What if!

Before beginning my first blog, let us assume that I have the required technology to invent anything that I could imagine such that it is theoretically possible.

I have always been fascinated by science and technology. My magical(aka physics) invention has its roots in the generation of energy. But wait, how can we create energy? The punchline of physics is "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can only be converted from one form into another". Hence here energy generation in this blog means converting non-useful means of energy into useful means like electricity.

Curious minds might cuss me asking why I'm interested in energy despite having any technology that I can dream of. Well, just trust me, After you have read the complete blog, you will discover that we have indeed achieved something magical!

Let's understand why energy generation is a big deal! To start, our current scheme of energy(electricity) generation is based on the combustion of fossil fuels and only a part of it is generated from renewable sources like solar panels, wind turbines, etc. So the first stumbling block is "limited resources". Fossil fuels are not infinite, they are limited and take millions of years to form and renewable sources are not reliable as they depend on the natural environment. Let's call my invention a black box. So, the black box tackles this issue and its fuel is abundant and can be replenished(basically infinite!).

Let us now handle the second stumbling block aka pollution. Combustion of fossil fuels contributes to pollution and they are used almost everywhere from vehicles to generating electricity. Renewable sources do not cause pollution but are not reliable and hence cannot be used for mass production(conversion) of energy. The black box contributes to almost zero pollution! Now this is getting interesting.

The last boulder block is efficiency. The average efficiency of converting mass into energy(E=mc2) from chemical reactions such as the combustion of fossil fuels is 0.000000001%. Whereas the efficiency of my black box for converting mass into energy is 0.7%. 0.7% efficiency is still mediocre but a billion times better than combustion reactions.

So, for the final wrap-up, what is this black box? It is none other than nuclear fusion!! But what does nuclear fusion have to do with technology? Humans have already developed hydrogen bomb which internally uses nuclear fusion. But nuclear fusion is not controllable and hence bombing on Earth to produce energy sounds daunting as nuclear fusion requires millions of degrees of temperature and massive pressure such as the core of the sun. Hence, my technology ensures that nuclear fusion is achieved at room temperature without any life-threatening bombings. This can be achieved by replacing electrons in hydrogen atoms with muons which reduce the orbit and hence create circumstances for hydrogen atoms to fuse as their orbits are near to the nucleus. This fusion releases energy which can be used to generate electricity. But muons live very shortly(nanoseconds) and hardly fuse up to 8 hydrogen atoms before fusing themselves or decaying. So, muons are not available due to their lifespan and we have to create them using muon catalyzer. A Muon catalyzer consumes energy to produce muons and the net energy is consumed rather than produced. Hence the magical technology that I have claimed in the beginning is an efficient muon catalyzer which can produce muons with less energy and hence the net energy can be used to power our civilization. This method doesn't cause pollution and it is quite efficient compared to chemical reactions but is it unlimited? Hydrogen in Earth's atmosphere is abundant but not unlimited. Hence we should have some way of replenishing the used hydrogen either with other methods or by performing nuclear fission on generated helium atoms from the above muon catalyzer. But nuclear fission produces nuclear waste and hence we need another magical invention which can perform nuclear fission without generating nuclear waste which is life threatening to living things. Well, that's a topic for some other day.

If such a thing can be done then we can combine both fusion and fission and generate tremendous amounts of controlled energy for the production of electricity to power our civilization. Imagine a planet with vehicles without pollution, designing spaceships, opening doors to better research and much more with essentially infinite energy! We would get one step closer to a utopian world.

I credit Henry Reich for most of the scientific facts listed in this blog. Interested people can view his YouTube channel "minutephysics" to consume content related to physics.