I preface this with the understanding that I am an amature when it comes to astrophysics and this is a very immature idea coming from half baked ideas. I have a lot of these though, and as I'd love to study the different fields of physics one day I figured I'd jot down my notes here and maybe share some of my random ideas for kicks. Perhaps I can use these in some future science fiction writing.
So Nuclear fusion is likely the future of energy. It's the process of fusing atoms, two hydrogen atoms for our purposes, to release the excess energy from the resulting atom. It's conceptually the cleanest high-yield energy generation method we have, should we be able to refine how we do it.
It's also the process by which stars burn. Our sun, and every star, is a massive fusion generator pumping out extraordinary amounts of energy as it fuses large quantities of hydrogen. The process starts in stellar nurseries, such as the Pillars of Creation, though the process is admittedly unknown to me.
I was considering the possibility of a sort of quantum fusion, perhaps where a hydrogen atom goes through quantum superposition which is then condensed into a single plane to create a fusion reaction. This thought made me consider what "plane" would even mean in this case; essentially I was talking about compressing an atom across a 4th dimension, but what that dimension is would be debatable in this case.
Time is often considered the 4th dimension though, so what would happen if you compressed the time of an atom? Effectively you would be blinking that atom out of existence in some point of time creating a "quantum vacuum" of sorts (Yes, I'm reasonably sure I'm now really butchering the concept of "quantum" anything, but I haven't got a better word). Perhaps such a vacuum would result in what we know as black holes, so that perhaps that is how stars are born leaving not simply a super-massive entity that distorts spacetime but rather a point in space where spacetime has ceased to exist as it has been compressed into a smaller time frame. Perhaps some black holes will turn into stars, as that compression may happen in both directions. My understanding of the cycle of death in a star suggests that this is a bunk idea even with what I know, but it's a fun idea. Points in space where spacetime has ceased to exist to to extreme compression.
Perhaps.
Certainly I'm sure this idea is rife with misinformation; I don't want to spend the rest of the night going down the rabbit hold of wikipedia articles and sources as I've done so often before, so certainly take this with a grain of salt. Or educate on the obvious flaws in this idea; I don't want to spend all night, but some guidance from comments is always appreciated as I learn more about these fascinating fields!