Fundamental Constants

Once upon a time, when I was but a humble undergraduate, I had a professor who interrupted his lecture to point out one of the fundamental constants of the universe:

"Unlike such things as the fine structure constant, which is occasionally up for discussion (and why 1/137?), there is one number that remains fixed and unchanging throughout time. When I was an undergraduate, commercial fusion energy was twenty years in the future. When I was a graduate student, commercial fusion energy was twenty years in the future. And now, as I look upon your bright and eager faces, I tell you that commercial fusion energy is twenty years in the future."*

* I may be gifting my old instructor with more eloquence than he actually possessed, but we'll give the old boy the benefit of the doubt.

I sat in my chair as he said this and harbored a secret chuckle, for I knew what he did not. I had spent several years as a technician working for the Fusion Research Center at the University of Texas on the Texas EXperimental Tokamak (TEXT), and I knew that with the remarkable breakthroughs that we were making daily, that it would only be a decade or so before someone, somewhere, had a working fusion reactor. After all, at that time there were hints from Princeton and other places of near-break-even operation, if only for a fraction of a second.

Well, today (and I am sorry to say that it has been much more than twenty years since I had sat in that classroom) there was an Op-Ed in the New York Times on the topic of fusion energy. Stewart Prager who is identified as the director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory has a wonderful piece that talks of all the benefits of fusion energy: it's not a greenhouse gas producer, it doesn't pollute, there is no chance for a catastrophic meltdown, it's available to every country on Earth, and the fuel is damn near free.

And then, in the last paragraph, just when he's closing the deal, he mentions the fundamental constant:

Fusion used to be an energy source for my generation’s grandchildren; now, plans across the world call for a demonstration power plant in about 20 years.

Hmmm, I wonder how the gravitational constant is holding up these days?