1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:16,960 Welcome to the 2024 season ending episode of the Kronos Fusion Energy Podcast. 2 00:00:16,960 --> 00:00:23,100 As we conclude this 2024 season, we reflect on a year filled with insightful discussions 3 00:00:23,100 --> 00:00:27,760 and groundbreaking advancements in fusion technology. 4 00:00:27,760 --> 00:00:33,880 Our journey has taken us through the intricacies of plasma physics, the development of superconducting 5 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:39,760 magnets and the exploration of sustainable energy solutions. 6 00:00:39,760 --> 00:00:45,040 We've had the privilege of engaging with leading experts who are at the forefront of reshaping 7 00:00:45,040 --> 00:00:50,320 our energy landscape, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the 8 00:00:50,320 --> 00:00:56,120 challenges and triumphs in the pursuit of clean limitless fusion power. 9 00:00:56,120 --> 00:01:01,000 I am deeply grateful to my co-founders and our founding board advisors for their unwavering 10 00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:06,840 dedication and the wealth of experience they bring to Kronos Fusion Energy. 11 00:01:06,840 --> 00:01:12,120 Each of them is a colossus in their field and I feel incredibly humbled to work alongside 12 00:01:12,120 --> 00:01:15,960 such an exceptional group of individuals every day. 13 00:01:15,960 --> 00:01:21,820 Their collective expertise and passion are the driving forces behind our mission to revolutionize 14 00:01:21,820 --> 00:01:24,160 the energy sector. 15 00:01:24,160 --> 00:01:30,160 Today I'm thrilled to welcome my co-founder, Dr. Konstantin Batygin. 16 00:01:30,160 --> 00:01:36,680 Our journey began at the Athenaeum at Caltech, where an electrifying conversation about the 17 00:01:36,680 --> 00:01:42,640 future of fusion energy laid the groundwork for our collaboration. 18 00:01:42,640 --> 00:01:48,600 Since our inception in 2022, Konstantin's profound experience in universal mechanics 19 00:01:48,600 --> 00:01:54,240 and advanced mathematics has been instrumental in advancing our mission here to create a 20 00:01:54,240 --> 00:01:56,560 mini sun on Earth. 21 00:01:56,560 --> 00:02:03,000 Dr. Batygin is a renowned professor of planetary science at Caltech. 22 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:08,200 He's celebrated for his pioneering work in planetary astrophysics. 23 00:02:08,200 --> 00:02:13,680 His research encompasses the formation and evolution of the solar system, the dynamic 24 00:02:13,680 --> 00:02:20,640 behavior of exoplanets, and the intricate processes within planetary interiors and atmospheres. 25 00:02:20,640 --> 00:02:26,360 Notably, he has been honored with the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship and was named a 26 00:02:26,360 --> 00:02:31,720 Packard Fellow, underscoring his significant contributions to the field. 27 00:02:31,720 --> 00:02:38,120 In today's episode, we embark on a journey through the frontiers of astronomy and fusion 28 00:02:38,120 --> 00:02:39,120 energy. 29 00:02:39,120 --> 00:02:45,920 Dr. Batygin shares insights into the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory, set to become operational 30 00:02:45,920 --> 00:02:52,920 by the end of 2025, and its potential role in discovering Planet Nine. 31 00:02:52,920 --> 00:02:58,300 We also explore the distinctions between the James Webb Space Telescope, optimized for 32 00:02:58,300 --> 00:03:04,520 close observations and spectrum analysis, and the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is designed 33 00:03:04,520 --> 00:03:07,360 for wide field searches. 34 00:03:07,360 --> 00:03:13,040 Additionally, we dwell into the utilization of particle accelerators in fusion and material 35 00:03:13,040 --> 00:03:17,000 science, particularly in isotope production. 36 00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:23,720 We discuss the advancements like part accelerator-driven systems and accelerator-driven fusion for 37 00:03:23,720 --> 00:03:27,280 material innovations. 38 00:03:27,280 --> 00:03:33,240 Our conversation extends to the theoretical concept of muon-catalyzed fusion, examining 39 00:03:33,240 --> 00:03:40,600 the potential of muons to drive fusion reactions and the challenges posed by their short lifespans 40 00:03:40,600 --> 00:03:42,820 and decay tendencies. 41 00:03:42,820 --> 00:03:49,440 We also consider the prospects of future cold fusion generators, emphasizing the necessity 42 00:03:49,440 --> 00:03:53,280 for advancements in superconductors in material science. 43 00:03:53,280 --> 00:03:59,260 Dr. Batygin highlights the transformative role of artificial intelligence in managing 44 00:03:59,260 --> 00:04:05,400 complex simulations and optimizing fusion reactor stability, especially with quantum 45 00:04:05,400 --> 00:04:11,200 computing's capability to handle multidimensional calculations. 46 00:04:11,200 --> 00:04:17,440 We reflect on the evolution from theoretical quantum mechanics to practical quantum computing, 47 00:04:17,440 --> 00:04:23,060 discussing how qubits can enhance complex simulations in fusion energy. 48 00:04:23,060 --> 00:04:30,360 We also get into his ongoing research on Jupiter's primordial state, using the orbital dynamics 49 00:04:30,360 --> 00:04:34,880 of its moon to infer conditions billions of years ago. 50 00:04:34,880 --> 00:04:40,640 The episode concludes with an exploration of the potential impact of the next generation 51 00:04:40,640 --> 00:04:45,360 telescopes and fusion technology in the near future. 52 00:04:45,360 --> 00:04:50,640 The way he sees it, at the end of the day, all the physics, fusion energy, and math are 53 00:04:50,640 --> 00:04:54,200 a big ruse to further his music career. 54 00:04:54,200 --> 00:04:58,820 So don't forget to check out the seventh season, where Constantine is the lead vocalist 55 00:04:58,820 --> 00:05:00,520 and guitarist. 56 00:05:00,520 --> 00:05:04,800 The seventh season is a Los Angeles-based rock band. 57 00:05:04,800 --> 00:05:10,720 Their powerful vocals, electrifying guitars, solid bass lines, and dynamic drumming creates 58 00:05:10,720 --> 00:05:15,600 a magnetic sound that has captivated audiences across the globe. 59 00:05:15,600 --> 00:05:20,560 So don't forget to check out the seventh season's latest releases and experience their captivating 60 00:05:20,560 --> 00:05:21,560 performances. 61 00:05:21,560 --> 00:05:27,360 I am Priyanka Ford, the founder of Chronos Fusion Energy, Inc. 62 00:05:27,360 --> 00:05:32,360 Here's my co-founder from week one at Chronos, Constantine Bachijan. 63 00:05:32,360 --> 00:05:34,960 Good start. 64 00:05:34,960 --> 00:05:39,400 Yeah, it's going good. 65 00:05:39,400 --> 00:05:41,400 How are you doing, Constantine? 66 00:05:41,400 --> 00:05:44,200 Listen, I'm doing great. 67 00:05:44,200 --> 00:05:45,200 I'm doing great. 68 00:05:45,200 --> 00:05:46,200 Science is coming along. 69 00:05:46,200 --> 00:05:49,120 You know, the spooky weather is here. 70 00:05:49,120 --> 00:05:51,480 So my favorite time of the year. 71 00:05:51,480 --> 00:05:54,200 Halloween's my favorite thing ever. 72 00:05:54,200 --> 00:05:55,840 Yeah, yeah. 73 00:05:55,840 --> 00:05:57,680 I like the time of the year. 74 00:05:57,680 --> 00:06:00,760 Yeah, the whole changing of the weather. 75 00:06:00,760 --> 00:06:01,760 It's beautiful. 