The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  In 1969, Johns Hopkins University’s Julian Stanley began administering the SAT college-admissions test to children under thirteen. Stanley also initiated the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which since 1971 has tracked early takers of the SAT who score near the top on the math or verbal sections of the test (some two hundred thousand students participate annually in the searches by taking the SAT in the seventh instead of the usual eleventh grade). Following the education and career paths of what has become a cohort of more than five thousand, SMPY has accumulated forty-five years of data that provide much of what we now know about early aptitude and subsequent trajectories of some of the nation’s smartest children.

  A high percentage of the children who were identified as extremely intelligent went on to become high-achieving adults. The top 1 to .01 percent (those whose IQs range from 137 to 160) typically joined the upper echelons of the STEM professions or became high-achieving humanities professors, powerful politicians, or successful journalists or novelists. The average MD or PhD has an IQ of around 125, while individuals with IQs above 160 often do brilliant work in mathematics or physics, where success is even more dependent on raw mental processing power.

  The takeaway, it would seem, is that innate talent and high general intelligence—which are to a great extent heritable, like titles of nobility—are a first-class, high-speed ticket to advanced achievement.

  Not necessarily. For one thing, cognitive abilities don’t appear fully formed at birth; they develop over time through a complex interplay between nature and nurture. (Research has attributed genetic influence on human intelligence to between 30 and 80 percent of its total variance.) Among the most important discoveries in recent years is that environment triggers gene expression. Although most personal characteristics—everything from perseverance to memory—are influenced by our genes, they are not fully determined by them.

  And then there’s the issue of deliberate practice. In 1993, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson (now at Florida State University) proposed that expert performance was far more dependent on a long period of concentrated, deliberate practice than on innate ability or talent. Ericsson and his colleagues found that violinists and pianists whom faculty rated as the best musicians had devoted an average of more than ten thousand hours to deliberate practice by age twenty. “We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs-novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice,” concluded Ericsson.

  The paper, which suggested that practice time explained most (about 80 percent) of the difference between elite performers and committed amateurs, unleashed a torrent of research on the development of expert performance and has been cited in academic literature more than forty-five hundred times. In his 2008 best-selling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell touted what he called the 10,000-Hour Rule—the theory that ten thousand hours of appropriately guided practice is “the magic number for true expertise” in any field—which fueled one of the most persistent and influential pop-psychology claims of recent years. The concept’s popularity—due to its meritocratic implication that almost anyone can excel at a chosen discipline if he or she tries long and hard enough—has been sustained by a slew of other best-selling books, including Daniel Pink’s Drive (2009), Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code (2009), and Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated (2010).

  Neither Ericsson nor Gladwell went so far as to claim that innate talent was completely irrelevant to high-level success. “Achievement is talent plus preparation,” wrote Gladwell, and Ericsson cautioned that effective training depended on the quality as well as quantity of practice time. But these finer points were lost amid Ericsson’s continued insistence that “experts are always made, not born” and Gladwell’s contention that diligent practice, more than talent, was the primary factor in the success of everyone from Bill Gates to the Beatles.

  The influence of deliberate-practice theory has, at times, reached absurd levels. In 2010, commercial photographer Dan McLaughlin was so struck by the 10,000-hour proposition that he quit his job to attempt to become a professional golfer. The duffer, who started at 30 over par, told the BBC that “the goal is to . . . compete in a legitimate PGA tour event.” Near the end of 2014, after 5,600 hours of practice, he’d managed to bring his handicap down to 3.1—respectable, although well above the 1.4 he needed to attempt to qualify for the U.S. Open tournament.

  Subsequent research has shown that the answer is not nearly as simple as “practice makes perfect.” For one thing, claims that deliberate practice nearly always trumps innate talent and intelligence conflict dramatically with the observations of teachers and others who work with gifted children. Many academics have derided Ericsson’s “absurd environmentalism” and pointed out conceptual and methodological gaps in Ericsson’s tests of his theory, which he later applied across several domains. More comprehensive research by others, including Wai and a team led by psychologist Brooke Macnamara, have found that the acquisition of expertise is, in fact, highly related to cognitive ability and that practice time explains only 20 to 25 percent of performance differences in chess, music, and sports. In another blow to deliberate-practice theory, Simonton, of UC Davis, has led several studies that found that people with the greatest lifetime productivity and highest levels of eminence actually required the least amount of time to achieve high-level performance. While practice is as important for prodigies as for other people, the time in which prodigies can amass the expertise needed for mastery in any given field is compressed. (A 2014 New York Times article on the research debunking Ericsson’s deliberate-practice theory was titled “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent.”)

  And yet, the evidence is stacking up that talent and practice are complementary, rather than oppositional, and far more intertwined than originally thought. All human characteristics, including the capacity and proclivity to deliberately practice, involve a mix of nature and nurture.

