Horney dot com. We love
hearing from you. See you next time. Before you still
(42:01):
have a question after listening to all these explanations, please
drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
(42:23):
my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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