76 00:06:01,760 --> 00:06:05,240 Have we found that planet yet? 77 00:06:05,240 --> 00:06:06,240 Planet X? 78 00:06:06,240 --> 00:06:07,240 Have we found that yet? 79 00:06:07,240 --> 00:06:12,280 The night is young and full of terrors. 80 00:06:12,280 --> 00:06:18,640 We haven't found it yet because I think most people have stopped actually searching in 81 00:06:18,640 --> 00:06:19,640 the last year or so. 82 00:06:19,640 --> 00:06:24,240 And that's because there's a new telescope coming online next year that's going to kind 83 00:06:24,240 --> 00:06:27,400 of eat everybody's lunch, so to speak. 84 00:06:27,400 --> 00:06:33,800 When LST, which is also known as the Vera Rubin Observatory, starts operations and that's 85 00:06:33,800 --> 00:06:41,440 scheduled for, like science operations are scheduled for summer of 2025, it will scan 86 00:06:41,440 --> 00:06:45,600 the sky up and down kind of every night. 87 00:06:45,600 --> 00:06:52,480 So it won't scan the entire sky, of course, because it's in the southern hemisphere and 88 00:06:52,480 --> 00:06:54,560 parts of the northern sky are unavailable to it. 89 00:06:54,560 --> 00:06:56,520 But it's going to get a lot of stuff. 90 00:06:56,520 --> 00:07:03,400 And that's going to be really a revolutionary point for all outer solar system research. 91 00:07:03,400 --> 00:07:09,880 And yeah, I think that telescope has the best chance of finding Planet Nine and if not, 92 00:07:09,880 --> 00:07:19,320 it will at the very least kind of independently confirm or refute for that matter the various 93 00:07:19,320 --> 00:07:23,840 lines of evidence that we have for it. 94 00:07:23,840 --> 00:07:29,620 This is better than the JWST or just different better? 95 00:07:29,620 --> 00:07:30,620 It's different. 96 00:07:30,620 --> 00:07:31,620 Yeah. 97 00:07:31,620 --> 00:07:37,580 So JWST is an infrared telescope, which is designed basically for characterization. 98 00:07:37,580 --> 00:07:44,720 So you can look at one thing with exceptional precision and take its spectrum. 99 00:07:44,720 --> 00:07:48,480 That's what JWST is good for. 100 00:07:48,480 --> 00:07:56,360 The Vera Rubin Observatory is an optical telescope and it's ground based and it has a huge field 101 00:07:56,360 --> 00:07:57,360 of view. 102 00:07:57,360 --> 00:08:03,280 So it's kind of a, it's more of a search instrument rather than a characterization instrument. 103 00:08:03,280 --> 00:08:07,160 So yeah, you don't want to be searching for your target with like a sniper rifle, right? 104 00:08:07,160 --> 00:08:10,960 You want to be searching with something with a larger field of view like binoculars, but 105 00:08:10,960 --> 00:08:16,880 then you want to characterize it with something like JWST. 106 00:08:16,880 --> 00:08:21,800 So once we find Planet Nine, we'll definitely look at it with JWST to figure out what its 107 00:08:21,800 --> 00:08:28,360 atmosphere is made out of and if it has a surface, that kind of thing. 108 00:08:28,360 --> 00:08:29,520 Nice. 109 00:08:29,520 --> 00:08:39,120 And you have, the only reason you can use this sniper scope is because you've mathematically 110 00:08:39,120 --> 00:08:43,000 done the calculation to figure that point out. 111 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:44,000 Is that right? 112 00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:45,000 Yeah. 113 00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:51,240 I mean, it's kind of the only reason there's motivation, I would say, to look for the planet 114 00:08:51,240 --> 00:08:56,720 in the outer solar system in the first place is because, like you said, the mathematics 115 00:08:56,720 --> 00:09:02,440 points to the existence of a planet in the outer solar system. 116 00:09:02,440 --> 00:09:11,480 I mean, the solar system at this point, its structure makes no sense if there isn't something 117 00:09:11,480 --> 00:09:17,760 out there shepherding the small objects' gravitation. 118 00:09:17,760 --> 00:09:19,520 Do you mind explaining that? 119 00:09:19,520 --> 00:09:20,880 That's fascinating. 120 00:09:20,880 --> 00:09:28,360 So where is it actually pulling on the entire solar system, on our outer planets? 121 00:09:28,360 --> 00:09:30,080 How big is it? 122 00:09:30,080 --> 00:09:32,000 How much is it pulling? 123 00:09:32,000 --> 00:09:33,000 Okay. 124 00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:40,800 So this is a, I'm glad you asked this because I think I have something like an explanation. 125 00:09:40,800 --> 00:09:50,880 So the calculations point to a planet that's about five Earth masses, okay, and that goes 126 00:09:50,880 --> 00:09:59,580 around the sun once every 10 or 20,000 years and does so on an appreciably eccentric orbit. 127 00:09:59,580 --> 00:10:03,640 So an orbit that's kind of elliptical and out and round, right? 128 00:10:03,640 --> 00:10:06,360 So does it pull on everything? 129 00:10:06,360 --> 00:10:08,680 Sure, it does. 130 00:10:08,680 --> 00:10:16,120 But its effects are amplified the further out you go away from the sun. 131 00:10:16,120 --> 00:10:21,440 So for example, if you were to say, what effect would it have on the Earth's orbit? 132 00:10:21,440 --> 00:10:28,960 The answer is it shifts the Earth's location by about one meter compared to, I don't know, 133 00:10:28,960 --> 00:10:29,960 it's not there. 134 00:10:29,960 --> 00:10:35,440 So that's a genuinely pathetic effect, right? 135 00:10:35,440 --> 00:10:41,040 Like changing the location of the Earth by three feet just doesn't matter. 136 00:10:41,040 --> 00:10:46,600 But if you go out beyond the orbit of Neptune, right, so to scale Neptune's at 30 times the 137 00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:50,800 distance between the Earth and the sun, and if you go another order of magnitude out for 138 00:10:50,800 --> 00:11:00,640 things that are 300 astronomical units and beyond, there you really get to see this planet 139 00:11:00,640 --> 00:11:07,840 kind of pulling all the orbits into a common direction, lifting their orbital plane by 140 00:11:07,840 --> 00:11:11,720 about 20 degrees relative to the plane of the solar system. 141 00:11:11,720 --> 00:11:17,920 And so you can kind of see almost this floral arrangement, or maybe it's a gravitational 142 00:11:17,920 --> 00:11:27,680 arrangement of orbits that are well beyond Neptune that require some form of sculpting 143 00:11:27,680 --> 00:11:29,800 by an exterior agent. 144 00:11:29,800 --> 00:11:34,160 And we know that that exterior agent cannot be the galaxy. 145 00:11:34,160 --> 00:11:36,680 We know it cannot be the Oort cloud. 146 00:11:36,680 --> 00:11:44,280 And in fact, the place where you have to put the perturbor is kind of in that intermediate 147 00:11:44,280 --> 00:11:52,680 part of real estate between the conventional solar system and what we call the Oort cloud, 148 00:11:52,680 --> 00:11:56,200 so the edge of the interstellar space. 149 00:11:56,200 --> 00:12:02,120 So yeah, it's an exciting time to be working on this stuff. 150 00:12:02,120 --> 00:12:07,640 We know the gravitational effects of the Oort cloud. 151 00:12:07,640 --> 00:12:11,400 Yeah, we do. 152 00:12:11,400 --> 00:12:12,840 It's significant. 153 00:12:12,840 --> 00:12:17,640 I thought it was just like a mist or just kind of like Saturn's rings where it was like 154 00:12:17,640 --> 00:12:22,680 a bunch of rocks, but it has a cohesive effect. 155 00:12:22,680 --> 00:12:30,640 Does it have more of a pull on certain parts of it and less than others based on the mass? 156 00:12:30,640 --> 00:12:31,640 What am I asking? 