by Tom Clynes
But at first, none of the forum contributors had any clue that they were communicating with a twelve-year-old.
“No, it never occurred to me until Carl told me he’d talked with Taylor on the phone,” says Hull. “I was amazed. By the level of his communications, I thought he was someone much older, with a great deal of academic physics education under his belt.”
Hull hosts the High Energy Amateur Science (HEAS) Conference each autumn. The invite-only event is a weekend-long swap meet and series of demonstrations and experiments involving radiation, lasers, and extremely high voltages. Taylor wasn’t able to make it to the HEAS gathering the year I attended, but Willis hasn’t missed one since 1993. He says he felt immediately at home at this semi-underground gathering. “Just knowing there were people who were interested in the same things I was, that was huge,” Willis says. “I also have to admit that the element of danger appealed to me.”
“These are not wine-and-cheese parties,” Hull had told me over the phone. Indeed, when I pulled into the lot next to Hull’s house midway through Saturday morning, my first impression was that I’d arrived at a sort of cerebral, hands-on car club, a flea market for high-end nerds. The yard was filled with vehicles, their trunks and tailgates open, and tarps and tables stacked with lasers, electron multipliers, vacuum tubes, and plenty of radioactive rocks. I overheard a conversation that began with the question, “Any idea where can I get some terbium-activated gadolinium oxysulfide?”
Hull wasn’t hard to find. In his late sixties, with the potbelly of a man who’s too busy tinkering to put much effort into taking care of himself, he’s an electronics engineer by trade, though his career rarely intersects with his hobbies. Neither does his wife, who stayed inside the house almost the entire weekend. Hull told me, in an accent that matches Slim Pickens’s character’s in Dr. Strangelove, his rationale for hosting the gathering: “I try and take what would normally be a lot of lone-wolf, clever folks who are spread across the continent and force them to mix and share their thoughts, ideas, and materials once a year.”
Near Hull’s workshop, someone was wiring a very large hand-built Marx generator, which produces extremely powerful pulses of both voltage and current by using multiple capacitors that are charged in parallel and then discharged in series across spark gaps. “That,” said Frank Sanns, a self-employed science consultant who was watching the setup, “is by far the most dangerous thing here.” Marx generators produce electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that can fry electronic devices—and anything else that gets too close. “Better take a step back and hide your digital camera and gonads when it comes on,” Sanns said. “Last year it took out a couple of cameras and phones.”
Tinkering was an essential part of life for much of the world’s population until very recently, and budding scientists and engineers learned by doing and fixing. During his teenage years, Richard Feynman taught himself how to repair radios, developing a business that helped support his family through the Great Depression and nourishing a curiosity that led to his Nobel Prize–winning brainstorms.
The post–World War II years were the era of Big Science, but they were also a boon to small-scale science—much of which was inspired by the space race and the Cold War. Hull got into experimental chemistry as a teenager in the 1960s. “Back then,” he told me at the gathering, “you were free to blow off an arm or leg making steel rockets. We used to go on a bus across town and pick up fifty or sixty pounds of ammonium nitrate. Try doing that now!”
As part of its Atoms for Peace program the Atomic Energy Agency distributed free radioactive materials to amateurs, hoping to inspire the generation that would push America further into atomic age. “I remember,” Hull said, “when the mailman actually brought cobalt-60 to my front door!”
It was a profitable time for businesses whose products met the demands of do-it-yourself scientists. The A. C. Gilbert Company thrived with its Erector sets (called Meccano outside the U.S.), telescopes, and atomic energy labs that included a Geiger counter and other instruments and even small radioactive sources. Heathkits, electronic kits marketed by the Heath Company, helped would-be electrical engineers learn the workings of radios, televisions, and other electronic gear by self-assembling them. “The kits taught Steve Jobs that products were manifestations of human ingenuity, not magical objects dropped from the sky,” writes Leander Kahney in his book Inside Steve’s Brain. Jobs credited his Heathkit explorations with giving him “a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment.”
