Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [38]
The failed Huemul project quickly became an embarrassment for Perón. Richter began to face accusations from Argentina’s legislators, and in December, despite official denials, the Argentine dream of fusion energy was over. Rumors of Richter’s incarceration began to appear in the press, but in truth it was two more years before he was finally arrested.
Perhaps it was naïveté or optimism that drove him; perhaps it was greed. Perhaps it was the desire for power. Whatever the reasons for Richter’s bold claims, he had wasted millions of dollars’ worth of Perón’s money in his pursuit.33 If he had succeeded, Perón’s Argentina would have solved the world’s growing energy crisis overnight. Humanity would have considered Richter its savior.
Instead, Richter found himself accused of fraud, scorned and humiliated. He was just the first casualty of the quest to put the sun in a bottle.
Lyman Spitzer, a physics professor at Princeton University, was about to leave for a ski trip to Aspen in March 1951 when the papers broke the story about Richter’s fusion reactor. Spitzer was instantly incredulous, but at the same time he was intrigued. On the ski slopes, he wondered just how to make a device that could hold a miniature sun. By the end of his sojourn, Spitzer was well on his way to designing one. Instead of using nuclear weapons to contain fusing hydrogen, Spitzer would exploit the odd properties of extremely hot matter, properties of what physicists call a plasma.
Heating an object changes the way it behaves. A frozen hunk of water is solid ice. Put it on a table and it will retain its shape. Heat it a bit and the ice changes, melting into a liquid. Though liquid water still has a definite volume, it no longer has a fixed form; it will change its shape to fit whatever container you put it in. Heat it some more and the fluid changes again. The water boils into a gas: steam. As a gas, the formless cloud no longer even has a definite volume. A gas expands or contracts, depending on the pressure and temperature of its surroundings. As matter gets hotter and hotter—more and more energetic—its atoms’ random dancing speeds up and it eventually changes from solid to liquid to gas. This much scientists knew for centuries. Only at the end of the 1800s did physicists begin to realize that extremely hot gases changed their properties yet again. The reason has to do with the composite nature of the atom.
GAS VERSUS PLASMA: In a gas (left), every electron is stuck to an atom. In a plasma (right), the electrons roam free, attracted by nuclei, but not attached to any single nucleus.
As scientists realized at the beginning of the twentieth century, atoms are not quite as uncuttable as their name would imply. Protons and neutrons sit in the center of the atom, making up a small, dense, heavy, positively charged nucleus. Surrounding the nucleus are light, negatively charged electrons. Ordinarily, electrons are bound to a nucleus; the opposite charges of the protons and electrons attract each other, so the electrons cannot easily shake free. In fact, the nucleus and the electrons attract each other so strongly that the whole mess behaves very much like a single object.
Yet this isn’t always the case. Raise the temperature and the atoms start moving faster and faster. There’s a lot of energy about, and some of that energy winds up exciting the electrons. If the temperature is hot enough, the electrons get so excited, so pumped full of energy, that they can escape the bonds of their nuclei, and the atom loses