The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  The awards ceremony was at noon on Friday. While Tiffany, Kenneth, Joey, and Ashlee sat in the middle of the crowd, Taylor sat with Ochs and the rest of the Nevada team as the celebrity emcee presented the awards for the various categories. He finally arrived at Physics and Astronomy.

  “I had an inkling I might win an award, maybe third or even second place, because of all the buzz around my display,” Taylor remembers. In fact, his project was one of the first-place winners. Taylor trotted up to the stage to accept the award and was told to wait. In a moment, he found out why: he’d also won the Best in Category award for Physics and Astronomy, which came with a five-thousand-dollar cash prize. After receiving congratulations, he went to pick up his award. Backstage, the other Best in Category award winners were lingering; Taylor joined them. As they exchanged congratulations, one of the organizers approached him.

  “She told me I needed to pick up my award, then go back and sit with my team,” Taylor says.

  Something was up.

  All that was left were the Gordon E. Moore Award and the two Intel Foundation Young Scientist Awards. The emcee relinquished the stage to the Intel Foundation’s executive director, Wendy Hawkins, who said that the Young Scientist Award winners were selected for their commitment to innovation in tackling challenging scientific questions, using authentic research practices, and creating solutions to the problems of tomorrow. The award, which seemed so far out of reach to most of the finalists that they didn’t even dare to imagine winning it, came with a fifty-thousand-dollar cash prize.

  “Taylor,” Ochs whispered as Hawkins wound up her speech, “I think you’ve got a chance.”

  The first winner was a team from Thailand.

  “Our other winner of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award,” Hawkins said, “is Taylor Ramon Wilson, from Reno, Nevada, USA!”

  Taylor looked at Ochs questioningly—Did she just say my name?—then leaped from his seat and sprinted toward the stage. Hawkins continued: “Taylor has developed one of the lowest-dose and highest-sensitivity interrogation systems for countering nuclear terrorism.”

  As applause thundered and cameras flashed, Taylor ran up the stairs and was soon covered in falling confetti, hugging Hawkins, the other contestants, and anyone in reach. Then he and the other winners lined up across the riser.

  “I was scanning the crowd for my mom and dad and Joey and Ashlee”—they were on their feet, screaming and hugging each other—“but the lights were too bright; I couldn’t see them out there.”

  And so Taylor stood, smiling broadly, holding his plaque high over his head as the confetti continued to fall.

  26

  * * *

  The Father of All Bombs

  “DAD, DID YOU get my coffee creamer?”

  “It’s out in the garage, Tay. Let me see if I can remember where I put it.” As Kenneth pushes himself up off his chair, Taylor is already through the kitchen door. I follow him into the garage and collide with a blast of midsummer afternoon heat.

  The Wilsons arrived in Texarkana two days earlier for their annual summer homecoming. I can immediately sense that everyone is more relaxed than in Reno, folded in among old friends and family and the familiar greenery and pace of the South. Soon—it will take a few days—all of them will find their fading accents coming back and their days taken up with friends and rituals and roles that defined them for the majority of their lives.

  Taylor takes a look around the garage. “These go way back,” he says, affectionately kicking a stack of traffic cones as Kenneth emerges from the house and lifts a large bag off the concrete floor. “Here it is,” he says, holding the bag out to Taylor, who reaches in with both hands and pulls out a couple of one-gallon canisters of powdered nondairy coffee creamer—a year’s supply for a midsize office. There are two more in the bottom of the bag.

  “That gonna be enough?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Taylor says, looking pleased. “That ought to give us a pretty nice fireball.”

  Taylor glances around. “Now we just need a five-gallon bucket, some fuse, and a little black powder, and we got us everything we need to fire up the Father of All Bombs.”

  When I ask, Taylor says, “The FOAB? It’s a Russian thing. That’s what they nicknamed it, to one-up the Americans’ Mother of All Bombs. The official name is the Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power. Basically, it creates the world’s largest explosion short of a nuclear weapon. It works like what I’m going to do with the coffee creamer; you get a super-high-temperature fireball and a massive shock wave. Their guy, General Rukshin, said”—here Taylor tacks on his Dixie version of a Russian accent—“‘Owl dat iss alive merely evaporates.’

