Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [36]
Soon, scientists the world over were squabbling, alternately claiming triumphs and debunking them. The Huemul drama was the first act in the quest to create a tiny, controllable fusion reaction. But it was far from the last.
At first glance, it seems impossible to make a bottle sturdy enough to contain a burning sun. What kind of material is strong enough to hold a fusion reaction? To get even the most fusion-friendly atoms to stick to one another, they have to slam together hard enough to overcome their mutual electric repulsion, so the atoms have to be extraordinarily hot—tens or hundreds of million degrees Celsius.32 But matter at such high temperatures is very hard to contain. It is hotter than anything on Earth, far hotter than the melting point of steel. Even a diamond vessel would instantly evaporate in temperatures that extreme. Million-degree substances act almost like universal solvents, eating through whatever substance you put them in. Nothing on Earth would be able to contain such hot matter, at least not without some extraordinarily clever tricks.
Ronald Richter did not have the credentials one would expect of someone who could come up with such a clever trick. He didn’t have a terribly strong scientific background. As a student, he apparently had tried to study (nonexistent) “delta rays” coming from the earth, but his proposal was rejected by his professors. His adviser merely remembered him as a “so-so” student. He hadn’t published any scientific papers and had scant experience in the laboratory. But when Perón suddenly announced that Richter had created a sun in a bottle, he caught the world’s attention.
In the days after Perón’s announcement in March 1951, Richter provided a few more details about his reactor, which he called the “thermotron.” He described the device as a “solar reactor furnace” and said the reactor worked by fusing deuterium with lithium—a light metal whose atoms have three protons and three or so neutrons—at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This was far short of the tens of millions of degrees that fusion scientists thought were required to initiate such a reaction. Richter also said that the reactions in the thermotron created little explosions, micro-fusion-bombs, which, however, were well-contained by large stone walls that surrounded the furnace. For most scientists, this announcement only increased their skepticism. But for others, Richter’s work began to seem plausible, and they started jockeying to share in the credit for the discovery.
On April 1, the New York Times announced that a French physicist supported Richter’s claims. The physicist was asserting that, a few months prior, he had performed experiments whose results bore a “striking similarity” to what the Argentine scientist was seeing. In the same issue, the Times’s science editor, Waldemar Kaempffert, wrote that “Richter admits that his process is not new,” and the journalist listed some of his intellectual forebears: the Britons John Cockcroft and Robert Atkinson; the German Fritz Houtermans; the Russian émigré George Gamow; and, of course, Edward Teller. Kaempffert conceded that Richter might have made a breakthrough, but he rejected Perón’s comment that everyone else was on the wrong track. “American and European scientists are fully aware of the work of Atkinson, Houtermans, Gamow, and Teller,” he sniffed. If Richter had made a breakthrough, it was not Argentina’s alone. It was due, in part, to the work of American, British, and German physicists.
Later that month, Perón pinned the