  “Unfortunately, many people have an overly simplistic understanding of talent,” says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Kaufman, who writes about intelligence and creativity in his Beautiful Minds blog for Scientific American. “In fact, there is no such thing as innate talent,” Kaufman contends. “Gareth Bale wasn’t born with the ability to score memorable goals. There are certainly genetic influences, but talents aren’t prepackaged at birth; they take time to develop.” In other words, high achievers are born, then made.

  Some concept of talent may be necessary to help explain the development of high performance. But many researchers now argue for a more expansive definition of talent. Talent isn’t just brainpower or acumen in a particular domain, they say, but any collection of personal attributes that quickens the development of expertise or improves performance given a certain degree of expertise. Simonton identifies four sets of characteristics—cognitive, dispositional, developmental, and sociocultural—and notes that a deficit in any one will lead to overall deficiencies. Tradeoffs can sometimes compensate (for example, someone with average intellect can become an overachiever if he or she is highly motivated), but these tradeoffs go only so far. “That’s why exceptional talent is so rare,” says Simonton.

  David Lubinski, the Vanderbilt University psychologist who now codirects the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, adds opportunity to the constellation of personal attributes that lead to extraordinary performance.

  “You could also include a million other things,” says Kaufman, “such as physical features, social skills, and curiosity.” There’s also assertiveness, rebelliousness, self-confidence, and “grit,” or the willingness to work hard. “The missing piece of the pie,” Kaufman says, “undoubtedly includes other forms of engagement that don’t feel as effortful as deliberate practice, such as play and flow.”

  If personal traits are as important as brains, so is another factor, and it isn’t usually included on most researchers’ lists—perhaps because, as a chance element, it can’t be studied
systematically. But this factor, Feldman says, is the most revelatory takeaway from his decades-long studies of prodigies.

  When Feldman began working closely with exceptionally gifted children, his primary question was, What does it take to translate the raw material of innate intelligence into genius-level mastery and exceptional accomplishment? His conclusion, after thirty years of empirical research:

  “Luck.”

  According to Feldman, the path from supersmart kid to world-changing adult depends mostly on what he calls “the co-incidence process.” Feldman’s research (now backed up by others) makes it clear that the circumstances have to be just right for talent to flourish. “From the starting point of innate, natural ability,” Feldman says, “specific talents tend to require specific environments very well suited to their development.”

  For instance, the SMPY subjects were a fortunate bunch of kids from the start. Without encouragement from parents or teachers, they likely wouldn’t have taken the SAT early. Their advantages continued to compound after they were identified as “exceptionally gifted.” Unlike many—perhaps most—gifted children, they gained access to unusually rich learning experiences. These included special attention from schools and teachers and invitations to hyper-intensive summer programs, such as the ones that Zuckerberg, Gates, Jobs, and Germanotta attended, where they could gorge themselves on a year’s worth of math or science or literature in a few weeks.

  Two recent papers published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that among young people with high ability, those who were allowed to skip a grade, enroll in special classes, or take college courses in high school were significantly more likely to earn PhDs, publish academic papers, develop patents, and pursue high-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn’t have these opportunities.

  Everyone’s heard the bright-kid-overcomes-all anecdotes. But the bigger picture, based on decades of data, shows that these children are the rare exceptions. For every such story, there are countless nonstories of other gifted children who were unnoticed, submerged, and forgotten in homes and schools ill-equipped to nurture extraordinary potential. In those environments, David Hahn–type outcomes are far more prevalent.

  “There has to be an almost uncanny convergence of certain things lining up,” says Feldman. “The gifted child must be exposed to a field or art, someone must observe their interest and act upon it, and the timing and cultural context and available technology must all be right. Parents and teachers must have the resources and work hard to connect the prodigy with the right mentors or coaches, if the child is going to achieve any significant portion of innate potential.”

  “This is not a trivial point,” says Winner. “Because it indicates that, of the [possibly] millions of children who are born with the potential to propel themselves to mastery, only a tiny portion are ever given a chance, due to accidents of fate. Imagine if Taylor had been born as an Aborigine in the Outback in Western Australia. There would be no technology, no environment, no mentors, no cultural context that would have matched his interests and abilities.”

  “Even if Taylor would have grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” says Feldman, “things likely would have not worked out so well for him.” He would have been born into a culture that supported high achievers, but it’s hard to imagine where he’d have dug his holes or shot off his rockets—or found neighbors who would tolerate his explosions and his glowing radioactive goodies. His parents might have had more financial ability to support his endeavors, but they likely would also have had more competing distractions—as would Taylor. Money can buy time, but when it comes to parenting, it often does not. Money can also buy a top-notch education, but prestigious prep schools are not set up to indulge exotic talents unrelated to bagging a spot at an Ivy League university. Formal schooling is just one piece of the prodigy puzzle, which also includes parenting, personal characteristics, social/emotional development, family aspects (such as birth order, gender, and traditions), access to resources, and historical forces and trends. When all those things happen to be in coordination and are sustained for a sufficient period, a child born with extraordinary potential can bloom. When one or more elements are missing, inborn talent is more likely to wither.

