The Boy Who Played with Fusion
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Although the Obama administration tweaked some aspects of NCLB, including its name, the focus is still on achieving grade-level proficiency. “They call it Race to the Top,” says NAGC director of public education Jane Clarenbach, “but it isn’t really about the top at all; it’s about achieving grade-level proficiency, which does nothing to help gifted kids. We believe it’s the responsibility of public schools to provide appropriate education to all children.”
The post-Sputnik decades of increased attention on gifted kids led to a staggering growth in highly educated people who produced science and engineering innovations that have extended both the quality and length of people’s lives, created tens of millions of jobs, and fueled much of the West’s economic growth.
Now, in an era in which prosperity depends ever more on the intellectual capability of a nation’s population, our educational system has failed to nurture and develop the talents of its most promising students. The rate of increase in the number of U.S. doctorates has fallen dramatically since its high in 1970, and the most recent round of international test results showed a continued decline in the performance of top U.S. students compared to their global counterparts.
Fifteen-year-old Americans ranked twenty-fourth and twenty-eighth, respectively, in reading and science. While most other nations’ scores had risen since the previous test, in 2009, U.S. performance had changed little. Vietnam, whose per capita GDP of $1,910 is less than 4 percent of the U.S. per capita GDP, outscored the United States impressively in math and science.
In math, fewer than 9 percent of U.S. students scored at the advanced level; compare that to 55 percent of students in Shanghai, 40 percent in Singapore, and 16 percent in Canada. An even more disturbing trend is that when American students are in elementary school, they actually compare well to students of the same age from other countries, but as they move to higher grades, they fall behind dramatically.
Even America’s highest-achieving students often struggle to maintain their elite performance. A 2011 study found that as time went on, early high achievers failed to improve their reading ability at the same rate as even average or below-average children did. Though there are bright spots (mostly in the wealthiest U.S. schools), the trends are clear: educators are generally failing to cultivate our most promising students as they grow.
All of which suggests that we may be squandering a crucial national resource: our best young minds. “These are the people who are going to figure out the riddles,” says Lubinski. “Schizophrenia, cancer, how to fight terrorism; they’re going to create the innovations that drive our economy. This is the population who you’d do well to bet on.”
An early interest in construction and heavy machinery would be familiar to most parents of young boys. But Taylor’s obsessions were extreme, and his parents supported his intellectual passions in ways that few parents would.
Wilson family
Taylor and Joey with their grandmother Nell, just after she moved into the house next door. Her death from cancer would affect Taylor profoundly, inspiring his vision of himself as a future groundbreaking physicist who would use fusion to create lifesaving medical isotopes.
Wilson family
Taylor at six and Joey at three. “This might have been Halloween,” says his mother, Tiffany, “but this is how Taylor dressed almost every day. And sometimes he could get Joey to follow suit.” The boys were close in age and ability, but as they grew, their personalities would evolve in very different directions.
Wilson family
When Taylor was nine, he and his father, Kenneth, spent three days at Space Camp, a program offered by the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Talent-development researchers say that early novel experiences spark creativity and innovation and help shape healthy brain systems that enable effective learning.
Wilson family
A budding scientist’s Christmas: Taylor, in the fifth grade, wears the monogrammed laboratory coat his grandmother gave him and shows off the new Geiger counter that Santa left under the Wilsons’ Christmas tree.
Wilson family
Explosive chemistry: Taylor at eight or nine years old, outside his garage laboratory, mixing methanol and sodium hydroxide as part of his biodiesel production project. He vainly tried to convince his father to use the homebrewed fuel to run his Coca-Cola delivery fleet.
Wilson family
Taylor with his “best nuke friend,” Carl Willis, outside the Black Hole, near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Now defunct, the unusual surplus store sold precision hardware jettisoned by the weapons industry, which made it a mecca for high-energy science enthusiasts from all over the world.
Tom Clynes
Taylor in his garage laboratory in Reno. As his collection of radioactive materials grew, so did his parents’ worries.
Deanne Fitzmaurice/National Geographic Creative
With Bill Brinsmead and Ron Phaneuf, in Phaneuf’s laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno, where Taylor built his fusion reactors and other inventions. The two men would emerge as Taylor’s primary mentors over four years. “We learned as much or more from him,” Phaneuf says, “than he learned from us.”
Tom Clynes
Taylor at fourteen, just after achieving nuclear fusion, with his reactor in the subbasement laboratory at the UNR physics department. The blackboard behind him is covered with calculations and a few holes burned by a laser that Taylor and Bill Brinsmead experimented with.
Photo by Mike Wolterbeek, University of Nevada, Reno
Inside the reaction chamber of Taylor’s fusor, as the negatively charged tungsten grid begins to glow. The grid attracts positively charged deuterium ions into a superheated plasma, where some will collide and fuse, releasing energy in the form of neutrons.
