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The Boy Who Played With Fusion
Popular Science ^ | 2012-02-14 | Tom Clynes

Posted on 02/21/2012 9:07:37 AM PST by justlurking

Propulsion,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

[...]

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Technical; US: Arkansas; US: Nevada
KEYWORDS: fusion; fusor; nevada; stringtheory; taylorwilson
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To: SunkenCiv

I think this is the article you freepmailed me about.


61 posted on 02/21/2012 10:04:16 PM PST by Kevmo (If you can define a man by the depravity of his enemies, Rick Santorum must be a noble soul indeed.)
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To: justlurking

Loved this article! Thanks for posting it.


62 posted on 02/21/2012 10:10:11 PM PST by Monitor ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it." - H. L. Mencken)
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To: Kevmo; AdmSmith; bvw; callisto; ckilmer; dandelion; ganeshpuri89; gobucks; KevinDavis; ...

Thanks Kevmo!


· List topics · post a topic · subscribe · Google ·

63 posted on 02/21/2012 10:11:56 PM PST by SunkenCiv (FReep this FReepathon!)
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The inventor of the Fusor, which the kid in this article replicated.
The Boy Who Invented Television: A Story of Inspiration, Persistence and Quiet Passion The Boy Who Invented Television:
A Story of Inspiration, Persistence
and Quiet Passion

by Paul Schatzkin


64 posted on 02/21/2012 10:17:50 PM PST by SunkenCiv (FReep this FReepathon!)
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BTW, something has bugged me since I first began to read this article, and it needs to be corrected. The Saturn V at Huntsville is not a "replica" -- it's one of three surviving Saturn V boosters, the other two are at Houston and Canaveral. Of course, the rest of the Saturn V boosters still exist, but they're at the bottom of the ocean. There's a deep-sea recovery and rehab job just crying out for fruition.
Jan. 30: Chris Capella looks upward as he walks beneath the newly renovated Saturn V moon rocket in Huntsville, Ala.

Jan. 30: Chris Capella looks upward as he walks beneath the newly renovated Saturn V moon rocket in Huntsville, Ala.

65 posted on 02/21/2012 10:25:20 PM PST by SunkenCiv (FReep this FReepathon!)
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To: albionin

Pretty much yes.


66 posted on 02/22/2012 2:32:01 AM PST by Boiler Plate ("Why be difficult, when with just a little more work, you can be impossible" Mom)
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To: SunkenCiv

That’s a great book. RCA ripped him off big time.


67 posted on 02/22/2012 8:58:44 AM PST by TexasRepublic (Socialism is the gospel of envy and the religion of thieves)
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To: TexasRepublic

Definitely.


68 posted on 02/22/2012 4:44:42 PM PST by SunkenCiv (FReep this FReepathon!)
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To: darth

Way cool, darth!


69 posted on 02/22/2012 7:32:15 PM PST by SaraJohnson
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