A lot of changes happened over the past 18 months. The MIT collaboration restarted and this time I’m getting paid for it 🙌. It’s the first time I’ve been paid to do physics since 2014, so it’s a big deal for me 😊.
What physics I hear you say?
If you’ve been following my science posts you’ll know that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life involved in fusion, whether that be hot fusion or cold fusion. So, after a couple of years away from it all (a story for another time), I’m back in the fusion business!
This has been made possible thanks to the very generous grant from the Anthropocene Institute 🙏. The work involved continuing the quantum notebook project that aims to make some of the underlying physics of cold fusion more accessible to technical people outside of the field.
As part of this work, I gave a talk at a solid state fusion conference in September this year - “International Workshop of Anomalies in Hydrogen Loaded Metal”.
It’s the first academic conference that I’ve spoken at since I left full time hot fusion research 10 years ago and I could really feel the difference in my style from having spent the last 7 years being involved in technology education.
Alongside the notebooks, the MIT team and I published “Known mechanisms that increase nuclear fusion rates in the solid state”. It’s a paper that explains how cold fusion works. The juicy details are in the 230 page supplementary notes that I worked on 🤓. The physics is all based on the pioneering work of Prof. Peter Hagelstein who’s been tirelessly working on the problem of cold fusion ever since it exploded onto the stage in 1989.
It’s been so exciting to be involved in this project because it’s genuinely at the frontier of knowledge and the potential impact on energy is hard to overstate. There’s still a lot of testing and refining to be done of course, but at least we now have a way to move forwards 🚀.
Part of moving forwards has involved reflecting on what this field actually is. It’s becoming clear that cold fusion isn’t just about fusion—it’s something bigger. I previously wrote some blog posts on the theme of Solid State Nuclear Reactions, which captured some of that larger scope but was a bit too generic. Everything finally clicked when Florian Metzler came up with the name Nucleonics.
Nucleonics is the scientific and engineering discipline that studies and applies the principles of physics to design, create, and operate devices that manipulate nucleons.
Florian took inspiration from the emergence of electronics, a fundamental shift in humanity’s relationship with information. This shift was driven by a revolution in how we understood and interacted with electrons: rather than relying on the movement of large groups of electrons through vacuum tubes, the transistor enabled deliberate and precise control of electronic states. Nucleonics poses a similar question: what if we could achieve the same level of precision and control over nuclear states as we have over electronic states?
So, this is what I work on now - Nucleonics 🤓. I’ll be posting updates here and will link out to more technical details on the nucleonics.org website. In addition, the team and I will be writing a Nucleonics Substack for those who want to stay focussed on nucleonics.
More updates soon.
Take care 👋.