406 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



wave ahead of it wliicli is so strong that it builds a plasma sheath all 

 the way around the astronaut, and our communication with the astro- 

 naut disappears. 



Physicists and engineers have been spending a great deal of their 

 time in a search for a way of producing controlled thermonuclear 

 fusion. We all know the sun is hot — a million degrees or more on 

 the corona. At those temperatures a controlled thermonuclear reac- 

 tion is produced, as we mentioned before. We would like to be able 

 to carry on the same reaction in a controlled fashion on the surface 

 of the earth. The advantages would be tremendous. For one thing 

 we are going to run out of fuel to produce power if we keep on using 

 fossil fuel. The fission fuel is rather dangerous because radioactive 

 products are left over after the reaction. If we went completely to 

 fission power, we would eventually have difficulty in disposing safely 

 of all the radioactive waste. The thermonuclear reaction has no ra- 

 dioactive waste. It ends up as ordinary helium. Furthermore, its 

 fuel is a plentiful isotope of hydrogen, found in all water. "V\'lierever 

 human beings are, there is water, and you can burn this water to 

 produce thermonuclear reactions. We know that a thermonuclear 

 reaction works because the hydrogen bomb is exactly this : by explod- 

 ing a fission bomb in contact with the hydrogen isotopes, you heat 

 them so hot that the fusion reaction takes place. We would like to 

 be able to do this in a controlled way in the laboratory ; we have not 

 yet succeeded. 



It should be quite clear from this description of the plasma state 

 that its science and technology do not fall within any one of the usual 

 established disciplines. It is well known that the Massachusetts In- 

 stitute of Technology is a place where particular disciplines do not 

 have any very rigid boundaries. The field of plasma physics cap- 

 italizes upon the philosophy of teaching at M.I.T. 



At the moment there are over 30 members of the faculty working 

 on some phase of the plasma program. There are about 100 grad- 

 uate students doing research and about 30 undergraduates absorbed 

 into the laboratory in various ways. It is difficult to know how many 

 courses are being taught at the graduate level because many of the 

 courses are not of a very formal nature. However, listed in the cata- 

 log are more than 20 different courses in the plasma field, taught in 

 many departments in both Science and Engineering. For example, 

 in Mechanical Engineering there are courses having to do with the 

 magnetohydrodynamic fluid flow, magnetohydrodynamic machines, 

 shock waves, and direct energy conversion. You would expect the 

 Electrical Engineering Department to cover a great many of these 

 areas and they do. There is a magneto-fluid dynamics course ; there 

 are some energy conversion courses ; there are microwave interaction 

 courses that deal with radio astronomy and the structure and be- 



