When Craig Vachon agreed to present at our New Tech event on March 5, we asked him to give us a snapshot of his proposed presentation. It went like this:

Industrial cyclotrons are necessary for testing heavy ions and proton effects on 'first wall' challenges for fusion startups and DoD compentry. Most cyclotrons were built in the 1950's and 1960's, hence they desperately need updating, and even though they run 24/7, they have 24-36 month wait times. Let's build an industrial cyclotron on the Central Coast.

Huh?

Now you probably have two questions: who is Craig Vachon, and what the heck is a cyclotron.

Craig Vachon is an entrepreneur, investor, and author known for raising over $1.6 billion for startups, leading AI Redefined (AIR), founding the Chowdahead Growth Fund, and writing The Knucklehead of Silicon Valley. In addition to recently joining Fuse Energy Technologies, a secretive fusion energy startup, he has served on various company boards and worked globally in AI, venture capital, and technology.

Cyclotron

Alright, kiddo, imagine you have a hamster running inside one of those little exercise wheels. Now, instead of just running in circles, every time the hamster reaches a certain point, you give it a little zap of energy, making it run faster and faster. Eventually, that hamster is zooming so fast it shoots off the wheel like a tiny, furry rocket.

Now, replace the hamster with a tiny charged particle, and instead of a wheel, picture a magnetic field that forces it to move in circles. Every time the particle gets to a certain spot, an electric field zaps it with energy, making it move faster and take bigger loops. This is how a cyclotron works—it’s a particle accelerator that cranks up the speed of tiny things like protons by spinning them in a spiral, like a hamster wheel on turbo mode.

But why do we do this? Well, super-fast particles are really useful! Scientists use them to:

Make medicine (like special particles for PET scans to help doctors see inside people)
Smash atoms together to understand how the universe works
Zap cancer cells to help people get better
Fusion reactors TBA

And get this—this whole idea was invented back in 1930 by a guy named Ernest O. Lawrence, who basically built the first-ever particle racetrack. And from that, we got even crazier machines like the Large Hadron Collider, which is like a cyclotron’s big, big, BIG cousin.

So yeah, a cyclotron is basically a turbo-charged hamster wheel for tiny particles, and it helps scientists do awesome stuff.

Join us on March 5 when Craig will do a much better job at making you laugh than we can in this article.

Get my tickets!