The lure of explosive chemistry was probably the most potent recruiting tool midcentury science had to offer. Hewlett-Packard cofounder David Packard, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, and author/neurologist Oliver Sacks all credit their interest in science to childhoods spent blowing things up with chemistry sets. Intel cofounder Gordon Moore was eleven when he exploded his first chunks of homemade dynamite. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids—particularly boys—to science,” says Roald Hoffmann, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981.
The trend away from do-it-yourself science began in the 1980s, says Bob Parks, author of Makers: All Kinds of People Making Amazing Things in Garages, Basements, and Backyards. As cheap, well-sealed electronic gadgets became easier and cheaper to replace than to repair, interest in building things and taking them apart plummeted. By the turn of the millennium, says Parks, that “‘Hey, let’s just make stuff’ mentality was mostly washed out of mainstream America.”
In 2001, Scientific American discontinued its Amateur Scientist columns; editors said readers were no longer interested in hands-on science. The magazine then published an essay, titled “R.I.P. for D.I.Y.,” by George Musser, who lamented the loss of much of “the mentoring and serendipity” that communities of amateur scientists offered.
Today you’d be hard-pressed to find a child who is motivated to get under the screen of a smartphone to figure out what makes it light up—and you’d be even harder pressed to find a parent who would encourage it. That’s made it less likely that today’s kids will have the kind of formative experiences that Feynman, Moore, and Jobs had.
Parental concerns about safety (which are often legitimate) can stifle young scientists, as can restrictions on chemicals, spurred by concerns about terrorism and the epidemic of crystal methamphetamine made by amateur cooks in clandestine laboratories.
In schools, science labs that benefited from spending sprees in the wake of Sputnik have suffered decades of neglect. The chemophobia that stifled home science has penetrated classrooms, where a fear of lawsuits makes teachers wary of letting students perform their own experiments. Kids who attempt science experiments on school grounds can find themselves handcuffed and charged with a felony, as a Florida high-school student found out in 2013 after she induced a chemical reaction that popped the top off a water bottle and produced some smoke. Though no one was hurt and nothing was damaged, the school expelled sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot, who had good grades and a perfect behavior record. Rocket Boys author and NASA engineer Homer Hickam came to Kiera’s aid after hearing her story, and he presented her with a scholarship to the United States Advanced Space Academy.
Science without interactive labs or projects that relate to students’ real-world experiences just isn’t that much fun and may be contributing to the declining interest in STEM careers. Thirty years ago, the U.S. ranked third in the number of science and engineering degrees awarded in the eighteen- to twenty-four age group; today the U.S. ranks seventeenth, according to the National Science Board. “Human beings learn best by exploring or investigating, not by ingesting and swallowing facts and figures,” says author and education-reform activist Nikhil Goyal, who advocates bringing back shop classes and introducing project-based learning, in which students probe real-world problems collaboratively. “Learning,” Goyal says, “should be messy.”
Those who are
motivated to do their own science say that, even as the Internet made it easier to learn how to do things, the hyperfocus on safety and security often made it harder to actually do them. “The list of things that are too dangerous, too corrosive, or too explosive seems to grow every day,” says Hull. The Porter Chemical Company, maker of the popular Chemcraft labs in a box (each of which had enough liquids, powders, and beakers to conduct more than eight hundred experiments), closed its doors in the 1980s amid liability concerns. Most states restrict materials that could be used to make illegal fireworks or meth. Texas has gone so far as to require buyers and sellers of Erlenmeyer flasks to obtain permits and register the equipment.
Bill Nye, who hosted the award-winning PBS series Bill Nye, the Science Guy, believes the restrictions have gone beyond reason, to the level of paranoia, and that the eventual negative consequences will far outweigh the benefits. “People who want to make meth will find ways to do it with or without an Erlenmeyer flask,” Nye told Wired magazine’s Steve Silberman. “But raising a generation of people who are technically incompetent is a recipe for disaster.”