  “And we’re gonna do it tonight,” he says, “at the party!”

  We gather the FOAB materials and assemble them in the backyard. Taylor is in almost constant motion, darting here and there to show me something or deal with some suddenly urgent matter that will be replaced within minutes by another even more urgent matter. When he sits, he triple- and quadruple-tasks, conversing, watching TV, checking his iPhone for the latest energy-related news, corresponding with friends and fans. “I’m getting bored,” he’ll say after sitting for a few minutes. “Let’s go blow something up.”

  Kenneth and Tiffany have invited several old family friends to the party; some bring along their teenage or twentysomething sons and daughters, who are all eager to hear what Taylor is up to. Near the fridge, Taylor holds court with Susan and Louis Slimer, regaling them with interesting facts on the subject of radiation hormesis, the theory that low doses of ionizing radiation activate the body’s repair mechanisms and protect against disease.

  Socializing in southern Arkansas is still a genteel experience. I hear a lot of “Yes, sirs” and “No, ma’ams,” and I notice that children and even young adults won’t refer to an older person by first name only; it’s “Miss Tiffany” or “Mr. Kenneth.” But Taylor has conversed easily with adults since the second grade; he’s never had a sense of being subordinate to them. Tiffany, watching Taylor from across the kitchen, tells me that at parties or on vacations, Taylor would always go toward the grownups. “He’s never had adults intimidate him. We worried about that. Did he have sufficient respect for authority? Not really. But most people responded positively; they were amazed that he could come up and meet them at their level. And most kids his age didn’t really want to hear about black holes and dark matter.”

  Jeff and Jolly Woosley want to know about Taylor’s plans for college. On this subject, Taylor is vague. He’d heard from recruiters at MIT and Berkeley. He had also heard from Lee Dodds at the University of Tennessee, whom he had impressed as a ten-year-old, and Dudley Herschbach, the Nobel-winning Harvard professor. In fact, Herschbach had called Kenneth too, and suggested the possibility of Taylor skipping his undergraduate degree and coming in as a nuclear engineering graduate student.

  “He said Taylor is doing research that most graduates have never thought of doing,” Kenneth would tell me later, “and he’d already done all these elaborate research papers and science projects. He said what if Taylor came in as a grad student and immediately got to work on his thesis paper? He thought it was ridiculous the way some of these grad students were drawing out their dissertations four and five years. He’d always wanted to see someone come in and come out with a PhD in a year’s time, and he honestly believed Taylor could be the one to do it.” Taylor had gotten a similar, but firmer, invitation to go directly into the nuclear engineering PhD program at the University of California, San Diego.

  But as he talked about it, there wasn’t a whole lot of excitement on his face.

  “Okay, Jeff, now ask him what it is you really want to know about,” Louis Slimer says, initiating a round of laughter and knowing grins.

  “Okay, okay,” says Woosley. “So, Taylor, y’all got some fireworks for us tonight?”

  “Well . . .” Taylor says, relishing the attention. He leans back against the counter, crosses his ar
ms, lowers his head, and looks up with a mock-sheepish expression. “I just might have a little bit of entertainment for y’all.”

  A few minutes later I’m out on the patio with Taylor and Ellen Orr, Taylor’s old friend and a schoolmate (and fellow teacher in middle school). She has kinky hair and a kooky laugh. She graduated a year early from high school in Texarkana (“I got bored, so I decided to hurry up and get out of here”) and she’s back in town on summer break from Centenary College. Taylor has outfitted Ellen and me with propane torches, which we’re using to ignite the thin lines of gunpowder he’s pouring onto the patio bricks. It’s eight thirty now, just dark enough for our explosive little streaks and laughter to catch the attention of the partygoers inside.

  “I do believe,” Taylor says as the guests drift outside, “that it’s time for us to make ourselves a little fireball.”

