Back in the 1980s, I came up with a fascinating technical concept, very advanced. I spent some time pursuing it but came to two conclusions. First was the painful realization that I’m not really a hardware person. I am fairly good with machines and electronics, but I can’t work in the speedy and adept manner that a true hardware person does in building something.

The second conclusion was that it didn’t really matter for the time being, because virtually none of the technologies needed to build it were ready. Many were starting to be developed, but some were completely obscure.

Even today it’s hardly certain that the concept would work, even in principle. Nevertheless, I have noticed a curious trend over the past two decades. One by one various of the technologies needed have popped onto the radar screen and become available, or at least in steady development. Yet there’s still been a key ingredient missing, an appropriately dense power source.

There are several possibilities already apparent, but none appeals to me as much as sonofusion, the claimed attaining of a fusion reaction from extreme pressures reached by cavitating/collapsing bubbles stimulated by ultrasound. The initial experiments, done by Rusi Taleyarkhan and a team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were reported in 2002. The methodology was soon questioned and little has been reported until recently.

Now an experiment done at Purdue by Yiban Xu and Adam Butt appears to provide further support of the possibility of sonofusion. The researchers also claim to have made progress in understanding how the required pressures could be produced by cavitation.

Obviously, much work likely remains just to confirm that fusion may actually be occurring, let alone to make practical use of it. Nevertheless, the prospect of a tabletop fusion reactor would excite any aerospace engineer.

As an engineer, I have been trained to be skeptical of technology, yet as an entrepreneur, I know that sometimes good surprises do happen, and that it pays to be positioned to take advantage of them. The payoff on sonofusion, should it prove to be real, would still be quite a ways off. Nevertheless, I continue to be amazed and delighted at how the pieces of a complex puzzle seem to be steadily falling into place.