Taylor Wilson
Taylor running his fusor’s control panel, shielded from the reactor’s lethal radiation field by a wall of lead blocks. Safety concerns led Taylor’s mentors to take extraordinary measures to protect him. As Ron Phaneuf explains, “We have a lot of radiation sources in our laboratories. Taylor was young and enthusiastic, and enthusiasm doesn’t protect you.”
Tom Clynes
Physicist and plasma researcher Ron Phaneuf cleared out a corner of his laboratory for Taylor and advised him as he pursued his ambitious projects. Most pioneering and high-achieving adults say that having a mentor was important to their development—but meaningful mentorship opportunities are scarce in today’s educational environments.
Deanne Fitzmaurice/National Geographic Creative
Taylor clowning, Slim Pickens-style, on Bill Brinsmead’s replica of the Little Boy bomb—a campy nod to the movie Dr. Strangelove—that Brinsmead rides each year at the Burning Man festival.
Tom Clynes
Nuclear family: After becoming the youngest person on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion, Taylor poses with his family for a photo shoot for Popular Science magazine. His early rise to fame would create exceptional opportunities as well as some darker consequences for the entire family.
Bryce Duffy
Demonstrating the small reactor that Taylor developed for inspecting cargo, at the 2011 International Science and Engineering Fair. “Some [physicists] like working on the questions and the mysteries of the universe. Me, I like applying [physics] to real-world problems, whether it be terrorists bringing nuclear weapons through ports or curing cancer with radioactive material.” Taylor would win big at ISEF that year.
Society for Science & the Public
Taylor speaking at the TED Conference in 2012, at age seventeen. The talk, which TED titled “Yup, I Built a Nuclear Fusion Reactor,” was unscripted (as all but one of his presentations have been) and received a standing ovation. The online video of the talk has been viewed more than 2.5 million times.
James Duncan Davidson/TED
Taylor skipped classes in order to attend the 2012 White House Science Fair, where he and President Obama chatted and joked for several minutes. “You may be working for me soon,�
�� the president told Taylor as they parted.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
Davidson Academy’s graduation ceremony with director Colleen Harsin (left), and Davidson Academy founders Jan and Bob Davidson. As government support for gifted-education programs has dried up, philanthropists such as the Davidsons have stepped in with funding and innovative programming. “We looked at what works best in education and we applied it to gifted kids,” says Bob Davidson. “We didn’t listen to the people who’ve done education wrong for a hundred years.”
Davidson Academy, photo by Theresa Danna-Douglas
On the set of The Big Bang Theory: Taylor sits in physicist Sheldon Cooper’s usual spot, next to actor Johnny Galecki, who plays Sheldon’s roommate, Leonard Hofstadter. While on the set Taylor made a discovery that would become a permanent part of the television show’s lore.
Tom Clynes
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Atomic Travel
NOW IT’S TIFFANY who drives, north along U.S. Highway 84 toward Los Alamos. Taylor, now sixteen, has convinced his mom to bring him to New Mexico for a few days to hang out with Carl Willis, who has become, as Taylor describes him, “my best nuke friend.”
Cocking my ear toward the back seat of the rented SUV, I catch snippets of Taylor and Willis’s conversation.
“The idea is to make a gamma-ray laser from stimulated decay of dipositronium.”
“I’m thinking about building a portable, beam-on-target neutron source.”
“Need some deuterated polyethylene?”
Taylor and Willis have invited me along on their latest “nuclear tourism” junket. The plan is to visit the historic nuke sites in and around Los Alamos, prospect for uranium, and scrounge through the desert in search of the still-radioactive detritus strewn—by plan or by accident—by atomic-weapons developers and deployers.
Taylor and Willis first met in person when Taylor was twelve, when the family stopped in Albuquerque on a cross-country road trip. At that point, Taylor had collected most of the parts for his reactor, and he and Carl were communicating regularly about the finer points of fusor construction.
“I think by then you’d found a source of tungsten wire for the grid and brought it with you,” Willis says, “and we were trying to figure out a way to fabricate it.”
They were drawn together by their shared passion for nukes, and their age difference quickly became a nonissue. “We always had these great conversations, not just about the technical stuff but about the history and philosophy of nuclear stuff,” Taylor says. “I never felt like a normal twelve-year-old around Carl; I felt like a peer.”
“Taylor, let’s face it,” Willis says, laughing, “you never were a normal twelve-year-old. Even back then, you knew more about the things I was interested in, more enigmatic nuke stuff, than any PhD or postdoc I knew.”
Willis is thirty now; he’s tall and thin and much quieter than Taylor. When he’s interested in something his face opens up with a blend of amusement and curiosity. When he’s uninterested, he slips into the far-off distractedness that’s common among the supersmart. Tiffany asks him how his work is going, and Willis says he’s thinking about leaving his nuclear engineering job at an Albuquerque company that makes particle accelerators to develop neutron generators at a small R&D company. “Whatever I do, I want to stay in Albuquerque,” he says. “It’s a good climate; there’s lots of labs, lots of uranium, lots of radioactive stuff. And there’s lots of history out here that’s tangible and collectible—as long as you come with a Geiger counter.”