  Taylor pops the polycarbonate face shield atop his head—“No one that gets burned or blinded plans on it,” he says—leaving the mask flipped up as he threads a fuse through a small hole he’s drilled near the bottom of a bucket. He looks around, checking for open flames, then grabs the container of black powder.

  “Okay, here’s the recipe,” he says, pouring a bit of powder into the five-gallon bucket. “The powder is the lifting charge, and you don’t need much if you do it right. Then you cover the fuse and powder with a paper towel, to separate the lifting charge from the creamer.”

  Taylor glances up at the small circle of people gathered around him. “I feel like the Martha Stewart of backyard naughtiness,” he says.

  “Actually,” he adds, pouring the creamer in, “I might-could do a book on backyard science someday. But not boring stuff; it would be stuff I like to do, like this.”

  Leaving the mask flipped up, he stands next to the bucket and addresses the crowd, clearly relishing the ringmaster role. “So, when you have oxygen combining with an element over a long period of time, the result is slow oxidation, like rust. But when oxygen combines with something rapidly, you have a quick energy release. What’s going to happen is the black powder’s going to push the sugar, which is the fuel, up into the atmosphere. When it meets the air, it’ll release its energy, in the form of light and heat.

  “The Russians call this the Father of All Bombs. But the way we’re doing it, it should be more of a fireball than an explosion. But you never know how this humidity will affect it,” he says, looking up at the sky. “So, just in case, stand back. And if you hear a big bang, duck and avoid falling shrapnel.”

  Ellen and I exchange anxious glances as Taylor pulls a lighter out of his pocket. Taylor flips his mask down and bends toward the fuse, and I find myself reflexively taking another step back.

  “Wait a minute,” Kenneth suddenly says, looking around the yard. “Where’s Joey?”

  Joey has, thus far, done an admirable job of remaining invisible. Apart from a few perfunctory hellos, strongly encouraged by Tiffany, he has very effectively managed to dodge human interaction. Tiffany opens the back door and yells into the house.

  “Joey? Joey, come on down for the fireball!”

  There’s no answer.

  Ellen and I, who last saw him playing a video game in the upstairs computer/exercise room, offer to fetch him. We head inside, moving past photos of the two laughing, clowning brothers in younger years. Upstairs we find Joey sitting where we last saw him, at the computer. Now, though, the screen is filled not with a game but with the Wikipedia entry for sorghum. Joey doesn’t look up when we enter.

  “Joey!” Ellen says. “What the heck?”

  “Sorghum is good,” Joey says, scrolling through a comparative chart of the nutritional content of major grains. He touches the screen with a finger. “Look at the protein content compared to the others.”

  “But Joey,” Ellen says, standing behind him with her hands on her hips. “There’s gonna be a fireball. Why are you up here Wikipedia-ing sorghum?”

  Joey stares at the screen for another few seconds, then answers, still not looking up.

  “I’m second best at everything,” he says. “I don’t know.”

  Taylor and Joey are both tall and thin and scary-smart. But right now, it’s a stretch to believe that the kid sitting upstairs in a house in Arkansas staring at pixels describing sorghum shares fraternal genes with the showman in the backyard who’s preparing to incinerate a good portion of the breathable sky.

  “Joey is incredibly intelligent,” Ellen would tell me later. “And he has an amazing, dry sense of humor when you can dig it out of him. But it’s like he got stuck in Taylor’s shadow. He’s such a smart kid, but Taylor just got there first.”

  It wasn’t always like this—and sometimes it still isn’t. One night in Texarkana, we all went out to dinner at an upscale restaurant. After a week back home, everyone had loosened up. Joey was in a giddy mood; he seemed more like the kid running around in the pictures and videos that chronicle his preteen life than I’d ever seen him. Once Tiffany coaxed Joey and Taylor to look at the menu, they carried on a running gag—“I weel haf zee soufflé,” they kept saying in over-the-top French accents—smirking and giggling and drawing a few disapproving stares from stuffier diners nearby. When the food came, Tiffany prodded them to eat, but the boys spent most of the time messing with each other’s plates. They were just two teenage brothers having a good time together.

