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Lyman Spitzer Jr.

person

Lyman Spitzer Jr., an astrophysicist and chairman of Princeton's Department of Astrophysical Sciences, proposed the stellarator in 1951 in a paper titled 'A Proposed Stellarator', conceiving a figure-eight magnetic bottle in which external coils alone produce the twisted field needed to confine plasma. The work began at Princeton under the code name Project Matterhorn, which became the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 1961. Spitzer's device was the first serious magnetic confinement concept in the United States and the direct ancestor of Wendelstein 7-X. He is included in this Journey as the origin point of the seventy-year arc that the phrase 'always thirty years away' is really describing: the concept is older than almost everyone who complains about its pace.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.

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No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

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    Assembled narrative · 1

    Assembled from 9 blocks · 1 evidence · 4 related

    1. Story
    2. Lyman Spitzer Jr., an astrophysicist and chairman of Princeton's Department of Astrophysical Sciences, proposed the stellarator in 1951 in a paper titled 'A Proposed Stellarator', conceiving a figure-eight magnetic bottle in which external coils alone produce the twisted field needed to confine plasma. The work began at Princeton under the code name Project Matterhorn, which became the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 1961. Spitzer's device was the first serious magnetic confinement concept in the United States and the direct ancestor of Wendelstein 7-X. He is included in this Journey as the origin point of the seventy-year arc that the phrase 'always thirty years away' is really describing: the concept is older than almost everyone who complains about its pace.
    3. Knowledge
    4. Lyman Spitzer Jr.
    5. Connections
    6. Stellarator
    7. Spitzer proposes the stellarator; Project Matterhorn begins at Princeton
    8. Evidence
    9. The stellarator concept and the beginning of organised US magnetic fusion research are both dated to 1951 at Princeton
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    Observed changes · 0

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