You and Betty and the nancy's and bills and joes and james will find in the study of science a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas. This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it matters. We're coming up to the 400th episode of this podcast, and so I'm revisiting some of my favorite topics with new guests,

sometimes with a co-host, sometimes with multiple guests. And so this week I thought it would

be appropriate to talk about a major scientific discovery. Physics is definitely not my forte,

but I always love talking to experimental physicists or theoretical physicists,

not just because they help me feel insignificant, but also because they put things into perspective.

All of a sudden, when you're talking about discovering a whole new way of powering our world or our place in this

vast universe, the everyday problems that I'm facing seem less important. So this week I have the

pleasure of talking to two physicists, yep, two at the same time, both from Lawrence Livermore

National Labs.

And they were part of the team that had this huge breakthrough back in December 2022,

when essentially in a series of experiments, they showed that fusion is actually a viable potential energy source.

Sabrina Nagel is a group leader in the physics division at Lawrence Livermore National Labs,

and she's the lead scientist for the National Ignition Facilities Dynamic X-ray Detectors Group.

And then Dr. Matias Hoenberger is an experimental scientist and group leader working on inertial confinement fusion at the NIF at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

He's been working and performing experiments in the pursuit of,

and now on the accomplishment of, Fusion Ignition for the last 13 years.

Sabrina and Matthias, welcome to inquiring minds.

I'm so excited to talk to you.

Well, thank you very much for having us.

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