# The Physics Behind Fusion’s Biggest Problem (Season Finale) (EP. 20)

An episode of [From First Principles](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1830375095), 23 Dec 2025, 1 h 18 min.

Audio: https://episode.flightcast.com/wnq5ycezimc145g5mc94spv0.mp3

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this Season Finale closes out Season 1 with a deep dive into the physics behind fusion’s biggest bottleneck: fast magnetic reconnection. We unpack why classic models predicted reconnection should be slow, why nature (and tokamaks) disagree, and how modern “plasmoid” reconnection helps explain solar flares, plasma instabilities, and the real engineering challenges fusion reactors face. Then we run a full Season 1 recap — our favorite episodes, biggest scientific moments, and the corrections and lessons we’re taking into Season 2. Summary • Fusion’s biggest problem — magnetic reconnection, why the Sweet–Parker model breaks down at scale, and how plasmoid instability enables fast reconnection. • From the Sun to tokamaks — how reconnection drives solar flares, space weather, and plasma confinement limits in fusion devices. • Season 1 leaderboard — our top episodes and the breakthroughs that stuck: astronomy, biology, AI, quantum, and the history of science. • Corrections + what’s next — what we fixed, what we learned, and how Season 2 evolves the format.

## Transcript

[0:00] Hello, hola, guten tag, and konnichiwaagwan internet.
[0:04] This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Chowdhury.
[0:14] We are in our recap episode for 2025, episode 20.
[0:21] It's been an incredible year.
[0:22] How are you, my friend?
[0:24] The season finale.
[0:25] Season finale.
[0:26] Season one.
[0:27] Yeah.
[0:27] There will be no cliffhangers on this episode.
[0:30] Yeah.
[0:31] But we are going to do a great...
[0:34] recap of our top five each of us gonna have our top five episodes or stories rather of the year and we'll do one interesting thing at the beginning but i want to just quickly i mean we started this in july yeah end of june and i just can't believe how much people love science
[0:58] Yeah, it's been like really nice seeing the amount of support that we've been getting, the amount of traction that we've been getting on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube,
[1:09] Spotify, Apple.
[1:11] I mean, on Spotify, we were making the charts according to our creator.
[1:15] Recapped.
[1:16] Yeah.
[1:16] So this is an important note.
[1:17] Shout out to everyone who's watched us on video or listened to us on Spotify because we got a 2025 Instant Hit Award, which means we were one of the few shows this year where
[1:33] On Spotify, that obviously was an instant hit.
[1:37] Yeah, yeah.
[1:37] Which is a huge deal.
[1:38] And we're in the top 2% of comments, top 2% of shares.
[1:43] It's great.
[1:44] It's just really incredible.
[1:45] It all comes from the audience, and we're extremely grateful for that.
[1:50] You all are what enable us to continue to do this.
[1:52] What I will say is, if you haven't already, follow From First Principles on YouTube.
[1:59] Hit that subscribe button.
[2:01] Like some stuff.
[2:02] The algorithms that the billionaires control are what allow us to get our science content to more people.
[2:10] We don't make the rules.
[2:11] Don't hate the play.
[2:12] I hate the game.
[2:13] Yeah.
[2:13] So I don't like asking for the subscribe button, but YouTube is huge.
[2:19] And it's where we've been struggling to get as much reach as we see on Instagram.
[2:24] Exactly.
[2:25] And other platforms.
[2:25] So if you do have a YouTube and you want to watch it there, that would be super, super helpful.
[2:30] But I was really surprised that Instagram has been our most popular platform.
[2:35] Yeah, that one's crazy.
[2:36] We're reaching almost 60K right now.
[2:39] Yes.
[2:39] As of the recording of this episode.
[2:41] We're going to have one of our story videos is going to hit a million in the next.
[2:46] By the time this episode comes out.
[2:47] Yeah.
[2:48] The story about the whales is going to be over a million.
[2:51] That'll be our first video.
[2:53] Anywhere.
[2:53] Yeah.
[2:54] That would be great.
[2:55] Over a million views.
[2:56] So we're going to go ahead and get started with the episode shortly.
[3:00] But before we get into our recap, we're going to start with some unfortunate news that just happened.
[3:06] Yeah.
[3:06] I think literally yesterday.
[3:08] Yeah.
[3:08] um the um the unfortunate passing of professor uh nuno loreiro who was the director of the mit plasma science infusion center yeah uh since 2024 there's also just a giant in plasma physics generally yeah uh really bizarre it's been a really weird week for yeah but the brown university issue this one and this was also a result of gun violence yeah
[3:34] Right.
[3:34] It's just insane.
[3:36] Right.
[3:37] Yeah.
[3:37] And so we will start with a brief retrospective on Nuno, and then we'll get into our recap.
[3:43] And as always, we're going to be focused on the science.
[3:46] Yeah.
[3:47] Because this is From First Principles.
[4:06] So, Professor Nuno F.G. Lurero...
[4:12] He recently died, as recently as yesterday, according to the taping of this episode.
[4:17] He was the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
[4:21] Very unfortunate.
[4:22] The entire community, the scientific community in Cambridge is reeling from this loss.
[4:27] Yeah.
[4:28] And I thought the best way that we can pay homage to a scientist like that is just to focus on his scientific career and some of the great seminal work that he has done in the field of plasma physics.
[4:42] Right.
[4:43] Um, I can't comment too much on what happened other than really this guy was an incredible scientist and incredible thinker.
[4:52] And apart from even a science, um, an incredible educator and someone that sort of cultivated students and the community to do science.
[5:04] So he seemed like a really incredible guy.
[5:07] Um,
[5:08] He really revolutionized our understanding of plasma physics, specifically this problem of magnetic reconnection, which is what we're going to go over.
[5:17] We're going to go over his seminal paper, the one that made him famous.
[5:21] And then we're going to go over the work that he was doing currently before his untimely death.
[5:26] Okay?
[5:27] And the focus is going to be on that seminal paper and then what he's been doing since recently.
[5:33] Yeah.
[5:33] Yep.
[5:34] Yep.
[5:34] He's been doing a lot, but we're going to focus on really just two aspects.
[5:37] Okay.
[5:37] Okay?
[5:39] So, it's going to be a deep dive into plasma physics, which I'm pretty excited about.
[5:44] Look, you know, we love the deep dives.
[5:46] The comments have told us.
[5:49] Yeah, they like the deep dives.
[5:50] And it's going to get technical, but I'm going to walk you through it, okay?
[5:54] Okay.
[5:54] And hopefully we can bring everyone along.
[5:57] So, plasma physics.
[5:58] Yes.
[5:58] Plasma is like...
[6:01] more than 90% of the observable universe, the stuff that gives off light.
[6:05] Okay.
[6:06] Not on earth.
[6:07] On earth, most of the stuff is not plasma, but plasma is effectively, when you get so high temperature and so high energy that the electrons leave the atoms.
[6:17] Right.
[6:17] Okay.
[6:18] You're at such an energy scale where it's just, it's fine if the electrons just go out on their own and you get this kind of ionized gas where, right.
[6:28] The gas itself is charged, and there's no neutral atoms anymore.
[6:32] Okay?
[6:33] That's the stuff that's inside the sun.
[6:35] That's the stuff that's in the interstellar medium.
[6:39] And again, more than 90% of the visible universe is plasma.
[6:43] When we look out into the night sky, we're seeing stars.
[6:46] Most of that stuff is plasma.
[6:49] Plasma.
[6:49] Okay?
[6:50] When we look at the sun, most of that stuff is plasma.
[6:53] Okay?
[6:59] and electromagnetic fields.
[7:02] This is what's very interesting about plasma physics, is the mathematics becomes immediately non-trivial.
[7:12] Okay?
[7:12] It's like extremely hard.
[7:13] Because fluids by itself...
[7:16] is a very hard thing.
[7:17] Which we've discussed, for example, just like simulating fluid dynamics is extremely difficult.
[7:21] It's extremely difficult.
[7:22] Like the Navier-Stokes equation with neutral atoms is a millennium problem.
[7:29] It's one of those seven problems, well now six, that have been unsolved that you get a million dollars if you solve it, which is do the Navier-Stokes equations have an analytic solution for any given geometry?
[7:41] Okay?
[7:41] Nobody knows.
[7:43] We don't know.
[7:43] We don't know.
[7:44] But that's for neutral atoms.
[7:46] Now imagine a fluid where you don't have to just worry about the particles bumping into each other and viscosity and all this stuff.
[7:54] You also have to worry about the fact that these particles have charge.
[7:57] And so they're creating electric fields because any charged particle creates electric fields.
[8:02] But also they're moving.
[8:03] So that's creating magnetic fields.
[8:05] And then those magnetic fields are going to affect the other charged particles around, which are going to affect the other charged particles around.
[8:11] So you have this entirely nonlinear process, right, that's happening.
[8:15] And it's incredibly difficult.
[8:16] This is why it's very hard to make fusion happen.
[8:20] Fission is very easy.
[8:22] We have fission reactors.
[8:23] Yes.
[8:23] All of the nuclear power that we think about is from fission, which is the splitting of atoms.
[8:28] Yes.
[8:28] That's a nuclear energy that we're harnessing to create electricity.
[8:32] Yes.
[8:33] The holy grail.
[8:35] would be fusion, right?
[8:36] Fusion power, because then we could just use hydrogen instead of trying to find like uranium and all this other crazy rare earth stuff.
[8:43] Hydrogen is just in water.
[8:45] We just find hydrogen.
[8:46] We could purify deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen.
[8:50] We'd combine them together and basically replicate the sun
[8:54] You know, this is the dream.
[8:55] Yeah, right.
[8:55] We replicate the sun in a building, and that just feeds us electricity.
[8:59] We're trying to replicate the sun locally.
[9:01] Yeah, exactly.
[9:02] I mean, it would be dope.
[9:04] It would be what Dr. Octopus wanted to do.
[9:06] Before he went crazy.
[9:08] Yes.
[9:08] In Spider-Man 2?
[9:10] Spider-Man 2?
[9:11] Spider-Man 2, right?
[9:12] Great movie.
[9:12] Yeah, it's a great movie.
[9:14] Those were the original, right?
[9:15] Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[9:17] And this interaction between the electric fields and the fluids is what is described by magnetohydrodynamics, okay?
