Something Only I Could Do

Sheng Xianfu froze.

When he handed over the paper, he had even prepared himself to be ridiculed.

Yet he had never expected his wildly imaginative idea to win Lu Zhou's approval.

"Cold Nuclear Fusion is not a proposition to be mocked. In fact, many things we cannot accomplish are not wrong because they are impossible, but because we still do not understand this universe well enough."

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Rising from his desk, Lu Zhou walked over to the Solar System chart hanging in a corner of the office wall, his gaze settling on that flame that had burned for billions of years without change.

"Just as we still cannot fully understand the source of a star's power."

In a sense, the fusion reactions occurring within stars were also a form of Cold Nuclear Fusion, except they did not appear "cold" in the way people understood it.

To achieve nuclear fusion, two protons had to possess enough energy to overcome the Coulomb Potential Barrier, reducing the distance between atomic nuclei to less than 10^-14 meters. To reach that distance, the thermal kinetic energy of a single atomic nucleus had to at least reach the MeV level.

Yet in reality, the average thermal kinetic energy of atomic nuclei inside stars only reached the KeV level.

A simple comparison of orders of magnitude proved that thermal kinetic energy alone could not overcome the Coulomb Potential Barrier and trigger nuclear fusion. Even accounting for gravity, fusion reactions within stars were, strictly speaking, unscientific.

From the perspective of Classical Mechanics, it was difficult to explain such an "unscientific" phenomenon.

Therefore, it was necessary to introduce a concept from Quantum Mechanics.

That was the Quantum Tunneling Effect.

Though the concept might sound obscure, its meaning was not difficult to understand as long as one had