Arts and Answers: Sun in a Bottle

As the testing of the atomic bomb began at Los Alamos, there was another superweapon in development—one that relied not on fission, like the A-bomb, but on fusion. The resulting H-bomb was one thousand times more powerful than its atomic counterpart, and the harnessing of fusion power soon began a quixotic pursuit to create the world's first fusion reactor: one that that held the promise of endless renewable energy. An interview with science journalist Charles Seife about his new book Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.