The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is a laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California, United States. NIF uses powerful lasers to heat and compress a small amount of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place. NIF is the largest and most energetic ICF device built to date, and the first that is expected to reach the long-sought goal of "ignition", where the fusion reactions become self-sustaining.
Neil Geoffrey Turok holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics (1967) at Cambridge University. He was born in 1958 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the son of Mary and Ben Turok, activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress.
Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he belongs to the scientific directorate of the Foundational Questions Institute. Currently, he also teaches a relativity class (8.033) to undergraduates at MIT.