The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Marie Curie was convinced of a causal relationship between the innate curiosity of childhood and great feats of discovery. And Einstein, well known for his childlike nature, insisted that “imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

  “I think kids are able to sometimes do better science than adults,” Taylor would tell me when he was on the verge of becoming an adult. “Because kids haven’t been exposed to the bureaucracy of professional science, they’re a lot more open to trying things.”

  If nuclear fusion is, as many physicists believe, still waiting for its big idea, then the notion that it could come from a young, forward-thinking physicist isn’t as far-fetched as it might at first seem. Dean Simonton, who has studied the advantages of youth in the creative process, found that physics and poetry, more than other fields, tend to produce early bursts of productive inspiration. Although breakthroughs most often come from midcareer scientists, physicists frequently make their first important discoveries before the age of thirty.

  Both Newton and Einstein experienced a “miracle year” in their midtwenties. Newton was twenty-four when an apple falling from a tree led him to hit upon the law of universal gravitation; that year, he also did important work in calculus, optics, and the laws of motion. Einstein’s annus mirabilis, which still evokes awe in the world of science, came when he was twenty-six. That year (1905), he overturned Newton’s idea that space and time are absolute with his special theory of relativity. He also developed the quantum theory of light, proved that atoms exist, explained Brownian motion, and described the relationship between energy and matter with E = mc².

  Carl Willis, the nuclear engineer from Albuquerque, detected in Taylor those sparks of curiosity and passionate ambition that, coupled with an early command of nuclear physics, gave the boy “an ability to make logical and useful connections that would have been exceptional at any age.” To get Taylor started, Willis sent him some specifications on a type of reactor known as a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusion reactor. Invented by Philo T. Farnsworth (who also invented the television) and improved by Robert Hirsch (who directed the U.S. fusion energy program during the 1970s), the fusor consists of a vacuum chamber surrounding one or two spherical inner grids that cradle a plasma field. With a just-right combination of fuel, vacuum pressure, and voltage, atoms ionize. As they become electrically charged, they accelerate toward the grid(s). When they pass through the grid(s) and converge in the central plasma field, some collide and fuse, releasing energy in the form of neutrons.

  But Willis made it clear that getting a significant number of ions close enough to fuse and produce measurable quantities of neutrons would be a tremendous challenge—especially for someone with limited resources in a town lacking any technical infrastructure to speak of.

  “But the thing about Carl,” Taylor says, “was that he never said, ‘You’ll never be able to do it, you’re just a kid and even if you weren’t it would be too complicated and expensive.’

  “He just said, ‘It won’t be easy.’”

  A few days after they talked, Taylor received a parcel in the mail. It was a gift from Willis: the helium-3 neutron detector being sold on Fusor.net that they’d discussed during their first communication.

  “That was a huge boost,” Taylor says, “because it told me Carl believed there was a chance I’d actually be able to build a reactor that could achieve fusion and produce neutrons.”

  15

  * * *

  Roots of Prodigiousness

  ONE SUMMER EVENING as a storm approached, Tiffany looked out the kitchen window and saw Taylor darting around the yard placing neutron detectors in trees and on the roof of the two-story backyard shed that the family called the Little House.

  “I’m looking for neutrons that might-could be generated by lightning,” he shouted in response to her query. He added, without breaking stride, that there was some evidence that lightning produced neutrons, but it hadn’t been proven; it was an open question in physics.

  “Maybe,” he yelled, “I can be the one who proves it!”

  “Better get yourself inside pretty quick before you get whacked by some of those neutrons you’re hunting for,” Tiffany hollered back.

  Psychologists and educators say Taylor’s sort of intensity is almost always apparent in gifted and talented children. “I call it the rage to master,” says psychologist Ellen Winner. “I hear it from parents all the time; they say there’s nothing that can keep their kids from what they want to be good at.”

  Definitions of giftedness vary across the academic and geographic world, but researchers agree that the common denominators include extreme curiosity and an intense urge to discover. “Truly gifted kids are almost always autodidacts, motivated from within,” says Susan G. Assouline, who directs the University of Iowa’s Belin-Blank Center, a leading research center focusing on gifted education. “Sometimes there’s something holding them back from expressing it, such as boredom or autism,” she says. (Recent research suggests a genetic connection between autism and prodigiousness.) “But on the inside, these kids want to be engaged; they want opportunities to discover something new.”

  The U.S. Department of Education defines the academically gifted as “students, children, or youth who give evidence of high achievement capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields, and who need services and activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities.”

  The UK Department for Children, Schools, and Families has a less verbose definition of gifted and talented students: “children and young people with one or more abilities developed to a level significantly ahead of their year group (or with the potential to develop those abilities).”