157 00:12:31,640 --> 00:12:32,640 Yeah. 158 00:12:32,640 --> 00:12:33,640 Yeah. 159 00:12:33,640 --> 00:12:38,320 So the Oort cloud in total is about is sort of a few Earth masses. 160 00:12:38,320 --> 00:12:45,240 So it's not, it is composed of, you know, comets basically. 161 00:12:45,240 --> 00:12:50,440 But cumulatively, it's not as negligible as Saturn's rings. 162 00:12:50,440 --> 00:12:53,880 Like Saturn's rings don't have any mass. 163 00:12:53,880 --> 00:12:59,040 The only reason they look cool is because they're reflective and they really don't 164 00:12:59,040 --> 00:13:00,040 weigh very much. 165 00:13:00,040 --> 00:13:08,800 So we do know the gravitational effect of the Oort cloud and it turns out to be pretty 166 00:13:08,800 --> 00:13:09,800 negligible. 167 00:13:09,800 --> 00:13:10,800 Right? 168 00:13:10,800 --> 00:13:14,160 And that's why you need something else. 169 00:13:14,160 --> 00:13:20,800 You can compute what the Oort cloud cumulatively will do and it would sort of change outer 170 00:13:20,800 --> 00:13:25,000 solar system orbits on a time scale of like 10 billion years. 171 00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:28,220 So something comparable to the age of the universe. 172 00:13:28,220 --> 00:13:30,800 But the solar system is only five billion years old. 173 00:13:30,800 --> 00:13:38,280 So even at best, the Oort cloud just does not compete. 174 00:13:38,280 --> 00:13:41,160 And that's why there has to be this other thing. 175 00:13:41,160 --> 00:13:49,280 And the word cloud, I think, kind of throws you off, makes you think it's like, yeah. 176 00:13:49,280 --> 00:13:54,960 And usually astrophysics is so good about getting the name so spot on. 177 00:13:54,960 --> 00:14:03,280 It's a halo of debris or planetesimals or comets. 178 00:14:03,280 --> 00:14:04,280 Right. 179 00:14:04,280 --> 00:14:05,280 How cool. 180 00:14:05,280 --> 00:14:06,560 That's so awesome. 181 00:14:06,560 --> 00:14:13,080 I think the fact that this is your job is so spectacular or part of your job, I guess. 182 00:14:13,080 --> 00:14:14,080 Yeah. 183 00:14:14,080 --> 00:14:19,520 I mean, I still kind of get surprised that I get paid. 184 00:14:19,520 --> 00:14:25,760 You know, like, yeah, it was kind of one of these things where I feel really fortunate 185 00:14:25,760 --> 00:14:35,160 in a multifaceted sense of working on things I love and being able to, you know, do that 186 00:14:35,160 --> 00:14:36,760 and kind of survive. 187 00:14:36,760 --> 00:14:38,760 Like, that's the dream. 188 00:14:38,760 --> 00:14:39,760 Yeah. 189 00:14:39,760 --> 00:14:40,760 Yeah. 190 00:14:40,760 --> 00:14:41,760 Hey, I get that. 191 00:14:41,760 --> 00:14:43,680 That's how I feel every day. 192 00:14:43,680 --> 00:14:46,880 I'm like, haha, I'd have done this for free. 193 00:14:46,880 --> 00:14:47,880 Yeah. 194 00:14:47,880 --> 00:14:48,880 Interesting. 195 00:14:48,880 --> 00:14:51,960 Did you want, is this what you wanted to do as a child? 196 00:14:51,960 --> 00:14:53,680 What did you want to be as a child? 197 00:14:53,680 --> 00:15:02,480 Oh, as a child, I was pretty sure that I was going to be a particle accelerator physicist. 198 00:15:02,480 --> 00:15:03,480 Like that. 199 00:15:03,480 --> 00:15:06,920 Yeah, that sounds kind of specific. 200 00:15:06,920 --> 00:15:13,600 But part of the reason for that is, as a kid, you know, we, like, I grew up on campus of 201 00:15:13,600 --> 00:15:18,000 a facility with a particle accelerator. 202 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:24,440 And I think, you know, it's one of these things where you kind of, you do the thing that, 203 00:15:24,440 --> 00:15:28,920 or at least as a kid, you think you want to do the thing that you are exposed to. 204 00:15:28,920 --> 00:15:34,840 And because there was a particle accelerator, a lot of people I knew were physicists or 205 00:15:34,840 --> 00:15:40,280 kids of physicists, I was like, well, I guess that's kind of like what you have to become 206 00:15:40,280 --> 00:15:42,160 when you grow up. 207 00:15:42,160 --> 00:15:46,720 And then I later realized that you don't have to become a particle accelerator physicist. 208 00:15:46,720 --> 00:15:49,840 And in fact, that's kind of a niche thing. 209 00:15:49,840 --> 00:15:56,160 And so, you know, the thing that I was going to do is be a professional musician. 210 00:15:56,160 --> 00:15:58,520 And you know, our band is going to become the next Metallica. 211 00:15:58,520 --> 00:16:04,240 And I think we're about, you know, three or four shows away from that happening right 212 00:16:04,240 --> 00:16:05,240 now. 213 00:16:05,240 --> 00:16:06,240 I feel it. 214 00:16:06,240 --> 00:16:07,240 Yeah, I feel it. 215 00:16:07,240 --> 00:16:08,240 I've heard it and I feel it. 216 00:16:08,240 --> 00:16:09,240 I'm right there with you. 217 00:16:09,240 --> 00:16:10,240 Yeah, it's got to, you know, that's right. 218 00:16:10,240 --> 00:16:13,240 David Spitz is about to be dethroned. 219 00:16:13,240 --> 00:16:21,320 Poor Planet Nine. 220 00:16:21,320 --> 00:16:24,280 It will have to wait just a little longer. 221 00:16:24,280 --> 00:16:25,280 Yeah. 222 00:16:25,280 --> 00:16:28,880 Oh, particle accelerator. 223 00:16:28,880 --> 00:16:29,880 Yeah. 224 00:16:29,880 --> 00:16:43,000 You know, I run into people when we talk about fusion, people talk about, oh, you know, they 225 00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:48,340 ask what type of fusion and whether we are what we're going after. 226 00:16:48,340 --> 00:16:53,600 And what they're really asking is, are we using fusion for electricity? 227 00:16:53,600 --> 00:16:55,120 Are we using it for heat? 228 00:16:55,120 --> 00:16:58,600 Or are we using it for like material development? 229 00:16:58,600 --> 00:17:06,020 So I, it took me a while to kind of build that bridge between particle accelerators 230 00:17:06,020 --> 00:17:09,200 and fusion and material development. 231 00:17:09,200 --> 00:17:12,920 But I feel like you built that bridge like decades ago. 232 00:17:12,920 --> 00:17:20,600 Like, can you help us like with how fusion and particle accelerators and new material 233 00:17:20,600 --> 00:17:23,600 or isotope development, like how it comes together? 234 00:17:23,600 --> 00:17:34,680 Yeah, so there's really a multitude of ways, but the first two that come to mind immediately. 235 00:17:34,680 --> 00:17:40,800 So let's talk first about, you know, production of lithium, right? 236 00:17:40,800 --> 00:17:47,480 Like lithium seven is a good way to make tritium, right? 237 00:17:47,480 --> 00:17:54,320 You irradiate lithium seven with a high intensity beam of protons. 238 00:17:54,320 --> 00:18:05,880 And you know, then, and then it decays into helium and tritium. 239 00:18:05,880 --> 00:18:18,080 And so that for a long time was kind of viewed as the most viable mechanism to source tritium. 240 00:18:18,080 --> 00:18:24,040 And it's still, you know, very much up in the kind of community. 241 00:18:24,040 --> 00:18:29,280 Like that's still something that is consistently discussed. 242 00:18:29,280 --> 00:18:36,200 And you know, fusion aside, you know, when it comes to fission, right, like the byproducts 243 00:18:36,200 --> 00:18:46,280 of nuclear fission can be made also less radioactive by irradiating them with a high intensity 244 00:18:46,280 --> 00:18:48,080 beam of charged particles. 245 00:18:48,080 --> 00:18:55,520 And that's because you basically peel off the isotopes of, I would say, uranium that 246 00:18:55,520 --> 00:18:57,560 are still radioactive. 