[9:25] Magneto, because there's magnetism involved, the fact that charged particles are moving around, they create a magnetic field.
[9:33] And hydrodynamics, because it's a fluid of charged particles, right?
[9:37] So you're combining...
[9:39] the Maxwell's equations with the Navier-Stokes equations in some sense to create this really complicated physics.
[9:48] There are multiple layers of dynamic things happening at the same time.
[9:56] Yeah.
[9:57] And to be able to have an understanding, you need to be able to model all those dynamic layers and how they change things.
[10:03] Over time.
[10:04] Yeah, and each little thing is affecting the other thing, right?
[10:08] So you can't really make... A lot of the times in physics, we like to be like, in this regime, we don't have to worry about this.
[10:15] In this regime, we don't have to worry about this.
[10:17] Well, in plasma, you got to worry about everything.
[10:19] Right.
[10:19] Right?
[10:20] And so it's incredibly difficult to make sense of what is going on, which is why the problem of fusion containment in these reactors is so hard.
[10:29] Makes sense.
[10:30] Okay?
[10:30] And the governing equation for the magnetic field in a plasma...
[10:33] is this which is a pretty a pretty daunting equation okay on the left hand side you have db dt which is the time change how how the magnetic field changes with time and then you've got two terms you've got del cross v cross b which is that's that's what we would call the advection term okay it's basically velocity
[10:57] Velocity perpendicular with magnetic field is going to give you some kind of force.
[11:02] And then how that force curls around is going to tell you how the magnetic field.
[11:07] So there's like all these vectors that are going in, right?
[11:11] And then, but at the end of the day, that magnetic field is actually going backwards.
[11:16] parallel with the velocity of those particles because there's two cross-products.
[11:21] This is something that people would, vector calculus knowledge would know, right?
[11:25] If you have two cross-products, then actually you're just going in the same direction.
[11:30] And then the second term there, nu over mu naught,
[11:32] Del squared B, that looks like a heat equation.
[11:35] Okay?
[11:36] And that is your diffusion term.
[11:38] Basically, you know, if you have a hot, if you have a metal rod and you heat up one part of the metal rod, the heat is going to diffuse across that metal rod.
[11:47] Right?
[11:47] And the magnetic field in these plasmas does the same thing.
[11:51] If you've got a lot of magnetic field here, it's going to sort of diffuse and the magnetic field lines are going to diffuse out.
[11:56] So the propagation of the magnetic field kind of looks similar to the propagation of heat.
[12:01] Of heat.
[12:02] From a mathematical perspective.
[12:03] From a mathematical perspective.
[12:04] But there's those two terms, right?
[12:06] There's the diffusion term, which is that heat kind of term.
[12:09] Yes.
[12:09] And then there's the advection term, which is the magnetic field moving in line with the charged particles.
[12:17] Because you've got that double cross product.
[12:20] So...
[12:22] When a plasma is a perfect conductor, in that equation, there was this new, right?
[12:26] Which is the conductivity.
[12:30] If a plasma is perfect, then the conductivity is just like amazing.
[12:36] There's no resistance.
[12:37] Yeah.
[12:38] Okay?
[12:38] And in that case, we don't have to worry about that second term.
[12:43] The heat-looking thing.
[12:44] Yeah.
[12:44] The heat-looking thing is because it's just going to like go.
[12:47] Go.
[12:47] Yeah.
[12:47] Right?
[12:47] Yeah.
[12:48] So we don't have to worry about that.
[12:49] And then we get something called the frozen influx theorem.
[12:53] Basically what this means is that the magnetic field lines don't actually diffuse out.
[12:58] They get locked in place with these plasma particles.
[13:02] So on the left you see straight lines.
[13:04] And then as the plasma particles move around, the magnetic field lines move around with them.
[13:09] Got it.
[13:10] You know?
[13:10] Yes.
[13:12] The field lines don't break.
[13:13] They don't cross.
[13:15] They don't change their connectivity.
[13:17] And in some sense, topologically, they're preserving this mathematics across those scales.
[13:24] Got it.
[13:25] Okay?
[13:25] So that would be really great if that's what plasma did.
[13:29] Right.
[13:29] And we didn't have to worry about one of the terms in the equation.
[13:32] It's still difficult.
[13:33] Yeah.
[13:33] But, you know, at least there's...
[13:34] It's incrementally less difficult.
[13:36] Yeah, it's incrementally less difficult, right?
[13:38] Like, at least the flux is frozen into the plasma, right?
[13:41] Okay.
[13:42] So that's that frozen flux theorem.
[13:44] Yeah.
[13:45] As a means by which to try to calculate and understand magnetohydrodynamics.
[13:52] Yes, yes.
[13:53] It would be like a great approximation...
[13:56] If we could do it.
[13:57] Not dissimilar to the approximation we do with the Stokes equation.
[14:01] Yeah.
[14:01] Like in terms of we can't really model.
[14:04] Exactly.
[14:05] And so we need some kind of approximation.
[14:07] Yes, yeah.
[14:08] So maybe at like certain geometries we can like, you know, and obviously it works.
[14:13] Yes.
[14:14] Right?
[14:14] Like Formula One teams use the Navier-Stokes equation to figure out
[14:19] how their car is going to do on a certain track, right?
[14:23] So obviously it works, but then you get to really high magnetic fields, like near the sun or inside of a Takamak.
[14:30] Yeah.
[14:30] And then you're like, it doesn't quite work.
[14:32] It doesn't quite work.
[14:33] I will.
[14:34] What's funny, the two videos, two movies I watched on my flight back from North Carolina.
[14:39] Yeah.
[14:39] Two days ago was the F1 movie, which he had recommended.
[14:43] Yeah.
[14:43] Quite good.
[14:44] We could have done without the love story, but that's another thing.
[14:46] Yeah.
[14:47] And then Tenet, which talked about Tokamaks and nuclear, because they're basically, long story short.
[14:54] I haven't seen that one.
[14:55] There was a nuclear nexus.
[14:57] So it's funny that both things are now being applied here to this one.
[15:01] Yeah.
[15:03] So...
[15:04] Real plasmas, right?
[15:06] We've got finite resistivity because obviously like zero resistivity is not a thing.
[15:11] It's not a thing.
[15:11] Right?
[15:11] Unless you're a superconductor.
[15:12] But at this heat, you're not going to be a superconductor.
[15:18] So the resistivity means that this magnetic field, that second term, you're going to have this diffusion of the magnetic field, right?
[15:25] And that violation of the ideal magnetohydrodynamics is no longer something that we're going to do.
[15:30] And what you end up getting is something called current sheets.
[15:34] Because wherever you have these magnetic fields and they crisscross and you go from, let's say, magnetic field going one way to magnetic field going the other way, you're going to get these current sheets.
[15:43] Over here, what you're seeing is the current sheets around the sun.
[15:48] So in the center there, that's the sun.
[15:50] And then you can see the orbits of the inner planets and the orbit of Jupiter on the outside there.
[15:54] Yes.
[15:55] That sheet, it looks kind of like a flamingo dancer when they twirl, right?
[16:01] And the skirt moves around in a certain way.
[16:03] Yes.
[16:03] That sheet is the border between where the magnetic field points towards the sun and where the magnetic field points away from the sun.
[16:11] Interesting.
[16:11] Okay.
[16:12] Okay?
[16:12] Because imagine, if you have a magnetic field going this way and a magnetic field going this way, you got to pass through zero.
[16:18] Yes.
[16:18] Right?
[16:19] Because you got to do this.
[16:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[16:21] And if it's in a small enough space, you have a very high gradient.
[16:25] You have a very high change in the magnetic field.
[16:27] And so the current is going to sort of collapse in that plane.
[16:32] Okay.
[16:33] Right?
[16:33] And so you get these current sheets.
[16:34] This is just a direct consequence of Maxwell's equations.
[16:37] Got it.
[16:38] Okay?
[16:38] So this is, again, just fundamental electrodynamics.
[16:41] So that's the heliocentric current sheet.
[16:43] Okay.
[16:44] you know at where the earth is that current sheet is like very small yeah right very small in magnitude unless you get like these mag massive coronal mass ejections and then and then it destroys our electricity every time i log on onto twitter aka x yeah someone is oh the the the this is the one it's happening this is the one that's gonna wipe everything out yeah yeah
[17:07] Yeah, exactly.
[17:08] Well, it never has.
[17:09] I mean, no, we've had some pretty bad ones, actually.
[17:12] Yeah, and look, let's knock on wood, because it's a thing.
[17:15] It is a thing.
[17:15] It's a thing.
[17:16] So with this current sheet, right, what's happening is that diffusive term is competing with that heat convective term, right?
[17:25] Yeah.
[17:26] What ends up happening is, in the mathematics, what you really care about is the ratio between these two competing forces.
[17:34] Which is the first part of that equation with the double cross.
[17:37] Yeah.
[17:37] And then the thing that looked like the heat equation.
[17:40] Yes, exactly.
[17:41] And what you want to do is look at the ratio between these two, okay?
[17:44] Okay.
[17:45] This is called a Lundquist number.
[17:47] Okay.
[17:47] Okay?
[17:48] And...
[17:49] At low Lundquist number, you're going to get a place where resistivity dominates.
[17:55] And at high Lundquist number, you get that frozen in.
[17:57] You only care about that first term.
[17:59] And these are the different typical Lundquist numbers.
[18:02] So for lab plasmas or something inside of Tokamak, you're looking at 10 to the 3 to 10 to the 10.
[18:08] But something like the solar corona, where you have massive scales...
[18:11] You're looking at like 10 to the 12, 10 to the 14, right?
[18:14] So you have this massive scale difference that you want your physics to work at.
[18:19] Right.
[18:19] And this is always tough.
[18:20] Right.
[18:21] I get you.
[18:22] Okay.
[18:23] The point is the map that we're trying to fill in is really large.
[18:28] It's really large.
[18:29] You're going from 10 to the 3 to 10 to the 13.
[18:32] 10 orders of magnitude.
[18:34] Right?
[18:35] You're going 10 orders of magnitude, and you're trying to say that the same physics works for everything.
[18:40] Right.
[18:40] And the point is that obviously that's not true.
[18:42] Obviously that's not the case.
[18:43] Especially if you watched our hypersonics episode where we talked about how supersonic and hypersonic
[18:51] which is much smaller scales, it doesn't work.