  The National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) estimates that there are three to five million academically gifted children in kindergarten through twelfth grade in the U.S.—roughly 6 to 10 percent of the student population. In Britain, the estimate is 5 to 10 percent; Turkey and India say about 3 percent of their students are gifted. But the NAGC admits that its number is little more than an educated guess; no one really knows how many children are gifted or whether the proportion of them in the student body is growing or shrinking. “To know for sure, you’d have to precisely define criteria for giftedness, then do a big epidemiological-type study canvassing a whole country,” says Winner. “Gifted kids do seem more visible now, but it may be that because of advances in technology and communication more are showing up who wouldn’t have been noticed before.”

  That’s probably true. In the pre-Internet era, it’s not very likely we’d have heard about someone like Akrit Jaswal, who performed surgery on a burn victim’s hands at age seven and was admitted to an Indian medical university at twelve; or William Kamkwamba, who built a wind turbine to power his impoverished Malawian village at age fifteen; or Gregory Smith, an American who finished elementary school in one year and high school in two years. After graduating from college with honors at thirteen, Gregory is pursuing a PhD in mathematics and traveling to developing nations to promote peace and children’s rights. He was nominated at twelve years old—and three times since—for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  The community of gifted children includes a much smaller subset of kids often described as prodigies, or the profoundly gifted. These are the scary-smart kids whose talents and early achievements are off the charts. Among the handful of academic researchers who have studied them extensively, no one has devoted more time and energy than David Henry Feldman, the Tufts University child psychologist. Feldman defines a prodigy as “a pre-adolescent who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field of endeavor.” In contrast to an especially smart kid of great general ability, the prodigy has a distinct form of giftedness that’s far more advanced and focused on a
single interest.

  These are the children who devour books (often nonfiction) before entering kindergarten; who teach themselves algebra or musical notation as toddlers; who take our breath away with their piano prowess, their devastatingly efficient chess moves, or their visionary artwork. With prodigies, the rage to master is extreme. They are attracted to a subject early and learn rapidly, approaching it with unshakable concentration.

  Feldman became intrigued by profoundly gifted children and their cognitive development in the 1970s, and over ten years he closely tracked six extraordinarily gifted children. He told their stories in his 1986 book Nature’s Gambit. The book’s content is both surprising (among other findings, he noted that prodigies’ IQs vary widely depending on specialty) and disconcerting, since prodigiousness, Feldman discovered, often does not lead to happy adulthoods. Feldman’s sensitivity and commitment to his subjects are impressive, as are his observations of the characteristics that define and link these children. But he stresses that the body of knowledge about extreme giftedness is thin. Prodigies, by definition, are hard to gather in large numbers, and they are often too busy to participate in studies. “We’re dealing with very tiny samples, maybe fifty children who have been intensely studied,” Feldman says. “We are at the very beginning of understanding them.”

  The past decade has brought renewed academic interest in prodigies and gifted children. Researchers see the gifted child (along with other outliers, such as savants, autistic children, and very high-IQ cases) as among the more striking manifestations of human potential. Understanding their intellectual development is an important key to deciphering the complexities of intellectual development across the entire spectrum of children.

  One of the primary questions puzzling researchers like Feldman is exactly where and how intelligence is generated in the brain. But the neuroanatomical basis of prodigiousness still generates more questions than answers. For instance, how do neurological reward systems differ between high achievers and other children? How and why are some brains seemingly wired to love novelty? Why do some people have such a driving need to ask questions and achieve mastery? What neural systems underpin the ability to outperform the rest of us? And how do external factors affect brain development?

  “Unfortunately, we don’t yet have the ability to answer, or even properly ask, what’s going on inside a prodigy’s brain that creates those conditions,” says neuroscientist Francisco Xavier Castellanos, director of research at New York University’s Child Study Center. In the near future, neuroimaging will likely boost our understanding of the brain’s development and help us predict future performance and deficits, health-related behaviors, and responses to pharmacological or behavioral treatments. “But the tools we have now to observe the brain are a bit like an early-generation microscope,” says Castellanos, who has spent much of his career scanning and analyzing the brains of children and adolescents. “We can tell that the brain is very busy, but we have profound ignorance about its workings.”

  Neuroscientists have observed a correlation between brain size and IQ—but it accounts for only about 10 percent of variations. Research also suggests that adult intelligence can be predicted during childhood by the rate of change in the thickness of a child’s cerebral cortex, the gray matter that makes up the brain’s outer layer. Other evidence has emerged that the efficiency with which information travels through the structures of the brain—in particular between the parietal and frontal lobes—may be a significant enabling factor for intelligence.