247 00:18:57,560 --> 00:19:02,800 And so those systems are called ADS, system accelerator driven system. 248 00:19:02,800 --> 00:19:12,960 Now there's also a distinct approach to fusion, right, which actually uses particle beams 249 00:19:12,960 --> 00:19:17,560 to collide them and drive fusion that way. 250 00:19:17,560 --> 00:19:23,840 So rather than, you know, doing like the usual thing in a telcomap where you just crank up 251 00:19:23,840 --> 00:19:32,680 the temperature to the point where you try to have tritium and deuterium today or, you 252 00:19:32,680 --> 00:19:40,080 know, helium three or helium three come in and just cross the kind of, you cool a barrier 253 00:19:40,080 --> 00:19:43,440 and combine just because the temperature is so high. 254 00:19:43,440 --> 00:19:49,760 The accelerator driven fusion is distinct in that you first accelerate the particles 255 00:19:49,760 --> 00:19:51,760 or whatever particles you want. 256 00:19:51,760 --> 00:19:58,920 I mean, typically it's heavy ions and then have those collide at a fast enough energy. 257 00:19:58,920 --> 00:20:00,520 So it's just a different approach. 258 00:20:00,520 --> 00:20:07,560 But yeah, the two things have, the two kind of fields of development, right, both the 259 00:20:07,560 --> 00:20:15,160 accelerator science and just plasma physics in general, of course, which is so critically 260 00:20:15,160 --> 00:20:19,800 relevant for fusion have always gone hand in hand and they've always kind of developed 261 00:20:19,800 --> 00:20:20,800 together. 262 00:20:20,800 --> 00:20:24,000 So there's a lot of cross-pollination between the two ideas. 263 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:26,560 Yeah, that's fascinating. 264 00:20:26,560 --> 00:20:36,920 I remember the first time we met in person at Caltech, you explained a nuance to me and 265 00:20:36,920 --> 00:20:44,720 how you could produce those in particle accelerators and somehow put them into a tokamak to make 266 00:20:44,720 --> 00:20:46,200 fusion better. 267 00:20:46,200 --> 00:20:48,080 Yeah, I would love. 268 00:20:48,080 --> 00:21:10,440 I would love another explanation of that one because I kind of found it fascinating. 269 00:21:10,440 --> 00:21:15,160 But I never forgot that conversation, just the possibility of how that could make for 270 00:21:15,160 --> 00:21:19,120 a more compact reactor. 271 00:21:19,120 --> 00:21:21,360 Tell us about that, Konstantin. 272 00:21:21,360 --> 00:21:22,360 Yeah. 273 00:21:22,360 --> 00:21:23,360 Okay. 274 00:21:23,360 --> 00:21:31,040 So it's actually, it's a genuinely fascinating thing, which also historically links up to 275 00:21:31,040 --> 00:21:33,840 the cold fusion, right? 276 00:21:33,840 --> 00:21:41,440 Like during the 80s, there was a moment of excitement about cold fusion, which turned 277 00:21:41,440 --> 00:21:44,040 out totally to be kind of a red herring. 278 00:21:44,040 --> 00:21:45,720 It was totally fake. 279 00:21:45,720 --> 00:21:51,960 But what's interesting is that the words cold fusion actually originate from a 1956 New 280 00:21:51,960 --> 00:22:01,280 York Times article exactly talking about not the 80s things, but the muon catalyzed nuclear 281 00:22:01,280 --> 00:22:02,960 fusion. 282 00:22:02,960 --> 00:22:04,920 So first, what is a muon? 283 00:22:04,920 --> 00:22:05,920 Okay. 284 00:22:05,920 --> 00:22:15,240 Muon is a negatively charged lepton, which is a type of particle with a mass about 200 285 00:22:15,240 --> 00:22:17,760 times that of an electron. 286 00:22:17,760 --> 00:22:25,360 So you can really, you can think of it just as a very, very heavy electron. 287 00:22:25,360 --> 00:22:34,200 And the unfortunate thing about muons is that they last about 2.2 microseconds because, 288 00:22:34,200 --> 00:22:41,920 and after a while, meaning after 2.2 microseconds, they decay into a neutrino, which is a different 289 00:22:41,920 --> 00:22:47,600 type of particle and a conventional electron. 290 00:22:47,600 --> 00:22:55,080 But while it lasts, like during its lifespan, what the muon can do is it can replace one 291 00:22:55,080 --> 00:22:58,840 of the electrons in the hydrogen molecule. 292 00:22:58,840 --> 00:23:06,000 And that allows the two nuclei to draw far closer than the normal covalent bond. 293 00:23:06,000 --> 00:23:15,120 And because of that, the probability of just regular deuterium curing fusion increases 294 00:23:15,120 --> 00:23:16,920 by a ton. 295 00:23:16,920 --> 00:23:23,120 And then after a fusion reaction occurs, like the muon that is responsible for catalyzing 296 00:23:23,120 --> 00:23:32,720 that reaction is in principle free to catalyze other events until it decays or is somehow 297 00:23:32,720 --> 00:23:34,320 removed. 298 00:23:34,320 --> 00:23:37,760 So it's really, really cool. 299 00:23:37,760 --> 00:23:44,760 And gosh, if it worked better, we would have had fusion, you know, like fusion reactors 300 00:23:44,760 --> 00:23:47,360 properly in the 50s. 301 00:23:47,360 --> 00:23:55,280 Now, the reason there's a problem with this approach is that, well, the muon doesn't 302 00:23:55,280 --> 00:23:56,280 last very long. 303 00:23:56,280 --> 00:24:02,000 Okay, so it only has 2.2 microseconds before it goes away. 304 00:24:02,000 --> 00:24:08,080 And the other problem is that it sticks to alpha particles, which are the helium nuclei. 305 00:24:08,080 --> 00:24:17,280 And so if you can somehow solve the time scale and the sticking problem, then you're in business. 306 00:24:17,280 --> 00:24:24,680 But indeed, muons are readily generated by particle accelerators. 307 00:24:24,680 --> 00:24:28,920 I mean, muons are actually even generated in the atmosphere. 308 00:24:28,920 --> 00:24:29,920 Right? 309 00:24:29,920 --> 00:24:36,280 So the cosmic rays, which are just charged particles that fly around in space as they 310 00:24:36,280 --> 00:24:41,880 impact our atmosphere, they create a shower of particles. 311 00:24:41,880 --> 00:24:45,360 And one of the things that comes out is muon. 312 00:24:45,360 --> 00:24:52,960 So I still think it's one of the coolest things ever, because it puts fusion just barely with, 313 00:24:52,960 --> 00:24:56,520 you know, it's like just a bit, a little bit out of reach. 314 00:24:56,520 --> 00:25:02,600 And yeah, I wish there was a simple solution. 315 00:25:02,600 --> 00:25:03,600 Interesting. 316 00:25:03,600 --> 00:25:08,320 Like maybe there's a complicated solution. 317 00:25:08,320 --> 00:25:17,560 So it looks like maybe 30 years down the line, there will be a possibility of cold fusion 318 00:25:17,560 --> 00:25:25,360 generators, but it would be some combination of the muon, some combination of a laser plasma 319 00:25:25,360 --> 00:25:37,480 heating system, and a lot of material innovations in terms of like superconductors and... 320 00:25:37,480 --> 00:25:42,200 room temperature superconductors, things like that. 321 00:25:42,200 --> 00:25:49,640 Yeah, it's all I think about, what do you say, two to three decades away? 322 00:25:49,640 --> 00:25:58,200 Oh, I would say, I mean, the way things are going, I'm more optimistic than that. 323 00:25:58,200 --> 00:26:05,160 I mean, I think that, well, I mean, material science generally right now is kind of having 324 00:26:05,160 --> 00:26:06,160 a moment. 325 00:26:06,160 --> 00:26:07,160 Yeah. 326 00:26:07,160 --> 00:26:11,480 So I'm, I mean, of course, it's hard to predict the future. 