Back IB Extended Essay · Physics

Limitless energy exists. You're looking at it.

every star runs on fusion, and has for billions of years

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Down here, our appetite for energy is exploding, just as burning things has to stop.

AI · electric everything · two billion more people · and carbon must fall

Our generation's moonshot: a star in a bottle.

the fuel is in seawater: enough for everyone, forever

Except a star vaporizes every bottle we own.

one hundred million degrees, six times hotter than the sun's core

But a star's fuel is charged particles, and charged particles obey magnetic fields.

a particle spirals around a field line like a bead on a wire: free to slide along it, unable to leave it

So we loop those field lines into a ring: a bottle with walls of pure magnetism.

the fuel rides the lines around and around. it never touches metal

One catch: the cage must twist like a corkscrew, or the star slips out.

So humanity split into two camps.

Tokamak

the heavyweight: twists its own cage from within

Stellarator

the sculpture: born pre-twisted, coils do everything

same dream · opposite machines

3d geometry · ITER Organization print files · Proxima Fusion open W7-X models (MIT)

The whole race hangs on one stopwatch: how long can you hold a star?

today: fractions of a second. the dream: forever.

my extended essay asks

Is there one law of shape powerful enough to judge every star bottle we could ever build?

Find it, and reactor design becomes something you can compute: dial in a shape, read out the hold time, before a single ton of steel is poured. That's the shortcut to plugging into a star: skip the Dyson swarm, bottle one at home.

Bottle a star, and everything downstream changes.

this is what one law of shape is really for

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