“Even in the 1980s when I was a kid,” says Carl Willis, “I could stop into the pharmacy and the pharmacist would order saltpeter for me, which I could use in my explosive experiments. The lack of freedom to do those kinds of things has made it really hard for young people to find something that captivates their interest, which only happens when they are allowed to interact with the material world, the physical universe, in a way that’s new to them.”
Then again, some young experimenters who have no interest in physically taking apart their video-game consoles or smartphones have taken their tinkering to the virtual world. They’re hacking and modding games, manipulating data, bending programs to their will.
“This isn’t something that should be dismissed,” says Shawn Carlson, a MacArthur Foundation genius-grant recipient who wrote the final Amateur Scientist columns and who now trains teachers to inspire children to love science. “Most kids just want to play the games. But some want to build something purely digital that’s ambitiously new and different.”
Pioneering computer scientist Ted Selker disagrees. “Something important is lost when kids don’t have—or don’t take—the opportunity to explore the world with their hands.” Known for inventing the TrackPoint device for IBM’s ThinkPad and for his user-interface innovations at MIT’s Media Lab, Selker believes there’s no way for someone to fully develop creatively by just staring at screens and tapping at keyboards. “Every time we touch a piece of bendy aluminum or soft copper, our brain builds a library of the physicality of that object, and the possibilities for it,” Selker says. “The ability to learn conceptually and not just procedurally is created by the process of taking things apart and building things; that’s how we develop the intuition to make useful and creative connections.”
This sentiment isn’t just poetic nostalgia, says physicist Steven Cowley, who leads Britain’s nuclear fusion program. Cowley believes that the lack of hands-on experiences is actually holding back innovation. “We have a big uptick in engineers and physics students coming in, but we don’t have good experimentalists with a feel for what’s going on, because they’ve lost the practical skills.” Cowley says he now keeps an eye out for engineers who are sons or daughters of farmers. “They’ve grown up getting the spanner out and learning to fix things, and that gives them a problem-solving perspective that you can’t get any other way,” he says.
“That’s what’s most impressive about Taylor,” says Cowley. “Not that he understands this stuff that practically no one else understands, but that he can build it. It’s one thing to understand physics at the age of thirteen, quite another to then apply the theory to a machine that you hand-build, largely by yourself, of begged-and-borrowed and adapted parts.”
Despite the roadblocks, there are signs that a small but countervailing trend is building and that interest in hands-on amateur science is on the verge of a comeback. The phenomenon is emerging via several different paths. Citizen scientists have become the workhorses of crowdsourced data collection and have made major discoveries and contributions in the fields of astronomy, environmental science, energy, and aviation. Top scientific journals have opened their peer-reviewed pages to research papers coauthored by self-taught experts such as Forrest Mims III, who discovered that LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have the ability to both emit and sense light.
At the same time, a new generation is intent on seizing the traditions of do-it-yourself science and remaking them in its own tech-focused image. The grassroots maker movement encourages hands-on and participatory creation, especially in pursuits such as electronics and robotics.
The movement had its roots in the sixties and seventies with publications like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and organizations like Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, whose hobbyists largely launched the personal-computer revolution. But maker culture really took off in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when hacker spaces, fab labs, and other maker spaces began popping up in university towns, allowing geeky creators to share skills, ideas, and tools. Maker Faires, robotics fests like Dorkbot, and media such as Make magazine and Boing Boing have boosted interest and a sense of community and helped translate the hacker ethic to the nonvirtual world. Suddenly, it’s cool again to get your hands dirty.
The high-energy amateur science community is an unusual maker subculture. Whereas most amateur scientists are into either theory (they want to know why) or building (they want to know how), HEAS people need both a command of complex atomic physics theory and the hands-on skills to do precision engineering work.
Like many at Hull’s HEAS gathering, Sanns, the science consultant, has ideas for pushing nuclear fusion forward. “I’ve recently had a eureka moment,” he told me. “All the approaches so far have been to hit it harder, ramp things up, smash them together, hope for the best. I’ve been thinking about the strong nuclear force and electrostatic repulsion and think I might have a better way.”
