Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Inside the National Ignition Facility, scientists create bursts of fusion hotter than the center of the sun that vanish in 100 trillionths of a second. The only way to trust what happened is to measure it - and Lawrence Livermore has spent decades building the instruments that can see the unseeable, the same instruments that proved the world's first fusion ignition was real.
This is the story of NIF's diagnostics: how Lawrence Livermore learned to photograph a dying star, prove a nuclear stockpile still works without ever testing it, and turn an event too fast, too hot, and too dense to touch into knowledge.
Guests featured (in order of appearance):
Dave Schlossberg - Experimental Physicist, National Ignition Facility, LLNL
Cara Vennari - Experimental Physicist, LLNL
Apple: livermorelab.info/4xerdTe
Spotify: livermorelab.info/4wF0duO
Inside the National Ignition Facility, scientists create bursts of fusion hotter than the center of the sun that vanish in 100 trillionths of a second. The only way to trust what happened is to measure it - and Lawrence Livermore has spent decades building the instruments that can see the unseeable, the same instruments that proved the world's first fusion ignition was real.
This is the story of NIF's diagnostics: how Lawrence Livermore learned to photograph a dying star, prove a nuclear stockpile still works without ever testing it, and turn an event too fast, too hot, and too dense to touch into knowledge.
Guests featured (in order of appearance):
Dave Schlossberg - Experimental Physicist, National Ignition Facility, LLNL
Cara Vennari - Experimental Physicist, LLNL
Apple: livermorelab.info/4xerdTe
Spotify: livermorelab.info/4wF0duO