[18:55] Because then you gotta worry about random stuff.
[18:59] And that's what ends up happening here.
[19:01] So before Nuno came along, before he came along,
[19:08] there was something called a Sweet Parker model.
[19:11] This was in the late 1950s.
[19:13] And what they wanted to do was model how these current sheets work.
[19:17] And what ended up happening was, if you've got a magnetic field going in one direction and a magnetic field going in the other direction, you've got this massive magnetic field gradient.
[19:26] What's going to end up happening is, there's going to be current that goes into that interface.
[19:31] And then it's going to get shot out because of the continuity equation.
[19:35] Continuity equation being...
[19:36] Stuff that comes in needs to go out, right?
[19:39] And so if the stuff is coming in in this direction, it needs to shoot out in that direction, right?
[19:44] And the idea was that this was a kind of way of figuring out how plasma works at all of the scales.
[19:55] It was something that they made a bunch of assumptions, but they created an analytic solution of it in the late 1950s.
[20:03] And that reconnection of the magnetic field going in one direction and the other direction, the lines are going to crisscross, and they could actually calculate a timescale.
[20:13] That that would happen.
[20:15] Okay.
[20:15] So now we've got an observable.
[20:17] You've done a theory, but a theory is only good as long as you've got an observable.
[20:21] Because then you can go into experiments, create experimental designs that then would show that that theory is reproducible.
[20:29] Exactly.
[20:30] In an observable context.
[20:31] Exactly, right?
[20:32] And so we've got these observables, right?
[20:35] And these sheets, these Sweet Parker sheets, what they're saying is, you know, at something like the sun, near the sun, where you've got a magnetic field line going in one direction and then it comes back in the other direction, so you do have these crisscrosses.
[20:48] I can see that happening.
[20:50] Yes.
[20:50] Those sheets are happening at a certain Lundquist number.
[20:55] And so I can calculate how long it would take for that
[20:59] Sheet to stay alive in some sense.
[21:03] Okay.
[21:04] And what they calculate is it should stay alive for a few months.
[21:08] Okay.
[21:08] Maybe a few years.
[21:09] Okay.
[21:10] That is very wrong.
[21:14] Okay.
[21:15] Observations show that it doesn't take months or years.
[21:19] It takes hours or hours.
[21:21] Minutes for a solar flare.
[21:23] In Talkamax, it'll take milliseconds.
[21:25] I was going to say, because at a solar flare scale.
[21:27] Solar flare, we've seen those things, right?
[21:28] We can observe them now with our solar telescopes.
[21:31] And you can just see the solar flare forming.
[21:33] And within hours and minutes, it'll just shoot out.
[21:36] Which is incredible because that means anything we're doing locally on the planet is like the Tokamak system for like nuclear power production.
[21:43] Yeah.
[21:43] Where we're trying to concentrate it into such a small volume.
[21:47] Means it's going to be even faster.
[21:49] The time scale is faster.
[21:50] Right.
[21:50] And the time scale on Tokamaks is something like milliseconds.
[21:53] Right.
[21:54] That makes sense.
[21:54] That makes sense.
[21:55] So now we've got, you said it was going to be months to years.
[21:59] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[22:01] And we're seeing hours to minutes.
[22:03] So we're at orders of magnitude off.
[22:05] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[22:05] It's not even a factor of two.
[22:07] It's a factor of like 10 to the six.
[22:09] Right, right, right.
[22:09] Right.
[22:10] There's something really wrong.
[22:12] The Sweet Parker model is not correct.
[22:14] Is not correct.
[22:16] Right.
[22:17] And I have to say, Parker there...
[22:20] He's a great plasma physicist.
[22:21] He's the guy who actually showed that the solar atmosphere is unstable and we should have something like the solar wind.
[22:27] So he literally predicted the solar wind from first principles.
[22:31] Right?
[22:32] So...
[22:33] All the credit to him.
[22:34] Kudos.
[22:34] This guy was someone who could have won the Nobel Prize had he lived long enough, right?
[22:39] Fair.
[22:39] But, you know, you win some, you lose some.
[22:42] Look, that's the next life.
[22:44] Yeah, yeah.
[22:44] And then the next life.
[22:45] Exactly.
[22:45] So this is where our hero, Nuno Luriero, comes in.
[22:52] Yes.
[22:52] Okay?
[22:53] He is in Princeton Plasma Physics Lab at the time.
[22:57] Go Tigers.
[22:58] Yeah.
[22:58] I was waiting for that.
[23:00] So he's at Princeton Plaza Physics at the time.
[23:02] He actually did his earlier training at UCL.
[23:05] Yes.
[23:06] And what he notices is that this doesn't work, guys.
[23:10] And it was a known problem for like 50 years.
[23:13] Okay.
[23:13] Right?
[23:13] But in 2005, he actually showed that these current sheets are violently unstable.
[23:19] And this is a slide that I got from one of his talks.
[23:24] Okay.
[23:24] Okay.
[23:24] Where in the beginning, he's like, does the sweet Parker Mogadal work?
[23:28] Sure.
[23:28] For this regime.
[23:29] And then he's like, maybe it doesn't.
[23:32] This guy was cheeky, dude.
[23:34] Yeah, it's kind of funny, right?
[23:35] So this is in 2005.
[23:37] He's doing numerical simulations to show exactly what would happen.
[23:41] And notice that there's this bubble that's forming.
[23:44] On the graphic that's to the right of these three examples where it says maybe it doesn't.
[23:48] Yeah, maybe it doesn't.
[23:49] And there's a sheet.
[23:51] And as the sheet is getting sort of stretched, there's a bubble that's forming.
[23:55] Okay.
[23:55] That is going to be the main...
[23:58] contribution that he makes in 2007 with a paper in the physics of plasmas with Laurario Shekhochhin and Cowley.
[24:10] Yes.
[24:10] This is the paper that makes him famous.
[24:12] Okay.
[24:12] Okay.
[24:12] This is the one that has the most citations.
[24:14] It's got like 800 citations, which in plasma physics is like unreal.
[24:19] Instability of current sheets and formation of plasmoid chains.
[24:22] Yeah, this is the...
[24:23] So he was at PPL at the time, Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.
[24:27] Yes.
[24:28] PPPL at the time.
[24:29] And this is the one that puts him on the map of plasma physics.
[24:34] Because he solves this 50-year-old problem.
[24:36] Problem.
[24:37] Not bad.
[24:38] Not bad.
[24:39] Not bad.
[24:39] Not bad.
[24:40] And for those who might not know, a lot of people tried to solve this problem.
[24:46] Yes, yes, yes.
[24:48] This was like a known problem.
[24:50] And he does it using just like good old-fashioned theoretical physics, analytical theory.
[24:56] And it's like, it's a technique that we've actually learned in grad school.
[25:01] But he applies it to this in a very ingenious way.
[25:03] And I don't, I'm not going to go into the...
[25:06] nitty-gritty detail, but effectively what he's doing is this, okay?
[25:10] He says, okay, I've got a thin current sheet, right?
[25:12] I've got this thin current sheet, and what's happening is...
[25:17] When I turn up the length scale of this guy and when I turn up the magnetic field of this guy, what's going to happen is that current sheet, which is the interface between the magnetic field going this way and this way.
[25:28] I want to be able to reconnect it.
[25:30] And the problem is that that reconnection is happening way faster than I want it to.
[25:34] Right, right, right.
[25:36] What he shows is the aspect ratio of that current sheet is...
[25:41] gets really small.
[25:43] Okay.
[25:43] Okay.
[25:43] At really high magnetic fields, the width of this guy is really small compared to the length of this guy.
[25:50] Okay.
[25:50] Okay.
[25:51] Okay.
[25:51] And then what he says is...
[25:52] Meaning it's like a twizzler.
[25:54] Yeah.
[25:54] Yeah.
[25:55] Right.
[25:55] And I'm like stretching it.
[25:57] I'm stretching it.
[25:58] Okay.
[25:58] Okay.
[25:58] It's a twizzler and I'm stretching it.
[26:00] Okay.
[26:00] Okay.
[26:00] Yeah.
[26:01] Yeah.
[26:01] And then what he does is he does something called perturbation.
[26:05] Yes.
[26:05] Which is, he says, okay, suppose I have this Twizzler and there's a tiny little bump.
[26:09] Yeah.
[26:09] Tiny little instability for whatever reason.
[26:11] Sure.
[26:12] Yeah.
[26:12] Okay.
[26:12] Can I trace what happens to that instability?
[26:15] Okay.
[26:16] If that instability goes down, if there's a restorative force.
[26:20] Yeah.
[26:20] Yeah.
[26:21] Right.
[26:21] Then that instability is going to go up and down and it's going to become a kind of like a harmonic oscillator.
[26:25] This is a very useful tool in graduate school physics is to understand perturbations and how those perturbations grow with time.
[26:33] Yep.
[26:34] Yep.
[26:34] But if there's an instability, then that tiny little fluctuation is going to magnify and create some kind of bigger instability, which will create a bigger instability.
[26:44] For laymen who might have seen the Aston Kutcher movie, it sounds a lot like the butterfly effect.
[26:49] Exactly.
[26:50] Right?
[26:50] Are we in this sort of chaotic regime where it's going to break free and start doing some random stuff?
[26:56] Right.
[26:57] Right.
[26:57] Okay.
[26:58] And what ends up happening is he shows that when you have this long sheet of stuff.
[27:02] Yes.
[27:02] Yes.
[27:03] It breaks into chains of smaller little plasmoids, is what he calls it.
[27:09] Okay.
[27:09] Okay?
[27:09] And they're these secondary sheets.
[27:11] And we've got a photo from exactly that, which is you've got this rubber band that you're stretching, right?
[27:18] Yes.
[27:19] And as you stretch that Twizzler, as you were saying, that Twizzler, as you stretch it, it's going to create little beads on it.
[27:25] To maintain its structure in some sense.
[27:29] Okay.
[27:29] Yes.
[27:30] Okay?
[27:30] Yes.
[27:30] And all of that stuff means that the timescale is going to be reduced by orders of magnitude.
[27:36] Okay.
[27:36] Got it.
[27:36] Right?
[27:37] Because now you're making the system smaller in some sense.
[27:40] Yes.
[27:40] Yes.
[27:41] Right?
[27:42] Like the system used to be this massive thing with a really large B field and a really large length scale.
