If you’re looking for hard problems, building a nuclear fusion power plant is a pretty good place to start. Fusion — the process that powers the sun — has proven to be a difficult thing to recreate here on Earth despite decades of research.
“There’s something very attractive to me about the magnitude of the fusion challenge,” Hartwig says. “It’s probably true of a lot of people at MIT. I’m driven to work on very hard problems. There’s something intrinsically satisfying about that battle. It’s part of the reason I’ve stayed in this field. We have to cross multiple frontiers of physics and engineering if we’re going to get fusion to work.”
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