Knowledge is Power Part 2: The extended potential well.

I like potential wells. Its easy to bridge to common sense: If a broken down car is between two hills, a takes work to push it out of there, up a hill. If the same car is sitting in a tiny dip on top of a hill, the work it takes to push it out is less than the work you can harness out of the car rolling down the hill, if say, it had a rope attached to it, you could use that work to pull a skateboarder up the hill, because a car is heavier than a skateboarder and that's how things are. Getting it rolling down with a push would be less work than pulling the skateboarder up yourself.

That's a potential well, a car sitting in a dip on top of a hill. It has potential to do work, it just needs a little push, a little work put in, to get more out.

But what is an extended potential well?

Well, its all cars, sitting in dips on the top of all hills, plus the information I just gave you - that you can get energy by pushing them out with a rope tied to them. In this case the push isn't just the effort put in, its the knowledge that you can do this. Information, remember, is power. 

Fusion is the same thing, except the car is in a volcano crater on top of Everest. A huge amount of energy needs to be put in to get it out, but even more is there for you if you can actually do it. The extended potential well is all cars in all craters on top of all Everests...Okay, that metaphor is stretched too thin. Its all hydrogen nuclei that could be fused to make helium, a situation that's all over the universe waiting to be tapped. If you can just do it.

But back to the metaphor. It takes work to get the car out of the crater, no doubt. But it takes even more work to figure out how to get a car out of a freaking crater on top of mount Everest. But like I said, knowledge is power. And it takes work to know. Once you know how, you've tapped the extended potential well.

There's a certain amount of energy that must be put in to fuse two nuclei. A physicist could tell you. Also, there's a certain amount of information on the topic you'd need to learn before you can build a fusion reactor to do this at all. Information too, remember, is energy. Its the energy needed to tap the extended potential well of fusion, the knowledge needed to do this on a repeated basis, and harvest results out of it. The extended potential well of fission has already been overcome with information, that's why we have nuclear energy.

In my most twisted and psychotic intuitions, I see that the amount of information needed to do this may be knowable, though the path would still not be revealed. But I'll leave that alone. Suffice to say I think its very worth it to study the unfolding of our own knowledge as it happens, a sort of meta-scientific inquiry.

Pushing the potential well lets us gain energy, pushing the extended potential well let's us know how to get the energy. The biggest trip is that at the fundamental level, these two are on in the same.