Laboratory Stars

I started working in science in 1970 in Mexico. The National Commission of Nuclear Energy was in charge of a plasma physics program to understand plasmas in the laboratory. The goal was to eventually build a fusion reactor. Stars produce energy that way.

After almost forty years, that dedicated group of people failed. Of course I also have responsibility for that, what gives me comfort though, is that nobody, nowhere in the World has done it.

Why?

Chaos theory gives us clues, protons in plasmas always find ways to escape any laboratory made barrier.

How does Nature do it?

Gravity.

A big pile of atoms, mainly Hydrogen and Helium, are parked somewhere, to the point where there is nothing else in the way to extinction of those nuclei in a little singularity-like region in the middle, but to fuse, and thus generate the energy we see all over the sky.

When I write this, I notice the chutpzah. Are we crazy; a Sun in our kitchen?

Maybe; the fact is that after billions of dollars, maybe trillions, there is no kitchen table sun.

Reading the lecture notes of Professor Wolfgang Ketterle (below), I got the idea that maybe Nature (put here the name of whatever god, or gods, you believe in), has given us a brake, in the nick of time. There is no time left, I'm hearing Ralph Nader in Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! . He is convincing, very convincing: he has a new book, "Only the Super Rich can Save Us" to explain his thoughts.

Ralph Nader writes:

"My friends, what brings us here is a common foreboding -- a
closing circle of global doom. The world is not doing well. It is
spinning out of control. Its inhabitants have allowed greed,
power, ignorance, wealth, science, technology, and religion to
depreciate reality, and deny potential. With our capitalist
backgrounds, it's easy for us not to be beguiled by the plutocracy's
self-serving manipulation of economic indicators. We know how
wealth is being accumulated, defined, concentrated, and stratified.
Why, four hundred and fifty of us have wealth equivalent to the
combined wealth of the bottom three billion impoverished people on Earth."

Here is my contribution.

We may be able to make a kitchen table spinning star. That is the secret ingredient, SPIN.

There are examples out there. They are called Neutron Stars. When more matter is collected in those regions mentioned above, a Super Nova is born, they throw away matter, and some keeps contracting, sometimes ending in these Neutron Stars. These objects are basically macroscopic nuclei. Mainly neutrons in a macroscopic quantum state.

Here comes the work recently reported by Ketterle's MIT group.

I was lucky to be in a talk at Fermilab, either by Carl Weiman, or Eric Cornell in 1994, or 1995, this was more than fifteen years ago, and I didn't take notes, so I forgot which.

The crux of the talk was that low temperature physics, and high energy physics had points in common, the speaker went on to explain the similarities. Quantum Mechanics is crucial for both, for different reasons, in high energy physics small distances are accessible, in low temperature physics the quantum wavelength increases: So going down in temperature, is similar to going up in energy, dimensional analysis and a bit of physical concepts easily convince us, that those two ways lead to quantum behavior, in one case by allowing us to see little things, and in the other, by making little things have influence in bigger things.

This group from Colorado eventually got the Physics Nobel Prize for producing for the first time a Bose-Einstein Condensate. This state of matter was predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924–25. Only in 1994 were there enough pieces of equipment to produce it in the laboratory, and Professors Ketterle, Weiman and Cornell got the prize for being the first to accomplish this feat experimentally.

Now we come to 2009, I am 60 years old now, and finally I see that my dream of forty years ago, may come true.

Professor Ketterle writes in his notes that Nature has been kind to us. They were finally able to produce a spinning macroscopic quantum state.⁶Li nuclei were brought together with the same tricks used to put together non-spinning atoms in 1994. This state of matter, has the property of change, with an external macroscopic dial. The interaction between nuclei can be adjusted with an external knob!

The physicist then moves the dial until all the atoms, a million or so of them, suddenly point in the same direction!

Now we have a spinning blob of matter controlled by us.

Here comes the new idea.

Let us assume that it costs ten thousand dollars to make this blob of a million atoms, I assume it fills a region of one cubic centimeter, to get a cubic meter, you will need a million times more money. We are talking real money now. I guess the Department of Defense together with the Department of Energy, can pony up big money. A million times ten thousand, that makes Ten Billion Dollars.

If that sounds like a lot of money to you, just think of the trillions the non-spinning guys have used, with nothing to show for it.

Of course this whole thing may be wrong, maybe there is no way to scale up this contraptions in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Boulder, Colorado, and other labs in hot pursuit of this bizarre state of matter.

But what if it is possible to make a star in the lab.

That will be cool.