• Question: How was nuclear fusion discovered?

    Asked by Selina on 29 Nov 2021.
    • Photo: Craig Hickman

      Craig Hickman answered on 29 Nov 2021:


      Hi Selina,

      Good question! I had to look this up myself.

      In 1920, British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was the first to suggest that stars draw their apparent endless energy from the fusion of hydrogen into helium.

      It took another theoretician, Hans Bethe, to precisely identify the processes that Eddington had postulated. This won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967.

      From https://www.iter.org/mag/3/29

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