Did American fusion breakthrough just save the planet?

If history reveals how complicated the world truly is, physics shows how marvelous it is.

The late theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was fond of telling his students that the mysteries of the subatomic world were, simply put, beyond comprehension. Scientists at one point believed electrons behaved like particles, then they thought it was like waves, but the truth was somewhere in between.

“They behave in a way that is like nothing that you have seen before," he said in a lecture in 1964. "Your experience with things that you have seen before is incomplete.” 

In one corner of this vast realm of wonder, scientists have been toiling away for years to harness the power of two hydrogen atoms being smashed together.