327 00:26:11,480 --> 00:26:14,000 It's easier to predict the past. 328 00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:21,920 But yeah, I'm kind of optimistic, given the explosion of both kind of theoretical work 329 00:26:21,920 --> 00:26:29,760 that's been done in the last decade and a half, kind of predicting different, you know, 330 00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:34,960 different phases, like what kind of materials are in principle possible. 331 00:26:34,960 --> 00:26:42,200 And that stuff is starting to get experimentally tested, and there's a huge, huge, huge amount 332 00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:46,720 of kind of research being done in that realm. 333 00:26:46,720 --> 00:26:51,720 So I'm, I have to say, I hope it doesn't take two to three decades. 334 00:26:51,720 --> 00:26:53,560 I think it'll be faster than that. 335 00:26:53,560 --> 00:27:04,720 And I don't know how the muon thing will play out, but surely the kind of superconducting 336 00:27:04,720 --> 00:27:12,520 like magnets, right, things that can produce kind of huge fields, fields on the order of 337 00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:14,520 10 Tesla or whatever. 338 00:27:14,520 --> 00:27:23,560 Like that's going to be a prerequisite for regular, you know, tokamak devices. 339 00:27:23,560 --> 00:27:29,320 And so in that regard, right, there's been progress left and right in the last decade. 340 00:27:29,320 --> 00:27:32,520 So I'm very, very optimistic about that. 341 00:27:32,520 --> 00:27:42,520 Yeah, yet another kind of convergence field between particle accelerators and fusion energy 342 00:27:42,520 --> 00:27:45,240 or the superconducting magnets. 343 00:27:45,240 --> 00:27:46,240 Yeah. 344 00:27:46,240 --> 00:27:47,880 It's, it's, it's awesome. 345 00:27:47,880 --> 00:27:48,880 Yeah. 346 00:27:48,880 --> 00:27:50,720 It's, it's the convergence of all of those. 347 00:27:50,720 --> 00:27:55,520 And of course, AI and material development with quantum computing and AI, that's going 348 00:27:55,520 --> 00:27:56,520 to be huge. 349 00:27:56,520 --> 00:28:06,120 I think in this regard, right, AI is going to play a critically important role, if anything, 350 00:28:06,120 --> 00:28:11,600 for its ability to think in more than, you know, four dimensions. 351 00:28:11,600 --> 00:28:19,440 Like human beings just naturally don't have the capacity to think in greater than 40. 352 00:28:19,440 --> 00:28:23,400 I mean, I have a, I have a hard time thinking in like 2D. 353 00:28:23,400 --> 00:28:31,000 You know, I usually think in just one dimension, but you know, the fact that artificial intelligence 354 00:28:31,000 --> 00:28:39,240 is not limited in this way means that from a fundamental perspective, right, it can kind 355 00:28:39,240 --> 00:28:47,880 of, it can keep track of plasma instabilities potentially far better than, than we can. 356 00:28:47,880 --> 00:28:56,640 And so I, I think that there's kind of an untapped future in, in this regard where, 357 00:28:56,640 --> 00:29:06,360 you know, where AI systems will be able to kind of machine learn the various instabilities 358 00:29:06,360 --> 00:29:08,600 and potentially suppress them, right. 359 00:29:08,600 --> 00:29:12,160 That's just something that human, human minds cannot do. 360 00:29:12,160 --> 00:29:18,200 And so I, that's another realm where I think the kind of convergence and the cross-pollination 361 00:29:18,200 --> 00:29:21,880 of those fields is going to be critical for progress. 362 00:29:21,880 --> 00:29:24,840 Yeah, for sure. 363 00:29:24,840 --> 00:29:34,440 We were, we've been thinking out our, our AI system within all of this. 364 00:29:34,440 --> 00:29:42,120 And we think about how the fusion energy generation aspect of it and those simulations itself 365 00:29:42,120 --> 00:29:47,120 there's, yeah, there's quite a bit we can do with AI with self-healing walls, with nanotechnology 366 00:29:47,120 --> 00:29:51,040 and, and plasma and mitigation and all of that. 367 00:29:51,040 --> 00:29:55,760 But then we think about all of the things you can do with AI in terms of like marketing 368 00:29:55,760 --> 00:30:01,360 and sales and in financial reporting and all of that to keep things accurate. 369 00:30:01,360 --> 00:30:06,780 And then so it's pretty exciting because there's a larger, larger convergence there as well. 370 00:30:06,780 --> 00:30:11,280 Because when you look at your end-to-end system of even customer management or like when you 371 00:30:11,280 --> 00:30:16,400 look at order of like any commercial product, not just, you know, something that we're doing, 372 00:30:16,400 --> 00:30:19,400 but like, it's, it's, it's pretty cool. 373 00:30:19,400 --> 00:30:21,400 It's, it's, yeah. 374 00:30:21,400 --> 00:30:27,200 Isn't it kind of wild that all of this stuff is happening right now? 375 00:30:27,200 --> 00:30:34,960 Like it's, it's kind of, it feels like, yeah, it feels like a really kind of monumental 376 00:30:34,960 --> 00:30:36,480 time in history. 377 00:30:36,480 --> 00:30:42,480 Like I always wondered what it was like in the early 1900s when quantum mechanics was 378 00:30:42,480 --> 00:30:49,000 getting discovered and like how cool it would have been to witness that and to be, to be 379 00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:52,560 involved in that, to kind of be a part of that revolution. 380 00:30:52,560 --> 00:30:58,200 But I think, you know, right now we're part of a somewhat different revolution, but it's 381 00:30:58,200 --> 00:30:59,880 equally cool. 382 00:30:59,880 --> 00:31:08,640 And yeah, it's just, you know, it didn't have to be this way, but it's an interesting time 383 00:31:08,640 --> 00:31:09,640 to be alive. 384 00:31:09,640 --> 00:31:12,040 Hey, I'm just, I'm grateful. 385 00:31:12,040 --> 00:31:13,040 I don't question it. 386 00:31:13,040 --> 00:31:14,480 I just say thank you. 387 00:31:14,480 --> 00:31:19,640 I, you know, the, the, the thing about that, you said, uh, multi-dimensional calculations 388 00:31:19,640 --> 00:31:21,000 and quantum. 389 00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:27,520 So that kind of brings about like doing multi-dimensional calculations for simulations using quantum 390 00:31:27,520 --> 00:31:33,920 computing and the convergence of the hardware and the software of that, meaning, um, the 391 00:31:33,920 --> 00:31:39,960 quantum computing coming together with the AI to build these like robust, like digital 392 00:31:39,960 --> 00:31:46,880 twin simulations and prototypes and the possibilities of those in every field, especially ours, 393 00:31:46,880 --> 00:31:53,520 but in every field, um, that's, that's like mind blowing to me, but I've never kind of 394 00:31:53,520 --> 00:32:02,680 like understood the actual bridge of, um, why a quantum computer allows you to do this 395 00:32:02,680 --> 00:32:10,720 multi-dimensional calculation like far better than, you know, shall we say, um, conventional 396 00:32:10,720 --> 00:32:11,720 computing? 397 00:32:11,720 --> 00:32:12,720 Yeah. 398 00:32:12,720 --> 00:32:17,720 Um, I didn't want to be offensive, uh, conventional super computing. 399 00:32:17,720 --> 00:32:18,720 Yeah. 400 00:32:18,720 --> 00:32:25,440 Well, yeah, help us, help us understand that, that multi-dimensionality of quantum computing 401 00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:27,720 and how that, yeah. 402 00:32:27,720 --> 00:32:33,240 And I'll be honest, I'm not at all an expert in quantum computing, right? 