FollowFrom the other side of a wide glass window on the third story of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s largest laser array looks an awful lot like the world’s largest plumbing project. Row after row of 16-inch-diameter pipes are packed into a room like cigarettes in a box—only the box is the size of three football fields. A catwalk thick with miles of cable runs through the center. Large metal ducts snake overhead and along the walls. I have to take it on faith that the pipes, called beam tubes, don’t contain water or gas, but 192 separate laser beams zipping back and forth. When the beams finally exit the room, their strength amplified more than a quadrillion times, they will converge on a pencil-eraser-size target in one short, powerful pulse. And in those 20-billionths of a second, I’m told, atoms of hydrogen will smash together with such force that they’ll essentially create a star.