[27:47] Now you're collapsing it into smaller and smaller length scales.
[27:51] So in this image, what we're seeing is at the top, there is, again, a long Twizzler, quote, unquote, and this example with small beads throughout it at varying sizes.
[28:02] And then as we go down, we see that those perturbations actually shorten the length of what we're seeing.
[28:08] And then those beads become more concentrated and larger, almost in their amplitude, right?
[28:15] Yeah.
[28:15] Right, because we're basically moving it from –
[28:19] like this big, a system that's this big to becoming smaller and smaller, right?
[28:23] Yes.
[28:23] And so now we're making like smaller and smaller systems with smaller Lundquist numbers.
[28:28] Yes, got it.
[28:28] Right?
[28:29] And now what he effectively showed is that the scaling that happens at this physics is no longer like one over the square root of the Lundquist number, but instead like
[28:40] the number to the power of something so it's not like a diminishing it's actually a growing thing right okay and this was just from first principles it's a beautiful paper yeah right that that he showed this um and so now he he can he can resolve that giant discrepancy yeah between time scales that we see right right right
[28:59] Because actually the thing that we're worried about, this is no longer a stable thing.
[29:03] As we make this thing bigger, it's going to sort of collapse into smaller things.
[29:07] And as those smaller things become bigger, it's going to collapse into even smaller things.
[29:12] It's like this weird fractally kind of self-similar thing where like the more you stretch, the smaller the beads become.
[29:18] And then you're going to make more beads the more you stretch.
[29:22] And you have this like fractally self-similar effect.
[29:26] Yes.
[29:26] That's happening.
[29:27] Yes.
[29:27] And this explains a bunch of stuff that we've noticed.
[29:30] Like that insight in and of itself.
[29:33] Yeah.
[29:33] Right.
[29:34] And the rigorous way in which he showed it in that 2007 paper.
[29:39] Right.
[29:39] It was very rigorous because he realized that one of the assumptions...
[29:42] that Sweet and Parker had made is no longer true, right?
[29:45] If I actually put in the dependence...
[29:47] He realized that there's this one term in the equation that they assume to be constant.
[29:52] But that term is actually dependent on the number itself, right?
[29:55] And when I put that in and I go through this perturbation analysis...
[30:00] Doesn't quite work.
[30:01] So a previously static variable was proven to be dynamic.
[30:05] Yes.
[30:05] And obviously, because it was not static but was dynamic, that was the key.
[30:10] It was a key unlock to then actually understanding the effects that we're trying to model.
[30:14] Yes, exactly.
[30:14] And it mattered for these big scales.
[30:16] Right.
[30:17] Right.
[30:18] similar to our hypersonics thing.
[30:19] It's like it didn't matter when you were at small scale, and so you could ignore it.
[30:23] But as soon as you start to go to larger scales, things that we label as constants for simplicity in order to be able to just keep the math simple, no longer can be applied and have consistent observable effects.
[30:36] Mm-hmm.
[30:38] Yeah, it's a very cool paper.
[30:39] Again, cited multiple times.
[30:42] And it applies to astrophysical plasma.
[30:45] For example, this is a picture of the Venus...
[30:49] toroid so this is what happens when the solar wind goes and impacts venus which has its own magnetic field and what you can see is you've got the stretching of the magnetic field because of the solar wind and on the top you've got a magnetic field going this way and on the bottom you've got a magnetic field going this way so what's going to happen you're going to get a little plasmoid you know because because those magnetic field lines want to sort of
[31:14] mesh together.
[31:15] They don't want to fight.
[31:16] Yes.
[31:16] Right?
[31:17] And so you get the little plasmoid that we were talking about.
[31:19] And you can see when we talk about the Venus Express, which is the probe that took measurements close to Venus, versus the Pioneer Venus Express, which took...
[31:33] measurements all the way out yeah it matches the fact that there's a strong magnetic field here and a weaker magnetic field there and the mathematics works out right yeah so it shows that in astrophysical plasma
[31:45] This hypothesis by Nuno is true.
[31:49] Just to double-click on that, the point being, Nuno's theory on paper, that can be proven mathematically on paper, had matching observable data from two different Mars, Venus, excuse me, probes, from different distances of where they measured.
[32:07] And that was...
[32:09] important in being able to show that it actually worked because we had two in two reference points of distance that's right where the measurements were coming in from and then so we could use the math that nuno sort of established and say does the math match at farther distance from the pvo this closer distance from the x and it and it did and it was great and crucially this is like on top of the fact that his theory
[32:35] reproduces the time skills that we see on the sun.
[32:39] Right.
[32:40] Yeah.
[32:40] The solar measurements also track.
[32:42] Yeah.
[32:42] The solar measurements, the fact that it takes hours to minutes for this reconnection to happen on the surface of the sun and the solar Corona and things like that, that's already taken care of.
[32:51] Right.
[32:51] And on top of that,
[32:53] He's now talking about the magnetic field around planets.
[32:57] And also in talkamaks, we've like literally seen this.
[33:00] So in talkamaks, which is a talkamak is like a donut shaped thing where we try to confine plasma.
[33:06] And in those talkamaks, you can see little plasmoids that form.
[33:10] And they format the scale that he suggests with this theory.
[33:16] And it lasts as long as what he suggests in the theory.
[33:19] And this becomes extremely useful when we are trying to replicate the sun on Earth for fusion research.
[33:28] Right.
[33:28] Right.
[33:29] Because while we have figured out...
[33:32] with nuclear weapons, how to create fission bombs, which I was just listening to something the other day, so correct me if I'm wrong.
[33:39] With a fission bomb, it's like you actually have the fission process is actually in the ignition to then create a fusion reaction after the fact.
[33:48] Yeah.
[33:49] But because of that two-step fission-fusion combination, that's where you get radioactive fallout as a result of that.
[33:59] Yeah, because you need a fission bomb in order to spark the fusion bomb.
[34:06] But if you were able to master fusion and have a pure fusion nuclear weapon—
[34:13] There would be no fallout.
[34:14] Yeah, there would be no fallout.
[34:15] Which would allow you, militarily, the strategy would be, now you can drop a nuke somewhere and have troops right nearby.
[34:22] Yeah.
[34:23] To be able to then go in post the fusion explosion because there would be no... Yeah, they'd have to wear sunscreen.
[34:30] Fair.
[34:30] Because you don't want the photons.
[34:32] It could be some distance away.
[34:33] Yeah, the photons are the main, you know.
[34:36] But at least you don't have to worry about, like, ionizing radiation.
[34:39] But, like, yeah, the other main thing is, like, with fusion, right?
[34:42] Fusion nuclear reactors, for example.
[34:44] Yes.
[34:44] Those are, like, relatively easy to control.
[34:46] Okay.
[34:46] Okay?
[34:47] Because you've got these rods of uranium.
[34:49] Yes.
[34:49] That are spitting out neutrons.
[34:51] Yes.
[34:52] And then in between you can have rods of graphite that slow down the neutrons.
[34:56] Yes.
[34:57] Right?
[34:57] And so you can have this sort of static nuclear reactor.
[35:02] That is creating heat, creating energy.
[35:04] That causes steam from water, and then that steam turns a turbine.
[35:09] Right, right, right, right.
[35:10] The heat creates motion, which turns a turbine.
[35:13] Yes.
[35:14] With fusion...
[35:16] Isolating fusion, right?
[35:18] Fusion is happening in plasma.
[35:19] It's not happening in solid materials.
[35:22] With fission, you have a rod of uranium.
[35:25] That thing is fissioning.
[35:26] Right.
[35:27] And it's creating energy.
[35:28] In order to create energy from fusion, you need this plasma, which is super hard to control.
[35:33] It's super hard to contain.
[35:35] And then...
[35:37] Once we have that, we need to have it self-sustaining and then create a heat source that then powers the turbine.
[35:44] It's a whole thing, right?
[35:45] And if we don't understand the mathematics fundamentally, then there's no hope.
[35:50] I will just note, we've talked about this off camera previously, but if you work in a classified program in plasma research and you've maybe figured out how to better control plasma for other use cases, declassify part of it so we can use it for fusion reactions.
[36:09] Yeah, that'd be great.
[36:10] Please and thank you.
[36:11] That'd be great.
[36:14] So that was his 2007 paper.
[36:15] Makes sense.
[36:16] Very big deal.
[36:17] Huge deal, yes.
[36:18] He won a bunch of awards for it.
[36:20] Well-deserved.
[36:20] Yes.
[36:21] Can't win a Nobel.
[36:22] Yeah.
[36:24] Yeah, not anymore.
[36:25] Which is really crazy.
[36:26] Yeah, yeah.
[36:28] He probably would have been on the shortlist because...
[36:32] In the future of his life, so that was at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.
[36:35] He was kind of a postdoc.
[36:36] Then he became a professor at MIT, became full professor.
[36:39] And in 2004, he was the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT.
[36:45] And that MIT PSFC spun out and created Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is designing something called SPARK.
[36:56] It is a small fusion reactor.
[36:58] I mean, this, it looks kind of big.
[37:00] Mate, compared to...
[37:02] Like compared to fusion reactors, that is small.
[37:05] Okay.
[37:06] That is quite small.
[37:08] The goal is to be the first device to achieve a Q factor greater than one.
[37:12] A Q factor is basically net energy gain, which is how much energy you put in, how much do you get out, the ratio of that.
[37:19] If you have greater than one, then whatever is that greater than one is...
[37:24] you can use to power a turbine, which creates electricity.
[37:28] There was actually, wasn't there an announcement in the last two or three years that one of the national labs achieved net energy gain for some small period of time?
[37:39] It was very small.
[37:40] But that was a first of some kind?
[37:43] It was a first of some kind because, so I don't remember the details, but what ended up happening was they had a diamond anvil cell
[37:50] with two diamonds attached to each other.
[37:53] We've covered this actually.
[37:55] Yeah, we actually covered this.
[37:56] And inside was a hydrogen deuterium mixture.
[38:01] And then they put lasers that created fusion inside of that diamond anvil cell.
[38:06] And they said that, yeah, the amount of energy of the lasers was less than the amount of energy that came out of the fusion.
[38:12] But like to make the lasers, you know, it's... Look, they're not...
[38:16] I don't think their end goal is to create... For sure.
[38:20] Fusion electric power from that, okay?
[38:23] Because like, what?