  “That’s a lot to get right,” says Feldman. “And because of that, only a tiny portion of would-be prodigies go on to become eminent, creative adults.”

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  The Lucky Donkey Theory

  IN A WAY, the amateur nuclear fusion movement began at the intersection of science and science fiction. In the mid-1990s, an electrical engineer and aspiring science-fiction writer named Tom Ligon heard that the physicist Robert Bussard was living and working just two miles from his Virginia home.

  “Some people still think Bussard is a fictional character,” Ligon says, “but it turns out that he was quite real.” In the mid-1950s, Bussard worked at Los Alamos in the Nuclear Propulsion Division, designing nuclear rocket engines. He coauthored two books on nuclear-powered flight and in 1960 proposed the “interstellar ramjet,” which would scoop up interstellar ionized hydrogen and funnel it into a nuclear fusion reactor whose output would propel a spaceship forward. Though Bussard thought his design was at least two hundred years from feasibility, the interstellar ramjet (also called the Bussard ramjet) became a fixture in science fiction, used to propel space travelers in Larry Niven’s and Poul Anderson’s novels and the Starfleet starships in the Star Trek universe.

  Bussard went on to become assistant director at the Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions Division of what was then the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The division had settled on magnetic confinement as its mainline fusion program, but Bussard saw more promise in a fusion reactor he called a polywell (a combination of polyhedron and potential well), which overcame some of the inefficiencies of the fusor. Bussard’s reactor used a negatively charged plasma field instead of a negatively charged wire grid to attract and accelerate the positively charged ions. Bussard started a small tech company, funded by the military, to pursue his polywell design.

  Ligon dropped by with his résumé. “Nobody was there,” Ligon remembers, “but the sign . . . declared that it was the Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation. I slipped my propaganda under the door, smiling as I got the connection to Einstein’s famous formula.”

  Bussard called him back, and Ligon went to work for EMC2, which built several polywell prototypes between 1994 and 2006. With the final prototype, Bussard felt that he’d solved the remaining major physics problems and he reported exponential efficiency improvements. But as the Iraq War consumed the military’s resources, the military defunded polywell research. Bussard raised private capital to build a polywell power plant.

  Bussard passed away in 2007. “He was convinced when he died,” says Ligon, “that he had achieved a significant breakthrough.” U.S. Navy researchers may have been similarly convinced, since they restarted the polywell program after Bussard’s death and brought it to Los Alamos. Taylor and Willis are among the few outsiders who’ve seen the next-generation polywell machine; since their visit to the laboratory, the project has been classified.

  In 1998, Ligon built an almost-functional Farnsworth-Hirsch reactor and brought it to a meeting of amateur high-energy scientists at Richard Hull’s home near Richmond. “While I was standing in awe of Richard’s mighty Tesla coil,” Ligon says, “the others were falling madly in love with the idea of building their own tabletop hot fusion reactors.”

  The next year, Hull’s fusor became the first outside a research laboratory to achieve a verified nuclear fusion reaction. Others in the community followed, and founded an online forum to share resources with people like Willis, who in 2003 became the tenth person to build a working reactor. In addition to Fusor.net’s role as an information clearinghouse, the forum has become the de facto verification body for claims of amateur nuclear fusion success

  Fusor.net’s fusioneers list has three levels. Scroungers are jus
t starting out, gathering components and/or assembling parts. Plasma Club membership requires evidence of plasma production. Neutron Club applicants must provide rock-solid proof of fusion in the form of images and a full data disclosure regarding setup, conditions, and neutron-detection systems. “Many of the people who get the idea to build a fusion reactor have that long-shot sci-fi edge,” Willis says, but the technical challenges quickly weed out those who aren’t serious about mastering nuclear theory and engineering. “You can’t fake your way into the Neutron Club,” says Willis.

  “Where people usually fall short is in their neutron-detection methods,” says Hull. There’s a lot of back-and-forth questioning and answering, which serves as an informal but tough peer-review process. In early 2014, for instance, a thirteen-year-old named Jamie Edwards, a student at Penwortham Priory Academy in England, announced fusion success. British tabloids and even David Letterman jumped the gun and ran with the story—but the consensus in the Fusor.net community was that Jamie had not decisively achieved fusion. Forum members suggested detailed steps he could take to bring his verification methods up to a convincing level. The youngster accepted the suggestions gratefully and continued to work on his fusor.

  Taylor added his name to the Scroungers list soon after Willis, who helps administer the Fusor.net site, suggested that Taylor build a fusor. Taylor became an increasingly frequent presence on the site’s technical forums. “Everyone was incredibly generous and willing to give advice and let me bounce ideas off them,” Taylor says. “There’s not too many sources of know-how for some things, like vacuum issues, for instance. Vacuum is almost a black art; I mean, who goes to school for it?”