Dr. Schund, is the US government embarking upon something cosmically stupid?
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (California) embraced the social advocacy business model that was so successful in imposing school busing and the 2008 adjustable rate mortgage implosion: If it is big enough, costs enough, and is tragically foul enough Congress will toss huge bursting bags of money at you to do it even bigger. There is no mistake that cannot be fixed by doing more of it more vigorously over a longer period of time, Germany's WWII Eastern Front to the US' Muslim War Eastern Front. Thus the National Ignition Facility.
A laser amplifier larger in area than a football field and costing more than "No Child Left Behind" can count is barely the start. It required growing a warehouse of 800+ pound potassium dihydrogen phosphate single crystals (remember boys and girls, 5 mole-% KCl and 0.01 mole-% EDTA to make it work). They were sliced into 40x40 cm2 plates to frequency triple insane pulses of 1053 nm wavelength neodymium-yttrium lithium fluoride infrared laser light. The light blasts into angled KDP plates and exits as its third harmonic. Then... a legion of day workers from the local Home Depot parking lot sweep up, replacing cheap shattered KDP with more gold of Croesus single crystal KDP plates.
192 beams totaling 2 megajoules of 351 nm ultraviole(n)t radiation converge into two petawatt foci, one on either side of a teeny tiny gold capsule containing a sparrow fart of (cryogenic) deuterium-tritium. The gold goes absolutely apeshit. Its hyper-heated plasma pulses an x-ray extravaganza to implode the fuel capsule. Nuclear fusion creates an improvised explosive device-sized kablooie! This will award us energy independence. Nobody quite knows how - the energy independence part - but first things first (hydrogen bomb microhydrodynamic modeling).
NIF could use a teeny spec of solid tritium-doped lithium deuteride instead of deep cryogenic radioactive gas solids. That would make so many government contractors cry into their wallets. Save the contractors! We might need their services to win a war (if we can get them to contract with the other side).
This is not the stupid part! Let us calculate what could be at each focus. A megajoule of energy, E=mc2, has a mass-equivalent. It is a little fellow, 1.11x10-8 grams, 11 billionths of a gram. A TEM00 laser beam coherent in time and space (one cannot imagine the NIF pinhole mode purifier) can be focused to half its wavelength. A 351 nm beam can be focused to a sphere with 175.5 nm diameter. That sphere's volume is 2.83x10-15 cm3.
The density of LIGHT at each focus is then mass/volume or 3.9 million grams/cm3. The maximum density of water at 4° centigrade is 1 gram/cm3, osmium the densest element is 22.61 g/cm3. Does Dear Reader wonder what will happen to spacetime when it gets that four metric tonne/cm3 sub-pinpoint boot to the head? KABLOOIE! is a real possibility.
The stuff stuffed into that vanishingly small pinpoint is merely a prelude to the real problem. A black hole requires a Planck mass (2.176x10-5 gram) be stuffed into a Planck volume (sphere with diameter 1.616x10-33 cm). 3.9 million g/cm3 is no problem at all. No problem at all. Mere nuclear density is 2x1014 g/cm3. Neutron stars are denser, 7x1014 g/cm3.
Air unravels with dielectric breakdown at a fluence of 1010 W/cm2 by multiphoton ionization or electron avalanche, your choice. The quantum vacuum itself will unravel to electron-positron pairs at 1020 W/cm2 fluence. If the NIF Big Popper is a 10 nsec pulse, we have 1014 watts shining on (pi)r2 = 2.42x10-10 cm2 or 4x1023 W/cm2. Is 4000 times the fluence necessary to piss off God a bad thing? Yeah, that is going to leave a mark, for it is enough to create parts of the Periodic Table.
Reality will stick around, its contents not so much. Tiny Book of Mormon avalanches may be promoted out of the quantum vacuum. Go sweep that up as Scientologists frantically distribute questionnaires and power up wallet-seeking E-meter harpoons. The political higgledy-piggledyness of fueling America by shoveling holy scripture (low sulfur!) into boilers will require a Congressional Caucus and diamond-encrusted 22 karat gold chalices of micronized nose candy. Call it "nosemarks" - and the Supreme Court demands amicus nasus status.
Dr. Schund sits in his pinche pendejo-overstuffed virgin Nigerian babyhide swivel armchair. He idly fips a Friend of the War Room laser pointer through his fingers. A rocker switch on the barrel shoots a continuous green beam casting a bright tight spot up to a kilometer distant, sufficient to illuminate PowerPoint presentations. His thumb pops the clicker switch and a New Testament drops from a tiny fireball. Afghanistan will have such a surprise...
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