[38:24] You're just going to keep shooting lasers in this?
[38:27] And then how do I get the energy out of that to come out and like do a turbine?
[38:31] Yeah.
[38:32] There's a lot of question marks, okay?
[38:34] It's probably weapons, if I'm honest.
[38:38] But it was still very cool.
[38:39] It was, I believe, Lawrence Livermore lab that was doing it.
[38:42] That tracks to me.
[38:43] California again.
[38:45] California forever, goodbye.
[38:46] Yeah.
[38:47] So, talk max, like the spark, the spark is something that is trying to contain plasma, and it's trying to create fusion in the plasma, and then it's trying to then offload that energy to create electricity.
[39:01] Right.
[39:03] And it's designed to have this Q factor of greater than one.
[39:07] It's using actually high temperature superconducting magnets, which means at about 20 Kelvin, which is actually quite hot for superconductors, they're using these rare earth barium copper oxide Rebco magnets that...
[39:22] And effectively, what they're trying to do is have these magnets go at 12 Tesla.
[39:27] 12 Tesla is insanely strong.
[39:29] Yeah.
[39:30] Okay?
[39:30] Yeah.
[39:31] Several orders of magnitude above the magnetic field of the Earth.
[39:34] Okay.
[39:34] And what they're doing is using these magnets to confine the plasma into a donut, spin it around really fast.
[39:42] Yes.
[39:43] And then have that plasma in that spinning...
[39:46] do the fusion.
[39:47] Yes.
[39:47] So the hydrogen is going to combine to make helium release a bunch of energy.
[39:51] Yes.
[39:52] And then that energy is going to be used to create electricity.
[39:54] That's what they're going to try to capture.
[39:55] And the point is you need that 12 Tesla because you need to be able to confine it.
[39:59] And that's the reason for that scale.
[40:02] Exactly.
[40:02] And at that scale, all of a sudden,
[40:06] um lorero's legacy matters right all of the theories that he's he's posited at these like high lundquist numbers yes that's what matters so any any code that you have to contain the plasma needs to rely on his theory so there's going to be a bunch of plasmoids that are dominant in that in that talk about
[40:25] The point is you could not use this.
[40:27] If you were trying to do fusion energy and you are focused on how do we contain the plasma, you cannot use the Sweet Parker model.
[40:34] No.
[40:35] And if you'd be completely wrecked.
[40:37] But for Nuno, you wouldn't necessarily have a framework for how to even do the math to do the containment of the plasma at that scale.
[40:45] Exactly.
[40:45] So when all these AI, all these billionaires and hyperscalers and frontier model companies are saying, we need more energy.
[40:52] And they're now investing in the small fusion reactor.
[40:55] It's like now a buzz term in Silicon Valley.
[40:58] And everyone's investing in all these new companies trying to do it.
[41:01] Yeah.
[41:02] All of them have to bend the knees.
[41:04] All of them.
[41:04] And be grateful that Nuno did this work because that math is now enabling the innovation for a small form factor fusion nuclear reactors.
[41:15] And exactly.
[41:16] With the tokamak design framework.
[41:19] You got it.
[41:19] You got it exactly right.
[41:21] Yeah.
[41:21] I mean, it's a fundamental science thing.
[41:23] Right.
[41:23] Right.
[41:24] Like, why does the solar corona work the way it does?
[41:26] Right.
[41:27] Like, that's how it started.
[41:28] That's how it starts.
[41:29] And then how it's going is we've got now maybe a path to create actual fusion on Earth.
[41:36] Which, again, like, fusion changes everything.
[41:40] Yeah.
[41:41] No, no.
[41:42] Oh, my God.
[41:42] It changes everything.
[41:43] It would be ridiculous.
[41:45] It would be ridiculous if we could get this going.
[41:47] Right.
[41:47] And we're now, people are...
[41:51] So on all the advertisements and stuff I see in the XC, they're now passing simulation tests, right, with different design types, and they're now transitioning into, like, real-world scaled versions of this, which means, like, this is now, like, this is not theoretical in terms of application anymore.
[42:13] No, this is, like, at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, they're actually doing it.
[42:17] They're, like, making it.
[42:18] Right.
[42:18] You know?
[42:18] Oh, God.
[42:20] It's crazy.
[42:21] We might be close.
[42:22] We might be.
[42:23] Let's knock on wood.
[42:24] Yeah.
[42:25] But it was, you know, Nuno Loreiro's work really underpins that fundamental science really underpins all of the stuff that these guys are doing, you know, that could truly change the world.
[42:37] This is why, again, academia and grants for science.
[42:42] Foundational science is hugely meaningful.
[42:45] And now the timescales of going from research lab to end product are shortening greatly.
[42:51] Yeah.
[42:52] For all the reasons we've talked about all season.
[42:53] Yeah.
[42:54] Right?
[42:54] Like, it's no longer a 30, 40, 50-year cycle in between fundamental discovery.
[43:00] That's 2007.
[43:00] Mm-hmm.
[43:00] 20 years.
[43:01] It's already...
[43:04] That's crazy.
[43:05] That's crazy.
[43:05] That's crazy.
[43:06] Yeah.
[43:07] Yeah.
[43:08] I think it's amazing.
[43:09] And, you know, the stuff that he did at PPPL, that's probably a DOE contract.
[43:14] Yep.
[43:16] I guarantee you there was no private funding when all these people say, oh, like, you know, maybe the private funders could, like, do fundamental science research.
[43:23] No.
[43:24] He was trying to figure out, like, why is this 50-year-old model of plasma wrong?
[43:28] Right.
[43:30] No one was... No one cared.
[43:31] No, because it was so far away that no VC would be like, I'm going to see this fruitful at the end of my life.
[43:41] Yeah.
[43:42] there was this interesting thing that Demis Asabas, who runs Google DeepMind, was kind of talking about where he's like, they were talking about hallucinations in AI models.
[43:54] And his whole thing was like, some hallucinations are actually kind of good because there's this whole sort of...
[44:01] you know, phrase, uh, like phrasing where it's like inventions, all inventions didn't come from explicitly knowing that you, you wanted the outcome of the invention when you were going through the discovery process.
[44:13] Right.
[44:13] Like a lot of times inventions come from curiosity and,
[44:17] And just exploration that then leads to an insight that then converts into an invention.
[44:24] But you don't always start saying, I want to create a light bulb and then create a light bulb.
[44:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[44:27] Right?
[44:28] And so you kind of need this surface area of exploration that is not tied to shareholder value or an already known end product.
[44:37] It's just how does it work.
[44:38] How does it work?
[44:39] And then once you know how it works, then all of a sudden it's like, wait, wait.
[44:42] Well, I could – yeah.
[44:43] Now all of a sudden maybe –
[44:47] Maybe a small fusion containment thing could actually work.
[44:51] Because now we know everything, right?
[44:52] Right.
[44:53] And now we have high-frequency computing, and we have AI, and we have means to control plasma really effectively, right?
[45:01] So it's all of the stuff compounding that really gives a lot of these startups room to breathe.
[45:06] Right.
[45:06] Right.
[45:06] Right.
[45:07] Right.
[45:08] Yeah, so it's really quite an amazing story.
[45:12] Nuno Lurario, MIT professor, very unfortunate death.
[45:17] Yeah.
[45:18] And also the way that it happened through gun violence, like in his apartment in Boston.
[45:23] Like, that just sucks.
[45:25] It's the American story in the modern era.
[45:28] Yeah, and apparently all we can do is thoughts and prayers.
[45:31] Look, yeah.
[45:33] I guess, yeah, thoughts and prayers to his family, and I wish we could do more.
[45:36] And thank you, Nuno, for what you've provided to humanity.
[45:40] Yeah, this is amazing.
[45:41] Amazing legacy.
[45:43] If we figure out fusion.
[45:44] Yeah, no.
[45:46] And if the Nobel Prize was given to posthumous people, he'd be one of them.
[45:52] yeah um we wanted to make sure we covered this again there's no there's literally no information about what happened yeah yeah it's super unclear actually so it's it's you know there's a lot of weird you know it is yeah you know we'll see what happens and um you know the best to those who knew him his colleagues and his family who you know and his mentors mentors i bet there's a bunch of students that are just
[46:15] We're just struggling and please, you know, we hope that those around him at the lab, you know, once grieving has passed, you know, continue to aggressively pursue his vision.
[46:30] Yeah.
[46:31] And, and, and the work that he's already done because it's, it's a huge foundation.
[46:35] Yeah, yeah.
[46:36] I mean, it's amazing, you know?
[46:38] And it could change the world.
[46:39] It could literally change the world.
[46:41] It could be one of the biggest things that happens in the 21st century.
[46:45] If you're a climate change person, like, you should be all over this.
[46:48] This is big.
[46:49] This is a big deal.
[46:50] We're going to now transition into our season one recap.
[46:54] Yeah.
[46:55] 19 episodes.
[46:59] Unbelievable.
[47:00] Just we covered.
[47:02] There's so many interesting things that happened this year.
[47:04] Yeah.
[47:05] And it was really hard to choose.
[47:07] Yeah, it really was.
[47:08] It was hard to choose.
[47:10] It looks like we're going to start with my five.
[47:12] Yeah.
[47:12] We're going to start with your five.
[47:13] And again, I'm,
[47:15] I loved all of them.
[47:16] I think we did 48 total stories.
[47:18] No, I mean, you know what's interesting is, like, I learned so much with each of the ones that I had to research.
[47:26] Yeah.
[47:26] And, like, really get into it.
[47:28] Yeah.
[47:28] You know, because we're not in the business of...
[47:32] Of just talking.
[47:33] Yeah, right.
[47:35] I was like, what is this figure?
[47:37] Right, right, right.
[47:39] You know, but I learned so much and I just love that we started this podcast.
[47:44] And again, every single one of the 48 stories we covered this year are incredible, literally on their own.
[47:51] Yeah.
[47:51] And so just because it's not included in the top 10 doesn't mean it's not good.
[47:54] However.
[47:54] Yeah, and let us know in the comments if we missed one of your favorites.
[47:59] One of your favorites.
[48:01] But I think these are quite good.
[48:03] These are all quite good.
[48:05] Again, based on what they are about.
[48:08] And in no particular order.
[48:10] Yeah, these are not ranked.
[48:11] These are not ranked.
[48:12] It's just top ten.
[48:12] So, okay.
