What seemed impossible in the world of science has just been solved, and Isaac Newton predicted it. Researchers from the University of Texas, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Type One Energy Group have managed to solve a puzzle that has been giving scientists trouble for a long time. This solution has a direct impact on what we know today about renewable, accessible, and clean energy. The craziest thing about all this is that Isaac Newton had already predicted this event in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The 70-year-old myth that has just been confirmed
Since 1950, scientists worldwide have been struggling to find a solution to achieve controlled nuclear fusion. What does this mean? Basically, we want to reproduce on Earth the same process that powers the Sun, that is, the fusion of atomic nuclei to release an immense amount of energy.
And why is this so important? Well, this energy, called nuclear fusion energy, would be completely clean and would not produce any carbon emissions – the best of both worlds, we know. However, things did not happen so easily…
Back in the 1950s, scientists created the first concepts of reactors, such as stellarators. This tool was designed to contain the super-hot plasma necessary for fusion to occur, but none of the ones created since then were successful, because “invisible holes” always appeared through which particles escaped. That’s when the myth (which is more like an almost impossible challenge) came about:
“How do we design perfect, flawless reactors capable of keeping high-energy particles trapped in fusion reactors?”.
The answer only came in 2025, 70 years later, and what we learned is that there is no such thing as perfect confinement, and Newton knew that.
The discovery that validated Newton’s proposed solution
A team of scientists from the University of Texas, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Type One Energy Group has discovered a new method to solve the challenge of keeping energetic particles confined in reactors.
With this new approach, it is now possible to design magnetic confinement systems 10 times faster than the standard approach. The scientists themselves, including Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas, describe the importance of this discovery:
“It’s a paradigm shift in the way we design these reactor”.
Newton’s laws of motion were already used in this process, as they were very precise, but they consumed a lot of computational time. Therefore, they began to use the perturbation theory approach, which is a simpler method, but also much less precise, which has delayed the development of reactors.
“There is currently no practical way to find a theoretical answer to the question of alpha particle confinement without our results. Direct application of Newton’s laws is very expensive. Perturbation methods make gross errors. Ours is the first theory that avoids these pitfalls”, Burby said.
With this, the team was able to confirm that Newton predicted this solution by anticipating the behavior of particles within the magnetic field (the reactors). But it was only now that scientists were able to apply it in a more accessible way.
It looks like nuclear fusion energy is closer than ever
We can say that this discovery represents a leap into the future of nuclear fusion energy. Of course, it won’t be able to power our homes in the blink of an eye, but this milestone does eliminate one of the biggest obstacles in science: precise control of plasma.
This goes to show that not everything we’ve believed for decades (7, in this case) is an indisputable truth (in fact, scientists have just discovered that a material previously considered impossible now makes solar panels work). However, Newton had already pointed out the solution to us, but we’ve missed some details.
