Where Science Meets Fiction
Merging renewable energy into daily life.
The fuel cartridge for a personal fusion energy cell weighs about eight grams, and most of that is casing. What sits inside is a pinch of hydrogen drawn from ordinary seawater, and it lasts a house a year. The cartridge waits on a utility room shelf next to a spare water filter and a box…
On September 14, 2015, two mirrors at LIGO – each suspended on glass fibers inside a four-kilometer evacuated tube – moved relative to each other by approximately one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. The displacement lasted under a second. It was caused by two black holes that merged 1.3 billion light-years away, releasing in that…
In 1997, a physicist named Steve Lamoreaux placed two metal plates inside a vacuum chamber, separated them by less than a micrometer, and measured the force between them. The plates were uncharged. The space between them was as empty as any space on Earth can be made. The force they felt had no business existing…