[48:13] So, from my list of five, the first one we're going to cover or touch on is the Vera Rubin Observatory.
[48:20] Yes.
[48:21] Episode four.
[48:22] Yeah.
[48:23] This was amazing.
[48:24] This was really good.
[48:25] So for those who know, I'm the UFO guy on the pod.
[48:27] Yeah.
[48:28] And so, you know, obviously anything that's going to help us better understand the universe around us, I'm all for.
[48:35] But I think the thing that really got me going about this episode was the...
[48:40] There was a couple of things.
[48:41] It's the scale.
[48:42] The way you described it, I think, in the episode was we're moving from photo to video.
[48:46] Yeah.
[48:47] In astronomy.
[48:48] Yeah.
[48:49] And that resonated.
[48:50] Of the entire southern night sky.
[48:52] Right.
[48:53] Like the scale difference between what we knew before and what we will now know and also the daily data dumps and accessibility.
[49:01] There's so many great aspects to the story.
[49:03] Yeah.
[49:04] I love this one.
[49:05] Yeah, and this one, you know, so I was looking up like, you know, what they've been doing.
[49:09] They've just been doing what they normally do, which is just data dumps.
[49:13] And now there's just so much data and astronomers are wrangling with how do we, how do we,
[49:18] interpret all of this data.
[49:20] Yes.
[49:20] Right.
[49:21] But one of the few things that I wanted to highlight.
[49:24] So there's one photo of the galaxy M61 messy object.
[49:28] M61.
[49:29] You see that thread?
[49:30] Yes.
[49:30] That's coming out of the bottom right galaxy.
[49:34] Yes.
[49:34] We didn't know that existed before.
[49:36] Yeah.
[49:37] That's just a thread of stars that's just getting ejected by that galaxy.
[49:42] That's unbelievable.
[49:43] And that's crazy.
[49:44] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[49:44] Because first of all, what?
[49:46] Yeah.
[49:47] Why is there just a...
[49:49] It's like a water gun of stars.
[49:51] Stars.
[49:52] Just getting shot out.
[49:53] Just getting shot out by a galaxy.
[49:55] Stars.
[49:56] Yeah, stars.
[49:58] Across many light years.
[50:00] Hundreds and thousands of light years.
[50:03] Just getting shot out for who knows how long.
[50:05] Because the...
[50:07] The trail is quite long, right?
[50:09] So it's just been doing it in one direction for a very long time.
[50:12] We've never seen that before.
[50:14] That's crazy.
[50:14] Never seen that before.
[50:16] So that's Messy Object 61, which, by the way, the fact that it has a name M61 means that
[50:23] It's been studied since Messier created that catalog.
[50:29] Okay?
[50:30] And we didn't know that that existed.
[50:32] Okay?
[50:32] So this is new.
[50:33] Brand new.
[50:33] Yes.
[50:34] Which is crazy.
[50:34] Yes.
[50:35] And the second one is a photo of the Virgo cluster.
[50:37] Yes.
[50:37] Yes.
[50:39] Beautiful photo.
[50:40] And you can see how diffuse those galaxies are.
[50:42] Okay?
[50:43] The key thing is, this is an average of about a thousand images.
[50:47] They probably have tens of thousands now, but this is an average of a thousand images.
[50:52] And when you average a thousand images, the signal to noise ratio goes up, right?
[50:56] The noise goes down because you're averaging.
[50:58] And you see how those diffuse like clouds of just stars, that's not something we've seen before.
[51:05] Like on the right-hand side, you've just got this random cloud with no real structure.
[51:10] We're seeing like a bunch of those in the Vera Rubin, right?
[51:14] Those are galaxies that we've never seen before.
[51:16] Because usually we're like, oh, spiral galaxies, they're like concentrated.
[51:20] Now we just got a cloud of like stars.
[51:22] Yeah, right, right, right.
[51:23] But we can now identify.
[51:25] Because we're taking so many photos of the exact same patch of sky over and over again that we can average.
[51:32] And the signal to noise ratio goes like square root of N. So the more we take photos of, the lower that noise becomes.
[51:40] And we can really start seeing this incredible detail, right?
[51:44] Yeah.
[51:44] we're turning the light.
[51:46] Like we, we, I can't emphasize enough how little we've actually looked like if earth, if like, if our solar system is like a house, right?
[51:55] No, no.
[51:56] We've, we've barely looked out of one of the windows of the house.
[51:59] No, we've seen Zillow photos.
[52:01] Yeah.
[52:03] That's what it is, dude.
[52:04] Like, we... Yeah.
[52:06] If our universe is a house, we've seen Zillow photos.
[52:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[52:09] Yeah.
[52:09] Right, right.
[52:10] Like, we've not... And now we're, like, putting in, like, ring cameras, you know?
[52:14] To really see in a different room, like, the...
[52:19] And the volume of data that it's producing is such that, you know.
[52:24] Yeah.
[52:26] And now it's up to the astronomers to really try to crunch through.
[52:30] We've identified like thousands of asteroids.
[52:32] Yep.
[52:33] We've identified thousands of transient objects.
[52:37] It's going to be great, dude.
[52:38] And the more sophisticated the algorithms get, the better it'll be.
[52:41] And it's open source.
[52:42] Yeah.
[52:42] Open science.
[52:44] That's what's great about it.
[52:45] That's your U.S. taxpayer funding.
[52:47] Right.
[52:48] Going into just like, we got a ring camera on the universe now.
[52:53] That's a great way to spend taxpayer money.
[52:55] 100%.
[52:56] Oh, my gosh.
[52:56] 100%.
[52:57] Yeah.
[52:58] Aliens coming soon.
[53:00] Story number two, K218B DMS dimethyl sulfide?
[53:04] Dimethyl sulfide.
[53:05] Look at me.
[53:05] I'm learning something this season, y'all.
[53:08] Episode 8.
[53:09] That was episode eight.
[53:11] This was the drama.
[53:13] This was the best evidence yet.
[53:17] Yeah, best evidence yet on BBC.
[53:19] Yeah, of life.
[53:20] And then a week later.
[53:21] Later, immediately.
[53:22] And so I think the reason I like this story is because we really covered how the peer review process works.
[53:28] Yeah.
[53:28] When the delta between the news headline and where the science is.
[53:33] Yeah.
[53:33] And how each of these universities or labs is competing.
[53:37] Yeah.
[53:39] And why the process of science works because of reproducibility.
[53:43] But also just you explaining to me how we do the atmospheric understanding.
[53:48] Yeah.
[53:48] And the atmosphere.
[53:49] retrieval and how we do that transit method to figure out the yes and what i loved about this story was how the the postdoc who put out the paper a week after yeah yeah that like he actually met he re he re um i guess he re-instagrammed yeah he didn't retweet but on instagram he reposted yeah are real oh yeah about that and he was like am i the drama because we were literally talking about how a week later yeah he's like yeah yeah
[54:18] Like that was that Oxford Cambridge beef.
[54:20] God, that was great.
[54:21] Yeah.
[54:22] And it was shout out to Tyler for yes, for for posting that.
[54:26] That was dope.
[54:26] That was great.
[54:28] Great story.
[54:29] So again, as you can see, I have a real space, a real space rotation to the first two.
[54:34] The third one that was really fascinating to me was the story we covered on Oncogan.
[54:39] Yeah.
[54:40] The AI Genome Project in episode 15.
[54:44] And I actually just talked to my mom about this who works in clinical trials and is focused on the future of precision medicine.
[54:51] And it was just the experimental – like what they – all of the different pieces they put together.
[54:58] Yeah.
[54:59] And the redundancy and really how well thought out it was.
[55:02] To make sure that the genomes that they were generating with this AI was not linked to anything personal.
[55:10] Yes.
[55:10] You know?
[55:11] No HIPAA violations.
[55:11] It truly was no HIPAA violations, but we're creating this data set that is going to be used to train AI models to detect cancer.
[55:21] And the fact that when they – with using those newly generated AI genomes, using existing tools like DeepTumor, they were actually able to increase the efficacy of detection in edge cases.
[55:33] Yeah.
[55:34] Basically proving that the genomes were not just junk data.
[55:39] Yeah.
[55:40] Right?
[55:41] Like an existing tool was better off.
[55:43] It was better off having it as a part of its data set.
[55:46] Yeah.
[55:47] That was a great one.
[55:48] I love that story.
[55:48] That was a great one.
[55:50] Yeah.
[55:50] Yeah.
[55:50] And that was originally because it was from the University of Toronto.
[55:54] Yes.
[55:54] And Toronto lost the World Series.
[55:57] Yeah.
[55:58] Look.
[55:58] The LA Dodgers won.
[55:59] We're from LA.
[56:00] What do you want us to do?
[56:01] May I just repeat what is already known?
[56:03] The LA Dodgers are back-to-back world champions.
[56:06] We did give Toronto's love, though.
[56:08] You know, we made sure we gave you guys some.
[56:09] That was an incredible scientific achievement from the University of Toronto.
[56:13] And the implications are great.
[56:15] just going to be yeah um and again this is another we've covered a lot of ai stories and for me what this was was like ai gets talked about as like oh image generation and ai slop yeah and like ai girlfriends right but this is not this is going to save lives no straight up literally yeah and it is it's important to understand that in a lot in multiple research environments um
[56:41] Folks are finally finding ways to get practical effects and outputs from a variety of use cases.
[56:49] Yeah, that's a great point.
[56:50] ML, RL, AI, whatever you want to label it as.
[56:54] Number four was time crystals.
[56:55] Time crystals.
[56:56] Group temperature.
[56:57] Time crystals.
[56:58] Room temp time crystals.
[56:59] Episode 9.
[57:00] University of Colorado Boulder.
[57:01] Yes, yes.
[57:02] Yeah, the OGs of solid state physics.
[57:06] Yes, and I just like that one because I never heard about a time crystal.
[57:10] That was crazy.
[57:11] Macroscopic room temperature time crystal.
[57:14] Yeah, yeah, that was pretty cool because we got to go through the whole...
[57:18] You know, from Frank Wolchek talking about the theoretical time crystal, and then somebody saying, eh, that's probably not possible.
[57:25] And then somebody else saying, yeah, but you could do it this way.
[57:28] And then now to where we've got this repertoire of time crystals, and this is the first one that's macroscopic.
[57:34] You can see with the naked eye.