403 00:32:33,240 --> 00:32:34,840 There are tasks, right? 404 00:32:34,840 --> 00:32:39,000 The tasks for which quantum computers fundamentally, right? 405 00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:45,160 Because they don't like a classical computer thinks in terms of, you know, bits, right? 406 00:32:45,160 --> 00:32:51,440 The flipping of zero one and, and the quantum computer thinks in terms of qubits, which 407 00:32:51,440 --> 00:32:52,440 are, which are states. 408 00:32:52,440 --> 00:32:57,440 Um, so, so fundamentally they work in a little bit of a different way. 409 00:32:57,440 --> 00:33:01,800 Um, the principle, by the way, has been around for a long, long time. 410 00:33:01,800 --> 00:33:08,720 I mean, like Feynman wrote about quantum computing, um, and he died, I don't remember exactly 411 00:33:08,720 --> 00:33:12,000 what year he died, but he died in like the early eighties. 412 00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:18,680 So I think the principle has been with us for quite some time, but the reason, and to 413 00:33:18,680 --> 00:33:26,000 be, and to be clear, like the quantum computer is not necessarily something that you would 414 00:33:26,000 --> 00:33:29,520 use in like your calculator, right? 415 00:33:29,520 --> 00:33:35,320 A regular classical computer is just fine as a calculator, but there are certain tasks 416 00:33:35,320 --> 00:33:38,960 for which the quantum computer works better. 417 00:33:38,960 --> 00:33:45,720 Now for a long time it was an issue of like just building one, right? 418 00:33:45,720 --> 00:33:52,720 Like getting, getting one to getting the, your computing system to be stable and not 419 00:33:52,720 --> 00:33:59,520 like interacting with the walls, for example, because you know, quantum mechanics is a, 420 00:33:59,520 --> 00:34:03,640 is a beautiful and, uh, and tricky thing, right? 421 00:34:03,640 --> 00:34:08,600 Things are not, there are no trajectories, there are no particles, so to speak, that 422 00:34:08,600 --> 00:34:12,560 are wave functions, which will tend to couple to walls. 423 00:34:12,560 --> 00:34:19,280 And that's a, that's been a problem for some time, but you know, again, right now, like 424 00:34:19,280 --> 00:34:25,320 with a lot of other things, we're living through an interesting kind of intersection point 425 00:34:25,320 --> 00:34:29,320 where that's becoming much more of a reality. 426 00:34:29,320 --> 00:34:30,320 Yeah. 427 00:34:30,320 --> 00:34:35,760 How does it go from like this theoretical world of like Feynman talking about these 428 00:34:35,760 --> 00:34:44,240 quantum states and how that exists in the universe and, and how did we turn that into 429 00:34:44,240 --> 00:34:53,080 a computing technology, you know, like that bridge of it, it, it's, it's mind boggling 430 00:34:53,080 --> 00:34:57,520 to me how it goes from Einstein hypothesizing it. 431 00:34:57,520 --> 00:35:01,840 And that's your field, you know, like you guys are, I don't know how you guys do it. 432 00:35:01,840 --> 00:35:03,840 Like that's, that's amazing. 433 00:35:03,840 --> 00:35:06,680 Well, I appreciate it. 434 00:35:06,680 --> 00:35:12,440 I'm no Feynman and you know, to, you know, and I think nobody, nobody is. 435 00:35:12,440 --> 00:35:18,160 He was a, he was one of the kind of unique minds of the 20th century. 436 00:35:18,160 --> 00:35:28,680 And that said, you know, there's, there are, there are numerous examples of, of times in 437 00:35:28,680 --> 00:35:35,840 science where you kind of know that stuff is going to work, but it's just the technology 438 00:35:35,840 --> 00:35:38,400 is not there yet to make it work. 439 00:35:38,400 --> 00:35:44,200 I mean, a good example is, you know, in signal processing, for example, right? 440 00:35:44,200 --> 00:35:50,640 Like a Fourier transform is something that you do routinely. 441 00:35:50,640 --> 00:35:57,080 And there's a method to computing the discrete Fourier transforms called fast Fourier transforms. 442 00:35:57,080 --> 00:36:04,480 And fast Fourier transforms were already invented by Gauss in like the 1800s. 443 00:36:04,480 --> 00:36:10,960 And he was frustrated by the fact that computers were not there to perform them. 444 00:36:10,960 --> 00:36:15,480 I mean, this is, this is kind of along the lines of what you're talking about, right? 445 00:36:15,480 --> 00:36:20,800 You realize that the principle is there and just the computational power is on there. 446 00:36:20,800 --> 00:36:29,720 And Gauss, by the way, was also the first person to conduct a true simulation of like 447 00:36:29,720 --> 00:36:35,560 planetary motion, like full scale planets, all the planets interacting with each other, 448 00:36:35,560 --> 00:36:40,760 which is not a problem that you can solve, you know, on a piece of paper, right? 449 00:36:40,760 --> 00:36:46,040 And he realized that you would have to discretize that problem and solve it via simulation. 450 00:36:46,040 --> 00:36:52,280 And the way he did it is he got a bunch of friends and like the people were the computers 451 00:36:52,280 --> 00:36:57,680 and they would pass pieces of paper around and propagate errors and do this stuff. 452 00:36:57,680 --> 00:36:59,280 And it worked. 453 00:36:59,280 --> 00:37:03,120 The only problem was that it worked slower than real time. 454 00:37:03,120 --> 00:37:08,760 You were better off just sitting back and watching the planets orbiting the sun. 455 00:37:08,760 --> 00:37:15,440 But still, like, yeah, was a legit numerical simulation. 456 00:37:15,440 --> 00:37:16,440 Oh my God. 457 00:37:16,440 --> 00:37:17,440 Yeah, it was running. 458 00:37:17,440 --> 00:37:22,240 Yeah, it was running on very slow processors, otherwise known as the human brain. 459 00:37:22,240 --> 00:37:23,600 How far we've come. 460 00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:31,120 Yeah, we've we've recently had conversations about having sensors and transmitters put 461 00:37:31,120 --> 00:37:38,360 into fusion energy generators that have to like withstand an immense amount of heat and 462 00:37:38,360 --> 00:37:43,240 also be able to communicate with the quantum computer and have like high speeds. 463 00:37:43,240 --> 00:37:45,280 And so it's a challenging task. 464 00:37:45,280 --> 00:37:53,440 It's a challenging material physics and yeah, it's a yeah, it's a challenging task. 465 00:37:53,440 --> 00:37:55,400 It's a tall order. 466 00:37:55,400 --> 00:37:56,880 We'll see. 467 00:37:56,880 --> 00:38:00,360 But what if it wasn't right? 468 00:38:00,360 --> 00:38:02,040 If it wasn't, it wouldn't be fun. 469 00:38:02,040 --> 00:38:05,040 And also true. 470 00:38:05,040 --> 00:38:08,480 That's true. 471 00:38:08,480 --> 00:38:12,440 Yeah, sorry. 472 00:38:12,440 --> 00:38:16,760 I'm vehemently agreeing with you here. 473 00:38:16,760 --> 00:38:17,760 Very cool. 474 00:38:17,760 --> 00:38:18,760 Yeah. 475 00:38:18,760 --> 00:38:26,800 But the fact that it what do you say about a hundred year gap between when quantum quantum 476 00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:35,640 states or quantum physics came to be to when we can use a quantum computer and tune the 477 00:38:35,640 --> 00:38:42,640 neural network such that we can process in high enough speeds to control a plasma in 478 00:38:42,640 --> 00:38:51,680 a tiny sun on Earth like that that road map is is is chock full of amazing scientists. 