  On the surface, both boys’ early childhoods looked much like a lot of other upper-middle-class childhoods. There were the PBS kids’ shows and Baby Mozart CDs. There was the organic diet (Joey stopped eating meat at age four and is still a vegetarian) and bedtime rituals that included lots of reading. “As a preschooler,” Tiffany says, “Joey was always escaping and getting lost in crowds. We actually decided not to go to New York City one year, because we were sure we’d have to get a leash for him if we did.”

  As a youngster, Joey liked playing in creeks and drawing. Computers had established more of a foothold in the house by the time their second-born was a preschooler, and he got hooked early on the wonders of the screen. “He loved those Clifford CD-ROMs, and he would stay on them till I pulled him off,” Tiffany says. Whereas Taylor has never had an interest in video games—he goes onto computers only for information—Joey is more typical of the Y Generation. He got into gaming fairly young and eventually began modding (hacking and modifying the games) in collaboration and competition with his friends—who were, in contrast to Taylor’s, mostly boys.

  Although Joey’s mathematical talents were stifled in elementary school, he charged ahead quickly at Davidson, and by his third year he was taking advanced calculus at UNR. “That was really the best thing about Davidson, especially at first,” Joey would tell me. But as his brother piled up achievements and became ever more exuberantly connected with the world, Joey became ever more introverted.

  “Joey was the first one interested in science,” Tiffany says. “He once said Taylor stole it from him.” Joey will often help his friends with math and chemistry, and in Ms. Walenta’s chemistry class he got the first perfect score on the final (which surprised his teacher, since he’d refused to attend the pretest review). “But now he says he’s not going to college,” Tiffany tells me. “He says what’s the point?”

  “This is a family dynamic that I see too often,” says Dona Matthews, a researcher in child and adolescent development at the University of Toronto. “When you get a kid like Taylor who’s on fire, and the family pours all their resources into making sure he gets all the stimulation he wants and needs, sometimes not everyone in the family gets a chance to develop their interests and abilities.”

  Matthews took on these issues in her recent book Beyond Intelligence: Secrets for Raising Happily Productive Kids. “I don’t necessarily celebrate when I hear about amazing intellectual achievement at a young age,” she says. “I worry; I want to know if all members in the family are thriving, not just the superstar.”

  David Feldman’s research for Nature’s Gambit left him with a dir
e view of the outlook for siblings of prodigies. “At a minimum it’s problematic, and potentially really sad for the second child,” says Feldman. “In most cases what it takes to fulfill the potential of one of these kids is more than even a really dedicated family can provide. And so the second child gets the scraps.”

  But now, he adds, “I’m a little less sure that’s true. Certain strategies can protect siblings, and I’ve come across examples of high-performing siblings.” Feldman cites the Williams sisters in tennis and the Polgár sisters, a trio of Hungarian chess prodigies. It helps, says Feldman, if the children have very different personalities, if the sibling relationship is noncompetitive, and—most important—if there’s enough parental support left over for the other children to fully pursue their interests.

  “People underestimate Joey,” Taylor says, “because he’s not out there tooting his own horn. But I think it’s simple: historically, most scientific and super-intelligent people are introverts.”

  That is essentially true. Among the general population, introverts are a minority, about 30 percent. But among gifted children, introverts make up between 60 and 75 percent, and the incidence of introversion goes up with IQ. In other words, among the Wilson boys’ brainiac peers, Joey is the norm and Taylor—with his communication skills, his self-advocacy, his showmanship—is the exception.

  “Yes, gifted children are more likely to be introverted,” says psychologist Ellen Winner. “Sometimes it’s because they can’t find peers. Sometimes they withdraw because they don’t get the attention they need to flourish in the areas they’re interested in. But often it’s simply because they like to spend a lot of time alone, doing what they’re interested in.”