[57:35] It's at room temperature.
[57:37] Yeah.
[57:38] It's crazy.
[57:38] Such a good one.
[57:39] Yeah.
[57:40] And then the last one for me was just our Nobel week episode, macroscopic quantum tunneling, especially.
[57:49] That was amazing.
[57:50] Nobel prize week was really incredible.
[57:53] This year's awards were all great, but I think that the structure of it and how we did the journey of like, because what it really, I like, I think showed and represented was how science is an iterative process.
[58:06] Yeah.
[58:07] that spans decades and generations.
[58:10] And everything that we want that it gives us modern life is on the basis of scientific progress over generations.
[58:20] And the awards this year were incredibly...
[58:24] complex and i think those episodes did a great job for a layman or anyone who doesn't has no basis for any of the understanding can really kind of get why this award matters yeah yeah and and what i remember from it is like waking up at 2 a.m to watch the to watch the things with you and then be like okay now i gotta i gotta do it because we dropped it those we dropped it live yeah we dropped it yeah dude and it was it was a great experience it was like the commitment that
[58:54] to this podcast and like to really getting and doing it right.
[58:59] I love that.
[59:00] It was great.
[59:01] And, and it worked and, you know, it blew up.
[59:04] It was great.
[59:04] Some of our biggest episodes were the Nobel episodes.
[59:07] A lot of you discovered us during that week.
[59:10] And we will be doing it next year.
[59:13] We're looking to hopefully get either a university or the Nobel committee to allow us to,
[59:20] to be a participant in the process to help elevate this beyond what they already do and make it accessible to the new gen.
[59:30] So those are my five.
[59:32] Not exclusive, but those are good.
[59:34] And so, okay, now let me start with mine.
[59:36] My first one is the programmable synthetic proteins.
[59:39] This was episode three.
[59:41] This one just like blew my mind.
[59:43] It was out of Yale University.
[59:45] Effectively, yeah, boo, but also wow.
[59:49] Because...
[59:50] They effectively like, you know, we're used to 20 building blocks when we create proteins and they're like, what if we could have 60?
[59:57] Yes.
[59:58] You know, because it takes three codons, sorry, it takes three nucleotides to create a codon.
[1:00:05] So three ATGCs, that's four choices in three bins.
[1:00:10] So four to the three is 64.
[1:00:12] You need a few of them to tell your protein machinery to start.
[1:00:16] creating a protein and stop creating a protein.
[1:00:19] But the question is, all of that others, you know, all of those, the rest of the 60 are getting mapped onto 20.
[1:00:27] What if I could map them onto 60?
[1:00:30] And this was the first step in that, right?
[1:00:32] They made a fully...
[1:00:35] Like bacteria.
[1:00:36] They made a full bacteria that incorporated a new amino acid into a protein.
[1:00:42] I thought that was absolutely insane.
[1:00:44] Unbelievable.
[1:00:45] That they could do this.
[1:00:46] Unbelievable.
[1:00:46] You know?
[1:00:47] That was a really good one.
[1:00:48] That was, it like blew my mind when I was researching it.
[1:00:52] That was episode three.
[1:00:53] And then the rest of them are all about science history because I love science history.
[1:00:57] Yes.
[1:00:57] So we've got the DNA episode.
[1:00:59] I don't have to talk too much about that because that was just our last episode.
[1:01:04] People loved that episode.
[1:01:05] Watson's not the guy.
[1:01:06] Watson is not the guy.
[1:01:09] Turns out he was a racist piece of...
[1:01:13] But the human story is fascinating.
[1:01:15] The way that...
[1:01:16] There was the competition between England and Caltech and all that.
[1:01:19] I just loved looking that up.
[1:01:21] The LIGO episode, which was episode 10.
[1:01:24] Yes, that was a great one.
[1:01:25] That was a great one.
[1:01:26] That little story about how the postdocs were like running around, you know, just an hour before the actual signal came.
[1:01:33] in and they were just like driving their jeeps yes along the along the instrument and then people were like just freaking out because they didn't know if it was a psyop right right they didn't know if it was a conspiracy or something i loved that also the actual engineering that went into ligo is unbelievable yeah yeah it is yeah being sensitive to 10 to the minus 21 in stress and then we're replicating that in three locations now yeah yeah
[1:01:59] Yeah.
[1:02:00] Amazing.
[1:02:02] The Heisenberg episode, which is episode five.
[1:02:04] Very popular.
[1:02:05] That one was very popular.
[1:02:07] Very popular.
[1:02:07] Yeah.
[1:02:08] Yeah.
[1:02:08] I love like going through his original paper that, you know, set it all up.
[1:02:14] Yes.
[1:02:14] Yeah.
[1:02:15] And that whole non-commutation.
[1:02:17] Yes.
[1:02:18] Yes.
[1:02:18] Yeah.
[1:02:19] A, B, not equal to B, A.
[1:02:22] Yeah, exactly.
[1:02:23] When we were talking about vector multiplication.
[1:02:25] Yeah, matrix multiplication on vectors.
[1:02:27] Matrix multiplication on vectors.
[1:02:29] Exactly.
[1:02:29] There's a lot of debate in the comments on that one because people would saw the graphic but didn't listen.
[1:02:34] Yeah.
[1:02:34] And so they thought we were not, anyway.
[1:02:35] Yeah.
[1:02:37] And then finally the Chen Ning Yang episode, which is episode 14.
[1:02:41] And that one where we had the discussion about symmetry and how the fundamental laws of symmetry govern the universe.
[1:02:47] And we can overturn the whole...
[1:02:50] idea of how we do physics by asking a fundamental question like what are the symmetries of the universe okay i do an experiment here and i do an experiment over there the laws of the physics that are the same yes what does that mean what does that mean and like yeah it's just so beautiful was that think about was that the episode with the the left hand right hand left car yeah yeah yeah
[1:03:09] Left and right, the chirality of stuff.
[1:03:12] That was really... All of the history episodes and the deep dives were really popular.
[1:03:17] I know there's someone on YouTube.
[1:03:19] We see the comments, not all of them.
[1:03:21] It's tough to keep up.
[1:03:22] But someone was like, I want more.
[1:03:24] Yeah.
[1:03:25] Deep dive, single subject history, go through all the details episodes.
[1:03:30] And so as we go into season two, we have some interesting ideas.
[1:03:34] And so the core format will be there.
[1:03:37] We'll do almost exactly like we did this year.
[1:03:39] Some episodes will have multiple stories.
[1:03:41] Some will be the deep dives.
[1:03:43] Maybe we might even be going directly into some...
[1:03:48] labs yeah to do some on-site episodes 26 you know uh we've got some some interesting things planned uh i'm gonna quickly honorable mention uh from from the wife yeah about her favorite episode she said if you don't include me you're in trouble so
[1:04:05] I'm including her three, which were the double slit MIT replication episode three, the diamond, the harder than diamond episode five episode, and also a double tap on the Rosalind Franklin.
[1:04:19] She's a women in STEM.
[1:04:20] Yeah.
[1:04:20] We love it.
[1:04:21] We love it.
[1:04:21] So we're going to wrap up with a corrections section.
[1:04:25] Yes.
[1:04:25] And so one of the things I love about this pod is that there's a surprising amount of comments.
[1:04:31] Yeah.
[1:04:32] from folks, whether you're doing your PhD currently, whether you're in a research lab, or just are into science generally, for folks who had some comments about how we framed things, and we want to give an opportunity to do a couple of key corrections from our past episodes.
[1:04:48] Yeah.
[1:04:48] And we'll maybe do something to incorporate this better into season two.
[1:04:52] Yeah.
[1:04:52] And so we're now going to talk about some of these corrections.
[1:04:55] Yeah, and I wanted to piggyback off what you said.
[1:04:58] It's really a testament to our audience that we're getting corrections at such a fine level.
[1:05:05] Yeah, very detailed.
[1:05:06] And look, I would much rather you're scrolling on Instagram and you're commenting about science versus nonsense.
[1:05:14] Yeah.
[1:05:14] So we love it.
[1:05:15] And please continue to pop in your viewpoints, your thoughts, because that's the whole point is we're trying to have a conversation.
[1:05:23] Yeah, exactly.
[1:05:25] So the first one is kind of a general one, which was during the whale episode.
[1:05:30] Our one video that's going to reach a million on Instagram by the time we drop this.
[1:05:34] Yeah.
[1:05:34] There were a lot of corrections about the fact that, you know, when you're in a sailboat, you can actually go against the wind.
[1:05:41] The correction is you can't actually go directly against the wind.
[1:05:45] You have to tack at an angle that's offset from the wind.
[1:05:49] I actually know this because during my grad school at UCLA, UCLA has a marina in Marina del Rey, and they offer— Marina del Rey?
[1:05:57] Yeah, Marina del Rey.
[1:05:59] And they actually offer sailing classes.
[1:06:02] And so I got a sailing license at the UCLA Marina, and they taught us how to tack and go against the wind and effectively use Bernoulli's principle to go against the wind at an angle.
[1:06:15] And you can sort of go like this, right?
[1:06:19] At the end of the day, though...
[1:06:21] Pythagorean theorem, you're not going to be going directly against the wind.
[1:06:24] So if you're a whale in the ocean, you can still outrun a boat.
[1:06:28] So the main point was the whales learned how to go directly against the wind and outrun boats.
[1:06:34] Right, right.
[1:06:35] Regardless of the fact that, yes, sailboats can, using tacking, go not directly against the wind, but in the direction where...
[1:06:42] The point is the whales will be able to outrun.
[1:06:44] Yeah, like imagine you're a whaler and you see them.
[1:06:47] You're not going to be like, I'm going to go get them.
[1:06:49] You're going to be like, no, that's a lost cause.
[1:06:51] They're going literally against the wind.
[1:06:54] So we get it.
[1:06:54] Yeah, we get it.
[1:06:55] But that wasn't the...
[1:06:57] Context.
[1:06:58] Yeah.
[1:06:58] Watch the full episodes, okay?
[1:07:00] The clips are not always the full context.
[1:07:04] The other one, so during the DNA episode, I talked about how Chargaff at Columbia University used human sperm to establish the ratio between A, T, G, and C. And he showed that A and T are exactly the same, and G and C are exactly the same.
[1:07:23] And I made the statement that sperm is mostly DNA.
[1:07:26] Mostly DNA.