The long-prevailing approach to magnetic confinement fusion is that bigger can only be better. The need for such massive scale—ITER is by far the biggest of all the Big Science projects—increases the complexity and the range of problems both scientific and political. Big Science has in many cases yielded big results, “but big science has the special problem that it can’t easily be scaled down,” physicist Steven Weinberg writes. If ITER succeeds, no one will regret betting big on it; if it fails, the cacophony of “I told you sos” will likely drown out any suggestions of taking on something this bold for a very long time. In the uncertain meantime, the question has to be asked: Is Big Science still the best way to get things done, or is it buckling under its own complexity?
Back in 1911, Rutherford’s gold-foil experiment, which resulted in the discovery of the nucleus, was financed by a seventy-pound grant and consisted of arranging a few items on a tabletop. Physicist Robert Millikan made his groundbreaking discovery of electrons by using a perfume atomizer to squirt a mist of oil and clicking his stopwatch to time how quickly the droplets fell through an electrical field.
“As the effort to understand the world has advanced, the low-hanging fruits (like Newton’s apple) have been plucked,” wrote George Johnson in the New York Times. Since Rutherford’s and Millikan’s discoveries, big breakthroughs have come at an ever-higher cost and have required ever more complex machines and supporting administrations. The Large Hadron Collider, seventeen miles in circumference, produced electronic data equivalent to billions of Millikan’s notebooks to verify the existence of the Higgs boson and the Higgs field, which gives fundamental particles their mass.
The massive investments in ITER don’t make it too big to fail; they make it too big to abandon. And yet, tokamaks like ITER may not represent the best long-term approach to fusion. “Tokamak technology is as twenty-first-century as you can get,” says plasma physicist Ron Phaneuf, “but you are still heating water to make po
wer.”
Meanwhile, a few startup companies are exploring radically different approaches, such as aneutronic fusion, which delivers electricity from the fusion process without using a turbine, and magnetized target fusion, a hybrid of magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. If fusion energy is still waiting for its big idea—a fresh approach that can leapfrog the decades-long incremental push toward more complexity—is it likely to emerge from a massive scientific bureaucracy? Or could it spring from a highly motivated individual, a small company, or one of the collaborations that the new model of participative amateur science is constantly spawning?
The fact that fusion reactors are now being built relatively cheaply by crowdsourcing and online collaboration is consistent with the way innovation is evolving in the twenty-first century. While the amateurs’ experiments aren’t nearly as advanced as those done in multibillion-dollar facilities, it’s conceivable that developers of these homebrew reactors could play a vital role in moving fusion forward, as citizen scientists have in other realms.
Hull calls it the “lucky donkey theory,” the idea that many scientific advances are achieved by creative underdogs who lack the resources and high technical standards of established laboratory-based researchers but make up for it in ingenuity and a higher tolerance for risk.
Carl Willis, with his nuclear engineering job and his high-energy hobbies, has a foot in each world. “The story of the underdog topping well-heeled opposition can be a seductive cliché,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s as far-fetched with physics as the industry leaders would have us believe. There’s a certain stodginess that impedes innovation, and from what I’ve seen, a lot of people in the big labs don’t have much of the creativity and enthusiasm that lead to big breakthroughs.”
As Hull beckoned the HEAS crowd into his workshop for a demonstration of his fusor, fusioneer Edward Miller told me that he recently flew to the University of Texas to conduct fusion-related experiments. “We got some money together and used their lab’s lasers and accelerators,” Miller said as we approached the door. “We were trying a lot of things, going for big numbers, using pressure instead of temperature. We blew deuterium into buckyballs and hit them with x-rays, electrons, protons, lasers. We didn’t get any neutrons, but we got tons of data. I don’t think we made any breakthroughs, but I think we pretty conclusively ruled out a few things.