This is an I-Hard podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Energy is everything.

It powers our lives, propels our cars, runs our massive data centers.

Our growing thirst for energy influences politics, it alters

the climate, it sparks conflicts, and it constrains the future of our civilization. Energy is also

very personal. Our bodies are made of vibrating particles, which themselves are pulses of energy

in quantum fields, so everything is energy.

And for decades now, physics has been promising to unleash the energy source of the stars.

Fusion, the thing that makes our sun glow, but brought down to Earth and mastered for our empire.

So exciting and so just around the corner. It's been 20 years away for about 80 years now.

So if hot fusion isn't just around the corner, is there another way? What if we don't need to replicate

the conditions inside the sun? What if we could do it all at room temperature? What is the physics

of cold fusion? Is it all just charlatans and nonsense? Or is there real science there? And if not,

why is DARPA funding it? We'll dig into all of that today on Daniel and Kelly's

extraordinary universe. on Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Hello, this is Kelly Wienersmith.

I study parasites and space, and in Virginia right now it is so cold that your fingers fuse to anything you touch that is slightly wet.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and my wife's favorite piece of physics is a terrible movie called Cold Fusion, starring Keanu Reeves wearing a University of Chicago sweatshirt.

Oh, you know, my favorite movie is Keanu Reeves wearing anything because he's such a cutie.

That movie is so bad and so full of plot holes, but Keanu Reeves is great and he looks

great in that shirt. And hey, if he makes physicists look good on the screen, I'm all for it.

Oh, yeah, I've never seen that particular movie, but I like that.

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