Taylor and Willis typically get together two or three times a year. They scavenge for equipment, visit research facilities, prospect for uranium, or run experiments. As we drive, they talk about taking their next atomic adventure farther afield. Willis says Taylor would love Chernobyl (Willis has visited twice), where “there are still pockets of surprising radioactivity.” Also high on both their lists is Shinkolobwe, the mine in Congo that yielded much of the material for the first atomic bombs, and the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan, the highly contaminated Soviet counterpart to the U.S. military’s Nevada Test Site. Soviet officials “told the top scientists that they would emerge at the end of a successful nuclear test as national heroes,” Willis says, “or, if it failed, they would be shot on the spot. The lower-ranking people were threatened only with prison camp in Siberia.”
The U.S. nuclear weapons program, based in Los Alamos, had more of a carrot than a stick approach, appealing to the scientists’ sense of patriotism. In late 1942, Enrico Fermi’s team in Chicago succeeded in creating the first self-sustaining fission reaction, proving his prediction that nuclei of uranium atoms would split if bombarded with neutrons, releasing more neutrons that in turn would split more atoms, creating an ongoing and self-sustaining reaction. The gates of the universe had been flung open, to paraphrase Pearl Buck, and mankind passed into new galaxies of possibilities that were both majestic and terrible.
The U.S. quietly and quickly accelerated research into nuclear weapons. The Manhattan Project’s scientific director was Robert Oppenheimer, a stick-thin, hard-drinking, extraordinarily ambitious man who had been a child science prodigy. Oppenheimer, who had visited the Los Alamos area during childhood family vacations, decided that the remote desert where he and his brother had ridden horses would be the perfect setting for a secret complex of atomic-weapons laboratories.
We pull into town, passing contaminated ponds and gullies, and stop at a diner for lunch. Taylor, wearing his belt-mounted radiation detector, heads for the restroom as Tiffany scans the menu. He returns with news. “I would like to point out that the bathroom is radioactive,” he says.
“Did you wash your hands?” Tiffany asks.
Taylor likes to wear his detector in public places to see what—or who—is radioactive. “I’ll be in the mall sometimes and it’ll go off as I’m passing someone. Usually they’re nuclear medicine patients. A lot of them are surprised when I tell them they’re radioactive.”
“I used to do that too,” Carl says. “But now I’m getting old enough that it’s not cute anymore. It’s just weird.”
Taylor eats a third of his lunch, then puts his fork down. “Whew,” he says. “I was starving!”
The talk gets back around to Taylor’s first fusor attempt, when he was twelve. By the time he loaded his self-made deuterium gas into his fusor, he’d already realized that it wasn’t going to work. “I knew I didn’t have the vacuum, the voltage, the chamber, or the grid I needed. Looking back, there was just no way I had the technical chops to even come close. But I learned a lot and it was fun to fiddle with, and I think I enjoyed deluding myself that it might work.”
Taylor decided to start over from scratch, applying what he’d learned in his first go-round. “Carl gave me a reality check about the voltage and vacuum issues,” he says. “He helped me realize that I’d need way more power and that it would be extremely difficult to reach a high vacuum without some ConFlat fittings.”
ConFlat, or CF, fittings use knife-edge flanges and a copper gasket to achieve an ultratight seal. Because they’re manufactured to exacting tolerances, they can be prohibitively expensive.
“That’s one of many reasons why creating nuclear fusion is out of reach for the average person,” Willis says. “Usually only the well-financed companies can afford new ConFlat and high-voltage equipment and other precision stuff. The used stuff is in high demand, but if you’re savvy and highly motivated, sometimes you can track it down.
“One reliable place to find it,” he says, looking at his watch, “is where we’re about to visit.”
In 1969, an eccentric nuclear technician named Edward “Atomic Ed” Grothus left his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory and turned to selling what he called “nuclear waste”—the lightly used precision hardware jettisoned by America’s lavishly funded weapons industry. Grothus informally named his surplus business the Black Hole, since, as he said, “everything goes in,
and not much seems to come out.”
Grothus hadn’t simply quit his job at the weapons lab; he’d stormed out after an epiphany. “What happened here and in Japan in 1945 is a demonstration of the power no person should have,” Grothus wrote on a placard that’s hung near the front of the store. Renouncing the industry that had long been his—and the town’s—bread and butter, he became an antiwar activist. He funded his new life, with exquisite irony, by selling the high-tech jetsam of his former workplace. Grothus also purchased the nearby Grace Lutheran Church building and renamed it the First Church of High Technology; he declared himself cardinal and ministered a Sunday service he dubbed the “critical mass.”
We drive past the church and pull into the Black Hole’s parking lot, strewn with bomb casings and massive vacuum chambers. Taylor says he found several essential parts for his second fusor attempt among the store’s chaotic shelves.
Taylor and Willis leap from the car and pluck their radiation detectors out of the trunk.
“Welcome,” Taylor tells me, “to geek heaven.”