The sun shines because of quantum tunnelling with Jim Al Khalili #quantum #shorts #quantumtunneling

and the sun shines because of quantum tunneling. Quantum tunneling is another aspect of the quantum world that's strange. The example that I like to give is that many people if you have a ball and a hill, you have to kick the ball up the hill hard enough if you want to get it to the top and over to the other side. If you don't kick it hard enough, it's going to go halfway up the hill and then come back down again. In the quantum world, replace ball with atom or electron or whatever and replace hill with some energy barrier. You can give that atom, say, enough energy to get halfway up the hill and it won't roll back down again. There's a certain probability that it gets halfway up, disappears, reappears on the other and rolls down. Like a ghost phantom walking through a solid wall. If we saw it in our everyday world, we'd say that's ridiculous. That's You've clearly lost the plot. You're not doing science now, you're just doing silly stuff. Quantum tunneling is real. Not just because the guys won a Nobel Prize for it this year. The reason we're here today is because we get life we life gets energy light and warmth from the sun and the sun shines because of quantum tunneling. Hydrogen nuclei, protons can quantum tunnel together in the first step towards nuclear fusion to make helium and that's what creates the thermonuclear fusion, the energy of the sun. So, the sun shines because of quantum tunneling.