It's the season of year where I once again find myself grading dozens of AP-level student research papers, all between 20 and 40+ pages in length. In such great quantities, words like these serve the dual reminder of both their power and meaning! Occasionally though, a lackluster paper reminds that the immense capacity of words is neither a foregone conclusion, nor an incidental byproduct of their existence. Without purpose and focus, even the most energetic writing or research ideas can suffer a kind of meltdown, their overheated creative potential dissipating into cognitive background radiation.
The non-physicists are interjecting, "That's fine and dandy, but what's a tokamak, and what does it have to do with stars or words in a Substack?" Well, I'm not a physicist either, but the principle behind the tokamak dates back 75 years, the main idea being that a nuclear fusion reaction might be sustained and harnessed for its power if it is sufficiently controlled. The fusion of two atomic nuclei can release enormous quantities of energy, but it's almost too much! Enter that fourth state of matter you've probably forgotten about: plasma. In day-to-day life, we're pretty familiar with solids, liquids, and even gases, but the extreme conditions to produce plasma make it otherworldly to our experience. Perhaps Mark Rober made plasma in one of his wildly-successful YouTube videos to create a loudspeaker for sound reproduction1, but short of this, you probably haven't seen plasma recently—unless you've stepped outside, that is. Our closest star, Sol, is an absolute hotbed for the stuff.
Plasma, the high-energy matter "swarm" initiated by conditions that are so extreme electrons partially abandon their typical, ordered orbits, is itself kind of a handful to deploy precisely and continuously. That's where a tokamak comes in. A field of plasma in the shape of a torus (doughnut, for the rest of us), is able to be sustained, and in turn contain, a nuclear fusion reaction for generating electricity. Well, mostly. Despite such a long-standing concept, tokamak development has been fraught with problems and setbacks. Safety, sustainability, and efficiency are major priorities for the capture of fusion energy, but even the most advanced contemporary designs are not without issues.
Thanks to ever more advanced simulations on supercomputers, a competing apparatus, the stellarator, is undergoing rapid refinement for energy containment and is likely to supersede tokamak designs. Stellarator is linguistically an agent noun, just like 'diver' is an agent noun describing someone or something that dives. Undoubtedly, tokamak is a cool Russian acronym2, but this author's opinion is that stellarator is the better name by light years! Sounds like it could be the name of a (nerdy) theme-park roller coaster ride. Indeed, looking at the article's illustration, the twisted arrangement of magnets around the plasma containment chamber traces a looping path in gold that any amusement park adrenaline junkie would find heart-pounding. Go look…really, it's amazing.3
https://www.science.org/content/article/stellarators-fusions-dark-horse-hit-stride
My nuclear rabbit trail brought me back to writing and the power of the word. The primality of language is underscored in the opening lines of John's Gospel in the New Testament…where the word (λόγος) not only made the world and everything in it, but the same word, "made flesh," became savior of the world. Yet James (3:4–5) reminds us that this same creative power of the word requires careful governance—the tongue that blesses can also burn, like a small rudder steering a massive ship, or a tiny spark igniting an entire forest. The fusion reactor of language needs its own tokamak (or a superior stellarator), lest creative fire become destructive conflagration. As a producer of words and pictures, and subscriber to the notion that "a picture is worth a thousand words" I have a deep appreciation for both the quantity and quality that writing and photography can convey. As a practitioner, I will just as readily assert that excellence is a product of experience, creativity, focus, and time…and that quantity is no guarantee of quality. To use the cliché, many times they are diametrically opposed.
So if poor writing is like the momentary warmth produced by rubbing two sticks together, and lazy photography is like repeatedly striking flint and steel, hoping for sparks to contact something combustible, neither is guaranteed to set the world ablaze with its output. But harnessing star power—the ability to make something new, generates energy at such a higher output, the problem is not one of ignition or release, but containment! Understanding that tokamaks and stellarators are different solutions to prevent fusion flow where it should not go deepens my understanding and appreciation for editing. It's not enough to have a novel idea or a unique point of view; it has to be shaped—crafted with purpose, veracity, tone, even as it is uniquely packaged for an audience for whom it will be not just tractable, but imbued with meaning.
In contrast to my own meandering composition and intermittent output, or the lack of (editorial) discipline shown in a few AP papers recently encountered, it is always an immense encouragement to see a former student who is regularly writing well, and composing with derring-do. Anna's Substack: All That Is Gold documents her road culture adventures in an RV across the US, and features a kaleidoscope of characters and locations, a wimmelbilderbuch ("teeming picture book"—like Where's Waldo) of rural America. No mere travelogue, it is a whetstone for an artist sharpening her skill as she journeys. I can't imagine how it fits in the camper, but clearly she's constructed a stellarator. As they say, "give it a sub".
https://substack.com/@annacanady
References
Clery, D. (2025, April 1). Stellarators, once fusion’s dark horse, hit their stride. Science, 388(6742). https://www.science.org/content/article/stellarators-fusions-dark-horse-hit-stride
The ‘Singing Arc’, William Duddell, UK, 1899. (2013, September 23). 120 Years of Electronic Music. https://120years.net/the-singing-arcwilliam-duddeluk1899/
Tokamak. (2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak#Etymology
- As a fan of electronic music, I can't help but highlight the fascinating history of the singing arc. https://120years.net/the-singing-arcwilliam-duddeluk1899/ ↩︎
- On its etymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak#Etymology ↩︎
- Even though the Science news article first appeared on April 1, this publication is not one to publish April Fool antics. ↩︎