2025-07-31
40 分钟The Economist.
There's nothing quite like the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, in California.
Can I just describe it in a very sort of non-expert way?
We're talking about a spherical object in the middle.
Fed by many sort of tubes and the most pistons and pipes I've ever seen in one place.
Yeah, that's a good description.
So this is the chamber that we put the targets inside.
Mark Herman is a very patient nuclear physicist who agreed to show me around this enormous facility.
Built to simulate the extreme temperatures and pressures that you'd feel
if you unfortunately found yourself at the centre of a nuclear explosion.
If you imagine the inside of a spaceship, that's what NIF looks like.
In fact,
this facility was used as the set for the warp core of the USS Enterprise in the film Star Trek Into Darkness.
And what you see are 24 groups of four beams that are going in.
Mark told me how in the centre of the machine,
192 of the world's most powerful lasers focus their immense energy onto a tiny diamond sphere.
And I mean really, really tiny, the size of a peppercorn.
The sphere is also hollow.
Inside is a mixture of deuterium and tritium, which are heavy isotopes of hydrogen.
The lasers heat up those gases to 100 million degrees Celsius and compress it to billions of times atmospheric pressure.