Fusion

Part I of Essay
For centuries, humankind has looked at the stars, and for just as many years humankind has tried to explain the existence of those very same stars. Were they holes in an enormous canvas that covered the earth? Were they fire-flies that could only be seen when the Apollo h ....

Part II of Essay
.... One simple way of explaining it is taking two balls of clay and mashing them into one, creating a new, larger particle from the two. Now replace those balls of clay with sub-atomic particles, and when they meld, release an enormous amount of energy. This is fusion. There is currently three known variations of fusion: the proton-proton reaction (Figure 1.1), the carbon cycle (Figure 1.2), and the triple-alpha process (Figure 1.3). In the proton-proton reaction, a proton (the positively charged nucleus of a hydrogen atom) is forced so c ....