My grandfather would have been psyched. He was a tool and die engineer his whole life but his hobby was making strange balsa, boron framed planes who's wings were made of this gossamer like film that were powered by a rubber band. He could talk endlessly about the many interesting (at least he thought so) qualities of boron. This would have taken up another twenty minutes of any willing parties time.
The last paragraph Seems to contradict itself. Either way, I get excited about this kind of stuff. The intersection of engineering and science in fusion makes it a particularly fun field due to the cool technologies that come out of it.The study was not designed to attain fusion’s holy grail — ignition, the break-even point at which the energy generated by the fusion process equals that of the input energy required to power the lasers. But leaps in the power and miniaturization of lasers and the simplicity of the two-laser system “makes this scheme practical” as a future power source, says Mourou.