- What later technologies and phenomena trace their understanding back to this mass-energy equivalence?
Nuclear Fusion
The joining of light nuclei to release energy.
- How did the discovery of hydrogen's dominance in stars explain how stars generate energy?
- What role does deuterium play as fuel in fusion reactions?
- What is magnetohydrodynamics, and why did Hannes Alfvén's theory of it apply to solar flares and fusion reactor plasma alike?
- What exactly did Pons and Fleischmann claim happened inside their palladium electrode in heavy water?
- Why did announcing the result at a press conference before peer review undermine the claim's credibility?
- What happened when labs on three continents tried to replicate the excess heat Pons and Fleischmann reported?
- Why do the entry's authors describe the episode as not quite fraud despite the claim collapsing under scrutiny?
- What explanations had researchers proposed for crop circles before the hoax was revealed?
- What three separate breakthroughs did John Bockris claim to be pursuing simultaneously?
- What happened to the original 1989 cold fusion claims by Fleischmann and Pons?
- Why did Bockris's colleagues at Texas A&M petition for an investigation into his work?
- How does the National Ignition Facility use 192 laser beams to trigger nuclear fusion in a hydrogen fuel pellet?
- How much energy did the December 2022 fusion reaction release compared to the laser energy that triggered it?
- Why does achieving ignition not yet mean fusion power is net-positive overall?
- What is the Greenwald limit, and why does exceeding it usually destabilize plasma confinement?
- How did China's EAST tokamak sustain plasma densities up to 1.65 times the Greenwald limit without collapsing?
- Why does exceeding the Greenwald limit matter for making fusion power plants economically viable?