Giving Thanks, 2009

Posted by Rezwan on Nov 26, 2009 at 12:10 AM
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This has been a great year for Focus Fusion. This is the year that LPP received an infusion of funding, sufficient to begin their 2 year experiment in fusion.  It’s the year that FoFu 1 was assembled and achieved a pinch.  Technical troubles notwithstanding, the LPP crew have taken brave, bold and thrilling steps towards a fusion future. 

I am thankful for the sense of possibility and adventure welling up as the new year looms before us.  I’m thankful that somebody (LPP!  Great crew!  Thanks guys!) has taken on the fusion challenge.  I’m thankful for the investors that have supported LPP and the donors that have supported FFS.  And I’m thankful for all of you, fellow FFS members and all of your input and enthusiasm over the years, on the website, via email, and in person.  I’m thankful to be part of something like this, in the company of all y’all!

I’m also thankful for this thing I am only just beginning to understand - the force of electricity.

To understand the Dense Plasma Focus, you have to understand plasma.  Plasmas are electrically conductive ionized gas.  Like gas, they have no definite shape or volume, expanding or contracting to fit containers.  Unlike gas, “in the influence of a magnetic field, it may form structures such as filaments, beams and double layers ” - unpredictable, unstable, wildly fascinating.  Plasmas are the most common phase of matter in the universe. All the stars are made of plasma.  The space between the stars is filled with a plasma. 

Plasmas.  Electromagnetic forces.  What is this stuff?  What is electricity?  Something we take for granted, just because we use it all the time.  Some words from David Bodanis in Electric Universe, The Shocking True Story of Electricity: 

What if the very existence of electrical forces stopped?  All the Earth’s oceans would gush upward and evaporate as the electrical bonds between water molecules broke apart.  DNA strands within our body would no longer hold together.  Any air-breathing organism that was still intact would begin to suffocate, for without electrical attraction, the oxygen molecules in air would bounce uselessly off the hemoglobin molecules in blood.

The ground itself would open up and begin to melt as the electrical forces that hold the silicates and other substances of our planet together let go.  Mountains would collapse into the voids left where the continental plates had torn apart.  In the last moments, a few living beings would see the sun itself switch off, as our star’s electrically carried light abruptly stopped and the world’s very last day turned to night.

Why doesn’t any of this happen?  The force of electricity is very powerful, and has been operating nonstop for more than 13 billion years.  But it’s also utterly hidden, crammed deep within all rocks and stars and atoms.  The force is like two Olympian arm-wrestlers, whose struggle is unnoticed because their straining hands barely move.  There are almost always equal amounts of positive and negative electric charge within everything around us - so well balanced that although their effects are everywhere, their existence remains unseen. 

For long eons it remained like this - as galaxies evolved and planets formed, as continents and trees and grasses appeared on Earth.  Occasionally there must have been brief sightings in the past.  Our australopithecine ancestors would have noticed abrupt bursts of lightning, as would early humans.  But as soon as it appeared, this force would quickly have returned to the invisible realm from which it had come.  For most of history, humans simply stumbled around it, unaware.

Thanks to the force itself, and to those who have made “efforts to penetrate this hidden world” - and to the understanding yet to unfold.