Holiday Edition Part 2, Science Matters: How the Universe Made your Holiday Gifts
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2022
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In December it was announced that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory National Ignition facility has achieved its first goal of “Ignition”, in which 192 powerful lasers focused on a small pellet of fuel led to a sustained fusion reaction for a fraction of a second that released more energy than it received from the incident laser light. Following on requests from many readers, I describe the science behind this experiment, and the wishful thinking associated with it, regarding the possible use of fusion as an unlimited power source for humanity in the future.
This special holiday edition of Science Matters accompanies our last podcast, with Augusten Burroughs, which was about another kind of wishful thinking. I hope you enjoy this science as much as I hope you enjoyed that delightful discussion with a wonderful writer.
Happy Holidays from Critical Mass, The Origins Foundation, the Origins Podcast, and from me.
Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Happy Holidays and welcome to a holiday edition of Science Matters, part of the Origins |
| 0:14.8 | podcast produced by the Origins Project Foundation. This week we released a podcast which was really about wishful thinking with an |
| 0:25.3 | author I really enjoy, Augustin Burroughs, and I thought it would be fun to supplement that |
| 0:29.3 | since it's the holiday season and often produce a science matters around that time to talk about |
| 0:35.2 | another aspect of what has been wishful thinking, |
| 0:38.8 | but now may be turned into a little more science than just wishful thinking. |
| 0:43.3 | And it also allows me to do two things, to tell you a holiday story about our origins, |
| 0:49.8 | and also to cover a topic that's been in the news currently this month and a lot of people have asked me about. |
| 0:56.2 | So let's go right to the presentation. I'm going to start sharing my screen. |
| 1:03.6 | And here we go. So the title of the presentation is |
| 1:08.3 | how the universe made your holiday gifts. |
| 1:14.0 | And we'll see we'll go almost right back to the beginning of time. |
| 1:18.2 | And it's got a kind of a subtitle, which is, and the gift that may help keep, the gift that |
| 1:24.2 | may keep on giving. |
| 1:25.3 | And that's the topic that that is more relevant to what's |
| 1:28.4 | going on right now in the news. So I want to begin with a quote which I've adapted from a famous |
| 1:35.9 | quote. The quote I want to use is if you wish to create a holiday gift from scratch, you must first |
| 1:42.3 | invent the universe. And that's after the famous quote from |
| 1:45.9 | Carl Sagan, who once said, if you want to create an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the |
| 1:50.1 | universe. So if you want to create your holiday gifts, first you have a universe in which they can exist. |
| 1:57.0 | And then let's assume we've already invented a universe, okay? And we have one. What next? Well, we have to make the stuff that your holiday gifts are made of, all the matter that we look around us on Earth right now that we use for our holiday gifts. And that matter, those elements began to be made in the first few moments of the Big Bang. |
| 2:20.1 | When the Big Bang was very, very hot in the earliest moments of the Big Bang before the universe was one second old, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lawrence M. Krauss, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Lawrence M. Krauss and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.