The Extraordinary Power of Everyday Materials
Way before Dodaro was thinking about these applications, he was struck by the extraordinary potential of everyday materials. During his doctoral studies, he was inspired by his professor, Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin. He pointed out to Dodaro that the fascinating quantum effects he studied were present in a piece of silicon. “He said, ‘all these particles and antiparticles, all of these things that sound very exotic. You could see them in real-world materials like silicon, like a photovoltaic solar cell.’”
This gave all of the equations and theories Dodaro studied new life because, as he put it, “you're applying them to do something very powerful.” This was incredibly exciting. As exciting as black holes and astrophysics were, Dodaro tells me, “We can't really test and explore.” By contrast, “the real materials that people were taking and studying led to the transistor and the laser and all of these revolutionary technologies that came from understanding basic foundational level physics.” This extraordinary power of ordinary solid-state materials resonated with Dodaro early in his doctoral career. He thought, “Yeah, the equations are interesting and the theory of quantum gravity would be really cool. But what's the application ultimately? And so myself, I was passionate about climate change, and I didn't know exactly where I could make an impact.”
In his usual mathematically-informed manner, he made a calculation.
“I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I had heard about the experiments. When you do the calculation for fusion, it's a quantum tunneling process. And so you know how to calculate that if you know what the repulsion is–the barrier, the Coulomb barrier. And you could say, well, if I bring particles this close together, what's the probability that they overlap? And you could write that down? And you could say it's 10-2000 or something? Well, if I put an electron in between them, I form a hydrogen atom. And I repeat that calculation–and there's papers that repeat this, and find like 10-64.So you say, Okay, I went from 10-2000 to 10-64 by just putting in an electron. That's a massive leap in terms of orders of magnitude, because we're talking about something that's exponentially small! And so a slight change like an electron just bringing them closer together. And so then you say, well, what if there are these other effects on top. You can imagine Nature being creative and finding ways to get you the rest of those orders of magnitude until you start getting heat at these measurable levels that we're interested in. If you say cold fusion and LENR/solid-state fusion is impossible, I would say, no, it's not. You calculate and find 10-2000, which may be astronomically small, but that's not actually zero. Right? It's exciting. There's so many stars in the universe, and the probability is very low, but it's not impossible. I'm not creative enough to think of all of the ways that Nature can do this and fail. And so I'm always open to the possibility that some configuration of atoms can make it work.”