Re:Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed ...
by pavlov on Monday December 19, 2022 @05:01AM
(#34050357)
Just 75 years after Thomas Watson said that, we were already doing EUV lithography, a process whose description and commercial incentives would have been totally incomprehensible to him:
"In our laser-produced plasma (LPP) source, molten tin droplets of around 25 microns in diameter are ejected from a generator at 70 meters per second. As they fall, the droplets are hit first by a low-intensity laser pulse that flattens them into a pancake shape. Then a more powerful laser pulse vaporizes the flattened droplet to create a plasma that emits EUV light. To produce enough light to manufacture microchips, this process is repeated 50,000 times every second."
Transistors, microchips and lasers were not invented yet in 1943. How would one even guess that it could soon be a viable business to build a giant machine that shoots molten tin droplets at 50,000 Hz to produce a particular bandwidth of light so that you could create billions of tiny computers out of sand?
Hopefully fusion is on a similar path where the description of 2100's commercial reactor will sound similarly incomprehensible to us.
"In our laser-produced plasma (LPP) source, molten tin droplets of around 25 microns in diameter are ejected from a generator at 70 meters per second. As they fall, the droplets are hit first by a low-intensity laser pulse that flattens them into a pancake shape. Then a more powerful laser pulse vaporizes the flattened droplet to create a plasma that emits EUV light. To produce enough light to manufacture microchips, this process is repeated 50,000 times every second."
https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/li...
Transistors, microchips and lasers were not invented yet in 1943. How would one even guess that it could soon be a viable business to build a giant machine that shoots molten tin droplets at 50,000 Hz to produce a particular bandwidth of light so that you could create billions of tiny computers out of sand?
Hopefully fusion is on a similar path where the description of 2100's commercial reactor will sound similarly incomprehensible to us.