479 00:38:51,680 --> 00:38:52,680 Yeah. 480 00:38:52,680 --> 00:38:57,520 Yeah, it's about a hundred year gap, which is kind of actually I hadn't quite I mean, 481 00:38:57,520 --> 00:38:58,520 a little bit more. 482 00:38:58,520 --> 00:39:07,280 I mean, we're now kind of past the first formulations, of course, of certainly we're past the 100 483 00:39:07,280 --> 00:39:11,920 year mark for the formulation of what's called the old quantum theory. 484 00:39:11,920 --> 00:39:21,680 But yeah, I never it's actually it would be an interesting exercise to, you know, really 485 00:39:21,680 --> 00:39:28,240 take every invention and measure what's the time scale in between the conceptualization 486 00:39:28,240 --> 00:39:30,320 of being possible and not. 487 00:39:30,320 --> 00:39:34,320 I would say the radio was a little shorter. 488 00:39:34,320 --> 00:39:44,240 The radio was invented by something like early 1900s. 489 00:39:44,240 --> 00:39:50,480 And Maxwell's equations were fully understood by Maxwell in the 1860s. 490 00:39:50,480 --> 00:39:54,920 So there was kind of a shorter than a century time scale in between. 491 00:39:54,920 --> 00:40:01,560 But that is surely the order of magnitude is correct. 492 00:40:01,560 --> 00:40:09,360 So so, yeah, that's a I never quite thought about that time span in between original theory 493 00:40:09,360 --> 00:40:12,720 and then what you could do with it. 494 00:40:12,720 --> 00:40:19,000 Yeah, some some harder than others, I suppose. 495 00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:26,600 What do you see now that that's probably in like a very raw theoretical stage that has 496 00:40:26,600 --> 00:40:34,640 like just world changing or maybe solar system changing implications in the next century? 497 00:40:34,640 --> 00:40:35,640 What do you think? 498 00:40:35,640 --> 00:40:41,000 Well, so yeah, you know, there's a OK, good question. 499 00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:50,040 So I have a former student named Walker Melton who did his undergraduate thesis with me at 500 00:40:50,040 --> 00:40:58,000 Caltech on kind of analogies between quantum mechanics and the propagation of waves in 501 00:40:58,000 --> 00:40:59,000 self gravitating disks. 502 00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:07,960 And then he went on to Harvard and he now works on stuff that I frankly don't understand 503 00:41:07,960 --> 00:41:08,960 at all. 504 00:41:08,960 --> 00:41:15,560 Like I was trying to read a couple of his papers a month ago and I couldn't understand 505 00:41:15,560 --> 00:41:18,560 any of the sentences. 506 00:41:18,560 --> 00:41:19,560 Right. 507 00:41:19,560 --> 00:41:24,280 And it sort of felt like like kind of a gorilla that's been handed like a wrench where I'm 508 00:41:24,280 --> 00:41:27,120 like, OK, I know this does something. 509 00:41:27,120 --> 00:41:31,320 What is it like warp warp like a wormhole or something? 510 00:41:31,320 --> 00:41:32,320 Like what are we doing? 511 00:41:32,320 --> 00:41:34,160 Like we're warping time. 512 00:41:34,160 --> 00:41:40,600 The paper was about the amplitude of the celestial leap. 513 00:41:40,600 --> 00:41:44,760 I have no idea or computing the amplitudes of celestial leap. 514 00:41:44,760 --> 00:41:47,120 So I have no idea what that means. 515 00:41:47,120 --> 00:41:49,080 What's a celestial leap? 516 00:41:49,080 --> 00:41:51,680 Is that like what happened in the interstellar movie? 517 00:41:51,680 --> 00:41:55,240 No, no, nothing to do. 518 00:41:55,240 --> 00:42:02,040 As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with celestial mechanics. 519 00:42:02,040 --> 00:42:07,840 Every time I talk to Walker about it, he said, well, just consider gravity in a box. 520 00:42:07,840 --> 00:42:09,880 And I was like, yeah. 521 00:42:09,880 --> 00:42:13,520 You know, again, like, you mean like gravitational pull inside a box? 522 00:42:13,520 --> 00:42:17,880 He's like, no, like take gravity, the theory of gravity and put it into a box. 523 00:42:17,880 --> 00:42:20,080 And that's kind of where where am I on? 524 00:42:20,080 --> 00:42:21,080 I don't understand. 525 00:42:21,080 --> 00:42:22,080 I don't know. 526 00:42:22,080 --> 00:42:23,080 But I do wonder. 527 00:42:23,080 --> 00:42:29,880 I mean, I'm sure that, you know, there were people a hundred years ago who saw quantum 528 00:42:29,880 --> 00:42:38,680 mechanics as some weird thing that you know, that's equally impenetrable as the celestial 529 00:42:38,680 --> 00:42:41,320 leaf amplitude is to me. 530 00:42:41,320 --> 00:42:46,200 And so, yeah, there's a lot of development like that that's happening right now that 531 00:42:46,200 --> 00:42:53,560 I'm kind of not involved in because ultimately, just from my own preference, I like the certain 532 00:42:53,560 --> 00:43:02,320 branches of physics that I like, I enjoy things being maybe I don't want to say practical, 533 00:43:02,320 --> 00:43:08,920 but I enjoy being able to imagine what actually is happening. 534 00:43:08,920 --> 00:43:09,920 You know what I mean? 535 00:43:09,920 --> 00:43:10,920 Yeah. 536 00:43:10,920 --> 00:43:19,080 And so like there's an applied aspect to celestial mechanics and orbital dynamics and plasma 537 00:43:19,080 --> 00:43:20,080 physics. 538 00:43:20,080 --> 00:43:29,200 There's a joy in being able to imagine its direct effects. 539 00:43:29,200 --> 00:43:36,440 So to that said, you know, I'm probably locked out of some of the things that will be, you 540 00:43:36,440 --> 00:43:42,800 know, a century from now making revolutionary technological strides. 541 00:43:42,800 --> 00:43:46,320 And the celestial leaf might be part of it. 542 00:43:46,320 --> 00:43:48,320 I just don't know. 543 00:43:48,320 --> 00:43:49,320 Interesting. 544 00:43:49,320 --> 00:43:50,320 Yeah. 545 00:43:50,320 --> 00:43:55,680 I googled the celestial leaf and I couldn't find an explanation. 546 00:43:55,680 --> 00:44:05,600 A friend of mine sent me a link to like a steam community post about how there's some 547 00:44:05,600 --> 00:44:12,080 video game where if you get stuck on the celestial leaf, you have to have the celestial leaf blower. 548 00:44:12,080 --> 00:44:17,680 And that's about the explanation, like the extent of the explanation. 549 00:44:17,680 --> 00:44:19,520 No, I was you know what I was about to say? 550 00:44:19,520 --> 00:44:25,400 I was about to say I feel like I have seen Gravity being turned off and on in like a 551 00:44:25,400 --> 00:44:26,800 superhero movie. 552 00:44:26,800 --> 00:44:33,560 I can't put my finger on which one, but I feel like I've seen that conceptually in like 553 00:44:33,560 --> 00:44:36,360 it's got to be like some sort of sci fi stuff. 554 00:44:36,360 --> 00:44:40,640 Maybe future Rama because I that's my favorite show on the planet. 555 00:44:40,640 --> 00:44:42,600 So maybe maybe it was there. 556 00:44:42,600 --> 00:44:43,600 Yeah. 557 00:44:43,600 --> 00:44:44,600 Yeah. 558 00:44:44,600 --> 00:44:45,600 Yeah. 559 00:44:45,600 --> 00:44:46,600 Makes sense. 560 00:44:46,600 --> 00:44:49,200 I'm excited. 561 00:44:49,200 --> 00:44:50,200 You've watched future. 562 00:44:50,200 --> 00:44:51,200 I'm not you like future. 563 00:44:51,200 --> 00:44:52,200 I'm not constantly. 564 00:44:52,200 --> 00:44:53,200 Oh, of course. 565 00:44:53,200 --> 00:44:54,200 Of course. 566 00:44:54,200 --> 00:44:55,200 It's been a moment since then. 567 00:44:55,200 --> 00:45:00,120 But like, yeah, gosh, it's like in college. 