| Title | The Tunnel at the Beginning of Light |
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| Contributor | David H. Silver(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.10 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.10 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | David H. Silver |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2026-04-08 |
| Long abstract | Solar fusion proceeds despite temperatures insufficient for classical nuclear reactions because quantum tunneling enables protons to penetrate the Coulomb barrier with non-zero probability. At the Sun’s core temperature of 15 million Kelvin, the average proton possesses only about 1/20 the energy classically required to overcome electromagnetic repulsion between positively charged nuclei. Quantum mechanics allows particles to “tunnel” through energy barriers they cannot surmount classically, with probability decreasing exponentially with barrier height and width. This tunneling effect, combined with the enormous number of interaction attempts in the solar plasma, sustains the fusion rate necessary for stellar stability over billions of years. |
| Print length | 10 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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| Landing Page | Full text URL | Platform | |||
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| https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.10 | Landing page | https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.10.pdf | Full text URL |
David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.