full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Michel Laberge: How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion

Unscramble the Blue Letters


Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hteotr, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one bintoillh of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the cneter.

Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a crvue of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the falebd Moore's Law that defined the amuont of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we settrad. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big leasr mhnicae in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more foisun energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good.

Open Cloze


Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets ______, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one _________ of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the ______.

Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a _____ of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the ______ Moore's Law that defined the ______ of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we _______. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big _____ _______ in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more ______ energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good.

Solution


  1. curve
  2. laser
  3. billionth
  4. fusion
  5. hotter
  6. started
  7. center
  8. fabled
  9. amount
  10. machine

Original Text


Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center.

Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a curve of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the fabled Moore's Law that defined the amount of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we started. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big laser machine in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more fusion energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
pretty good 4
liquid metal 4
laser fusion 3
ping pong 3
billion dollars 3
fusion happen 2
pong ball 2
fusion power 2
fusion energy 2
fusion company 2
neutrons hit 2
general fusion 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
ping pong ball 2

Important Words


  1. amount
  2. announced
  3. ball
  4. beam
  5. big
  6. billionth
  7. bit
  8. bunch
  9. called
  10. center
  11. chip
  12. close
  13. curve
  14. defined
  15. donut
  16. dot
  17. energy
  18. europe
  19. european
  20. fabled
  21. facility
  22. fact
  23. fast
  24. fuel
  25. fusion
  26. gain
  27. good
  28. happening
  29. hard
  30. heat
  31. hotter
  32. ignition
  33. jet
  34. joint
  35. lab
  36. laser
  37. lasers
  38. law
  39. machine
  40. making
  41. managed
  42. matter
  43. megawatts
  44. month
  45. national
  46. nif
  47. noise
  48. pellet
  49. people
  50. physicists
  51. ping
  52. pong
  53. power
  54. pretty
  55. produced
  56. put
  57. quick
  58. squashes
  59. squeeze
  60. started
  61. strong
  62. times
  63. tokamak
  64. torus
  65. transistors
  66. true
  67. working
  68. years
  69. zap