[1:07:28] Yes, that's not true.
[1:07:29] Okay, and that's a fair point.
[1:07:31] Sperm is mostly, again, proteins and a bunch of other random stuff.
[1:07:35] But my point was that there's more DNA per volume in sperm than there are in other cells.
[1:07:43] And so if you want the greatest bang for your buck in terms of trying to analyze DNA per volume, sperm is a great...
[1:07:51] you know, the sort of sample to get.
[1:07:54] It's not all DNA.
[1:07:56] Yeah.
[1:07:56] But the DNA per volume is the most functional and beneficial for the use case.
[1:08:01] Yes.
[1:08:02] Of doing the demo.
[1:08:02] Exactly.
[1:08:03] So yeah, that was fair play.
[1:08:04] That's a good one.
[1:08:05] Okay.
[1:08:05] Um, um,
[1:08:06] Whenever I talk about transcription and translation, whenever I get excited, I mix up the two.
[1:08:11] Okay.
[1:08:12] Okay, but I do know what they mean.
[1:08:14] Transcription is DNA to RNA.
[1:08:17] Yes.
[1:08:18] And it's in the word, right?
[1:08:20] Transcribe from the same language to the same language.
[1:08:23] There's a little bit of difference because instead of T, you're using U.
[1:08:27] But instead of ATGC, you use AUGC.
[1:08:31] But it's the same, nucleotide to nucleotide.
[1:08:37] nucleotide to amino acid, right?
[1:08:39] So it's a different language altogether, and that's why you're translating.
[1:08:43] And, you know, when I get excited, sometimes I say the wrong thing.
[1:08:46] Yes.
[1:08:47] But hopefully you guys know what I mean.
[1:08:49] Duly noted.
[1:08:50] Yeah.
[1:08:51] The fourth one, sodium batteries.
[1:08:53] Sodium batteries are actually a thing.
[1:08:55] Yes.
[1:08:55] And we made it seem like sodium batteries weren't a thing.
[1:08:59] Sodium batteries are a thing.
[1:09:00] There's active companies that are actually trying it.
[1:09:03] Solid state sodium batteries are not a thing.
[1:09:06] Right.
[1:09:07] Right.
[1:09:07] And that's sort of the holy grail that the Chicago UCSD paper was trying to solve.
[1:09:12] Right.
[1:09:12] Right.
[1:09:13] They're trying to get closer to that solid state sodium battery because then we could start using it for EVs and long term storage and all this other kind of stuff.
[1:09:21] Yes.
[1:09:22] So they made a real leap forward in that solid state.
[1:09:25] Solid state.
[1:09:26] Where there's no liquid electrolyte.
[1:09:28] Right.
[1:09:28] That's going around.
[1:09:29] Right.
[1:09:30] Which if you listen to the full episode is...
[1:09:33] you know yeah yeah we we did make it a thing but okay fine we'll take it play um and then finally airplane speed the hypersonics episode this this one i got a lot of a lot of uh poopoo for it is not 250 miles per hour it is in fact 500 miles per hour and i should have i should have like known this because you know from here to new york is like 3 000 miles it takes six hours like five hours like 500 miles
[1:10:00] per hour that kind of makes sense but um what really incensed me about this is because um one of my friends good friends from college told me that he recommended it to one of his friends yes um justin honenstein justin if you're if you're listening if you're listening um i understand that you don't want to listen to any of our podcasts because because we made that one error and we're not acknowledging it well here i am acknowledging it
[1:10:25] Here I am.
[1:10:26] This guy, by the way, I've interacted with him a few times.
[1:10:30] I think he's just jealous.
[1:10:32] Yeah, I get it.
[1:10:32] Because we beat him in beer pong in 2011.
[1:10:35] Thanksgiving 2011, I don't forget.
[1:10:38] We beat you, me and Alan.
[1:10:40] We beat you in beer pong in 2011.
[1:10:42] And then we sang a Jason Derulo song.
[1:10:44] And we sang it really well.
[1:10:46] He was harmonizing.
[1:10:47] And we sang it really well.
[1:10:48] Maybe he's jealous.
[1:10:50] And now he doesn't want to listen to our podcast.
[1:10:52] Well, Justin...
[1:10:55] Now I've admitted that I said 250 when I should have said 500.
[1:11:00] And so for those still watching at the end, you know our trend where now at the end of the show, it's helpful for us to know that people actually reach the end.
[1:11:09] And so for those still listening, whether it's a podcast or you're watching the video, in the comment thread, if you want to go ahead and put...
[1:11:19] Justin, they apologized, or Justin, we're waiting for you.
[1:11:23] Or anything funny Justin.
[1:11:26] Justin, if you have a bit that you want to put...
[1:11:30] Put it in the comments.
[1:11:31] We want to get Justin back on the train, listening for not only our season one episodes, but moving forward to season two.
[1:11:38] And again, we're not above reproach here.
[1:11:42] No.
[1:11:42] Right?
[1:11:42] No.
[1:11:43] That was fair play, Justin.
[1:11:44] A hundred percent.
[1:11:45] And we are willing, again, because the whole point here, like the fundamental concept of science we talk about every day is it's an iterative process.
[1:11:53] This was our first season.
[1:11:55] We literally started it in my garage that's now converted into this unbelievable studio.
[1:12:00] Amazing.
[1:12:01] And we are very excited for what we're going to be able to do next season.
[1:12:06] We do know – just a couple of notes before we wrap up.
[1:12:10] We've heard the comments about all the sound and the angles and the colors, all the production people, all that's been solved.
[1:12:18] So now the color matching is good.
[1:12:20] Yeah.
[1:12:21] If I bang on the table, it doesn't get picked up as much anymore.
[1:12:24] I also don't bang on the table as much.
[1:12:27] So we, we hear you.
[1:12:28] We're listening as we go into next season.
[1:12:31] A lot of folks have asked us about whether we're going to do interviews.
[1:12:36] The focus of this show is not to be an interview show.
[1:12:39] There are plenty of science podcasts that are interview shows.
[1:12:43] That being said, we do have plans to do some interesting interviews.
[1:12:50] Focus or featurettes that will both be virtual and in person with labs or research teams in what they're working on.
[1:13:00] So we will be incorporating interview style content next year.
[1:13:05] But...
[1:13:06] This is not the core focus of the show.
[1:13:09] The show is really meant to look at what is breaking research in the verticals and industries we're interested in and talking about those from first principles.
[1:13:19] That is still the fundamental DNA of the show.
[1:13:22] And we want to stick and focus on making sure that that is our core entry point.
[1:13:28] However...
[1:13:30] we only had six months this year.
[1:13:31] Next year we have a full year.
[1:13:33] And so we can splice in a couple of interviews.
[1:13:36] And we have some good ones that I think you guys will enjoy quite a bit.
[1:13:39] Not least of which will be my finally convinced my dad, at a minimum, who's a parasitologist, Harvard postdoc, has had some incredible things he's done in his life to come on and talk about one of the things he discovered
[1:13:58] almost two decades, maybe even three decades ago, that is now actually going to be going into production by a pharma company.
[1:14:06] And so that'll be at least one of them.
[1:14:08] And we have a couple more that are exciting.
[1:14:10] And if you are on a research team, if you're a fan of the pod and you're a PhD, a postdoc, the principal investigator, and you would like us to talk about what you're researching, yeah,
[1:14:26] Please email us.
[1:14:27] Our email is available on the social platforms.
[1:14:29] It'll be available on the website.
[1:14:32] Or shoot us a DM on any of the social platforms and let us know what you're doing.
[1:14:36] We'd be happy to explore potentially having you guys on the pod and talking about your research.
[1:14:43] Again, this is not an invite for people who have created their own research paper on the side.
[1:14:48] Unfortunately, we have to keep it pegged to published or research institutions that are associated with either a university or a mainstream lab.
[1:14:56] That's just where our box is and what we're focused on.
[1:14:59] And so maybe some point in the future, we can take folks not associated with that.
[1:15:04] But that is currently our focus.
[1:15:07] So if you have sent us papers...
[1:15:09] that you've created on your own.
[1:15:11] We appreciate it.
[1:15:12] This is just not the platform for those.
[1:15:13] Um,
[1:15:15] And I'll wrap up with our new website will go out for season two.
[1:15:19] Our new leaderboards will also go out for season two.
[1:15:22] And we will have a new way to support the show via direct donation.
[1:15:27] Because, again, there's only two people on the FFP team.
[1:15:31] It's literally just the two of us.
[1:15:33] It's just us.
[1:15:33] There's no production assistant.
[1:15:35] There's no editor.
[1:15:36] There's no social media person.
[1:15:38] There's no assistant.
[1:15:39] It's just us.
[1:15:40] It's a lot of work.
[1:15:41] And so doing a weekly show at this scale, video and audio, also with the social distribution, is quite a bit.
[1:15:50] And so all of the engagement, the best way you can support currently, share it with your lab.
[1:15:56] If you're in a lab meeting, a research team meeting, talk about the show.
[1:15:59] Yeah, please.
[1:15:59] Please.
[1:16:00] Would love that.
[1:16:00] If you're on socials, share it in your DMs, repost it to your story.
[1:16:04] Every little piece of engagement –
[1:16:06] helps us battle the billionaire algorithm.
[1:16:09] We are trying to make science sexy.
[1:16:11] We're trying to make it popular and hip and expand it to more people.
[1:16:16] And all of you have been a huge help in helping get this show to reach.
[1:16:21] I mean, we're doing 3 million views on Instagram a month.
[1:16:25] We're doing a million on TikTok.
[1:16:27] It's just unbelievable.
[1:16:29] Again, the fastest growing, we are one of the fastest growing science pods globally.
[1:16:34] in the world.
[1:16:35] And that's all because of you, the audience.
[1:16:36] And we're incredibly grateful that the random chemistry that this friendship has around this has, has really resonated with so many of you.
[1:16:46] It's been an incredible year.
[1:16:47] Yes, it really has.
[1:16:49] And we're excited for next year.
[1:16:51] As always, I'm your host, Lester Nari joined by the smartest and the best science communicator on the planet.
[1:16:59] And our resident PhD, Krishna Chowdhury.
[1:17:03] We'll see you all next year.
[1:17:04] Happy holidays.
[1:17:06] And with that, the 2025 season has come to an end.
[1:17:12] This is from First Principles.

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