568 00:45:00,120 --> 00:45:04,720 This was kind of a staple for Caltech. 569 00:45:04,720 --> 00:45:05,720 Really? 570 00:45:05,720 --> 00:45:15,560 One of my favorite moments in that it was when the robot goes to sleep in the closet 571 00:45:15,560 --> 00:45:20,240 and he's just kind of asleep talking is like destroy all humanity, destroy humanity. 572 00:45:20,240 --> 00:45:25,680 And then he gets woken up and he's like, oh, sorry, I was just having a wonderful dream. 573 00:45:25,680 --> 00:45:27,680 I love it. 574 00:45:27,680 --> 00:45:29,560 Yeah, no, I love that show. 575 00:45:29,560 --> 00:45:31,560 I love it so much. 576 00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:35,400 Yeah, downright my favorite. 577 00:45:35,400 --> 00:45:40,280 Watching it in Caltech, but in a way like that, that's almost that's super cool. 578 00:45:40,280 --> 00:45:44,560 I've seen garbage being incinerated in that one. 579 00:45:44,560 --> 00:45:49,080 That one always fascinates me because I feel like I can build a fusion energy generator 580 00:45:49,080 --> 00:45:54,000 that would produce so much heat that it would just incinerate just about every garbage and 581 00:45:54,000 --> 00:45:56,880 with nothing left, not even smoke. 582 00:45:56,880 --> 00:46:05,000 You know, like, yes, so I get some ideas from Futurama every now and then. 583 00:46:05,000 --> 00:46:11,000 But the you know, the thing I did want to ask you about sometime, I've been thinking 584 00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:12,680 about this for a while. 585 00:46:12,680 --> 00:46:20,300 When I talk to people about magnetic fields and creating magnetic fields to confine plasma, 586 00:46:20,300 --> 00:46:27,480 you kind of think about like we talk about 30 Tesla magnets. 587 00:46:27,480 --> 00:46:33,880 We've seen I think the strongest magnet is 45 Tesla and that was also designed by Bob. 588 00:46:33,880 --> 00:46:37,760 But then you think about like you take that up to like 150 Tesla. 589 00:46:37,760 --> 00:46:38,760 I don't know the number. 590 00:46:38,760 --> 00:46:40,320 I'm just making this one up. 591 00:46:40,320 --> 00:46:45,920 Like if you take it to 150 Tesla or something, is that the Einstein Rosen Bridge? 592 00:46:45,920 --> 00:46:53,300 Is that where you get into the possibilities of being able to bend? 593 00:46:53,300 --> 00:46:55,680 I don't know what I'm asking here. 594 00:46:55,680 --> 00:46:58,180 But these are all things that are a long way away. 595 00:46:58,180 --> 00:47:07,720 And I think, yeah, and I think a lot of our work now is quite grounded in reality in the 596 00:47:07,720 --> 00:47:10,160 next 10 years, I suppose. 597 00:47:10,160 --> 00:47:11,160 Yes. 598 00:47:11,160 --> 00:47:19,800 So what are you working on like now other than the Planet X Clonestrontine? 599 00:47:19,800 --> 00:47:24,520 Well, you know, I've got I'm excited about fusion. 600 00:47:24,520 --> 00:47:25,520 I'm excited about AI. 601 00:47:25,520 --> 00:47:28,880 I started up going. 602 00:47:28,880 --> 00:47:32,000 I'm also right now. 603 00:47:32,000 --> 00:47:41,200 I'm involved in a really cool calculation to constrain and understand the primordial 604 00:47:41,200 --> 00:47:46,760 radius of Jupiter and primordial magnetic field and the primordial accretion. 605 00:47:46,760 --> 00:47:56,880 So around Jupiter, there are the satellites that are famed Galilean satellites, like Io, 606 00:47:56,880 --> 00:48:00,120 Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. 607 00:48:00,120 --> 00:48:05,400 But interior to Io, there are these tiny satellites that are just like nobody cares about. 608 00:48:05,400 --> 00:48:08,000 They're called the MLF group. 609 00:48:08,000 --> 00:48:18,000 But what I found is that by carefully studying the dynamical footprint, the sort of orbital 610 00:48:18,000 --> 00:48:28,000 dynamics interactions between the Galilean satellites and the small satellites, you can 611 00:48:28,000 --> 00:48:35,480 deduce many of the properties of Jupiter four and a half billion years ago. 612 00:48:35,480 --> 00:48:41,360 And you can do this calculation actually kind of on a piece of paper, which is pretty remarkable. 613 00:48:41,360 --> 00:48:48,320 And so the upshot of all of this is that when the solar nebula dissipated, so like when 614 00:48:48,320 --> 00:48:56,000 the gaseous cloud got evaporated from around the sun, Jupiter was twice as big as it is 615 00:48:56,000 --> 00:49:04,720 now and had a magnetic field of about 200 gauss. 616 00:49:04,720 --> 00:49:08,640 So this is 0.02 Tesla. 617 00:49:08,640 --> 00:49:10,880 Nothing like what we like to talk about. 618 00:49:10,880 --> 00:49:18,240 Chronos, of course, but it's bigger than what it is now for Jupiter, which is about 619 00:49:18,240 --> 00:49:19,240 10. 620 00:49:19,240 --> 00:49:25,440 And it was accreting material, like accreting an atmosphere at a rate of about a Jupiter 621 00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:28,200 mass per million years. 622 00:49:28,200 --> 00:49:30,640 So this is just a cute calculation. 623 00:49:30,640 --> 00:49:31,960 I'm really excited about it now. 624 00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:36,040 It just got accepted for publication like a week ago. 625 00:49:36,040 --> 00:49:39,280 So that's the thing that I'm thinking about a lot. 626 00:49:39,280 --> 00:49:40,280 That's awesome. 627 00:49:40,280 --> 00:49:43,280 Yeah, it is kind of the paper. 628 00:49:43,280 --> 00:49:44,840 Yeah, I'd love to. 629 00:49:44,840 --> 00:49:45,840 Yeah. 630 00:49:45,840 --> 00:49:51,080 Even if I understand like 2% of it, I'd love to read it. 631 00:49:51,080 --> 00:49:52,120 That's amazing. 632 00:49:52,120 --> 00:49:53,640 That's amazing. 633 00:49:53,640 --> 00:49:57,920 And then when does this telescope come online next year then? 634 00:49:57,920 --> 00:50:08,540 So I think it's supposed to start operation maybe in the winter of 2025, but science operations 635 00:50:08,540 --> 00:50:11,120 begin in the summer of 2025. 636 00:50:11,120 --> 00:50:17,040 So it's going to be a pretty cool, you know, pretty busy time. 637 00:50:17,040 --> 00:50:18,640 Yeah, yeah. 638 00:50:18,640 --> 00:50:22,920 Exciting times, exciting times, exciting times for fusion too next year. 639 00:50:22,920 --> 00:50:23,920 Absolutely. 640 00:50:23,920 --> 00:50:27,280 Yeah, big timelines. 641 00:50:27,280 --> 00:50:28,720 That's awesome. 642 00:50:28,720 --> 00:50:31,560 Well, this was great. 643 00:50:31,560 --> 00:50:34,480 Thank you so much for doing this, Constantine. 644 00:50:34,480 --> 00:50:35,480 Thank you so much, Priyanka. 645 00:50:35,480 --> 00:51:02,400 I really appreciate it. 646 00:51:02,400 --> 00:51:14,360 For scale, right, 150 Tesla, okay, is, you know, about a million Gals, which is the typical 647 00:51:14,360 --> 00:51:17,640 magnetic field of like a white dwarf star. 648 00:51:17,640 --> 00:51:27,120 So such fields are not, yeah, they're not, you know, out of this world, so to speak. 649 00:51:27,120 --> 00:51:30,080 Like they happen all the time in astrophysics. 650 00:51:30,080 --> 00:51:36,680 And there's nothing scary, nothing, nothing scary happens when you reach those, those 651 00:51:36,680 --> 00:51:37,680 out. 652 00:51:37,680 --> 00:51:43,280 Like you can elevate a frog pretty well with the strontium magnetic field, but that's about, 653 00:51:43,280 --> 00:51:45,440 you know, that's about the consequence. 654 00:51:45,440 --> 00:52:01,080 So yeah, there's nothing, nothing horrific.