  General intelligence is typically gauged by IQ score, which remains a popular scale in large part because it’s a reasonably comparable meas­ure that’s been applied over a long term to large numbers of people. “IQ is like democracy; it’s better than the rest but it has acknowledged flaws,” says Castellanos. “We can’t deny that IQ data are among the best measures in finding differences between people in general, but reliable ways.”

  And yet, IQ doesn’t go very far in explaining the way smart people’s brains work or in providing useful tools for mapping the path from raw cognitive ability to remarkable achievement. “[IQ is] unlikely to predict a kid who has abilities like Taylor’s,” says Castellanos. “There’d be lots of kids with IQs as high as his who wouldn’t have gone this far, this fast.”

  Joanne Ruthsatz, a psychologist at Ohio State University, confirmed Feldman’s observations that IQ requirements for mastery vary widely across specialties. In a 2012 paper published in the journal Intelligence, she reported that a typical IQ for an art prodigy is around 100. Early chess and music masters usually have higher IQs, as do math whizzes, who average in the 140 range.

  A high IQ will not take you far in the art world (in fact, it appears to be a handicap for those with artistic gifts), but it’s almost essential for a high-achieving physicist. Then again, there are exceptions. The iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman had an IQ of 124, high but not spectacular, yet in his midtwenties he mastered the astonishingly complex equations that led to his Nobel Prize–winning theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), and he did it with what biographer James Gleick called “frightening ease.”

  “Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal,” Feynman reportedly told his wife after accepting the prize, “but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something.”

  The search for a specific cognitive ability that underlies all forms of prodigiousness has pointed most distinctly toward working memory, a key cognitive function that allows us to hold information in our minds in a highly active state. According to several recent studies, a high working-memory capacity is a constant that appears to predict and positively affect performance and intelligence across all domains. Ruthsatz has administered standardized IQ tests to prodigies and found that, although IQs ranged from 108 to 147—just above average to above the conventional cutoff for genius—each prodigy was at or above the 99th percentile for working memory.

  So how does working memory work?

  “It’s been argued that the brain is limitless as to how much information can be stored in a lifespan,” says Castellanos, “and no one has proven otherwise. What’s profoundly limited is how many things we can hold in our mind at one time, available for processing. The magic number for humans seems to be seven, plus or minus two.” To get to a novel thought, a person has to be able to maintain several things up in the air, ready to manipulate.

  It’s relatively easy to test for working-memory capacity. One common way to measure it is by seeing how many items someone can remember simultaneously for a short period. If you’re given two ten-digit phone numbers and can repeat them back, you have a higher working-memory capacity than someone who can recall only seven digits of one phone number. Working memory lets you multiply large numbers in your head or remember the names of two new acquaintances while being introduced to a third. It’s crucial to academic, professional, and social success, and it typically increases steadily through childhood and adolescence, peaking between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. It begins to decline in our thirties, but it can be fortified and preserved through training or pursuits that demand its use. It is this premise that has driven the success of brain-training programs and apps that promise to make our minds more supple and spry—although there is absolutely no solid scientific evidence to back up these promises.

  Surprisingly, humans and monkeys have identical working-memory capacities. But modern humans have learned, in a profoundly useful adaptation, to hack the limits of working memory through a process called chunking, in which information is analyzed and compressed into composite nuggets that are more memorable and easier to process. For example, we chunk when we hear 212 not as three discrete elements but as the telephone area code for Manhattan. This allows our memory systems to be more efficient and effective at grasping possibilities and extracting useful structure from raw data.

  High achievers are able to chunk and superchunk in the domains they’re focused on. “We all know someone,” says Castellanos, “who amazes us at h
ow fast they can think. You observe them and you say, ‘Holy shit, you got there faster than I did. Now, if I had X percent more time I might have been able to get there too.’ I think of intelligence as how much can you get done in the span of time available—whether it’s a lifespan or the moment in which we’re thinking.”

  One of the longest and most frequently debated aspects of high achievers is the degree to which they are born or made. Is a person’s intellectual destiny dependent on inherited mental hardware? Or can someone starting at subprodigy levels reach genius-level acumen in a chosen discipline through ambition and long, hard work?

  Much of the research on talent development has been driven by the urge to answer these questions and predict who will rise to the top. An extensive and growing body of evidence confirms that we can identify future innovators by the time they are teenagers. The same research has confirmed that those whose abilities are identified early and who are given support to develop their talents are the ones most likely to grow into the creative, high-achieving adults who transform society, advance knowledge, and reinvent modern culture.

  “Exceptional youthful ability really does correlate with exceptional adult achievement,” says Jonathan Wai, a research scientist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and the author of Psychology Today’s Finding the Next Einstein column. “It really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become future innovators.” Wai has investigated different populations of intellectual outliers to better understand the talent-development process and the degree to which brain­iacs are likely to become billionaires.