The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  Joey’s shower-door calculations were a good example of the last scenario. But people who prefer quiet, alone time don’t have it easy in a society that increasingly celebrates and rewards charisma and self-confident leadership. To get ahead, we’re told, we must be outgoing and self-promoting.

  “Those dominance-seeking behaviors seem to be the desired character traits now,” says Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Cain says schools, which promote group learning, “can be suffering grounds and poor learning environments for introverted children, who prefer to work alone and are often reluctant to push themselves forward or make contributions without being coaxed.”

  Cain, an introvert herself, presents an intensely researched case (like most introverts, she excels at solitary, highly focused work) demonstrating that a large part of the population has been unfairly sidelined. “Projecting confidence and being outgoing and verbally voluble has come to be seen as the cultural ideal. Introversion,” she writes, “is regarded as less successful, less desirable, and less worthy a temperament in our society.”

  Obviously, Tiffany and Kenneth thought Davidson Academy and the move to Reno would benefit both their children. But it was becoming clear that what worked so very well for one child wasn’t working at all for the other.

  Educational researchers who are focused on talent development say that being with one’s intellectual peers is almost always good academically. But child psychologists have mixed emotions about segregated learning environments for gifted children. “By putting all these smart kids in the same place,” says Dona Matthews, “you’re creating an extremely marginal group. That kind of cloistering can intensify their differences from normal development.”

  Even some Davidson students feel it. “I went to London for a summer internship,” says Taylor’s friend Ikya Kandula, “and I realized that I’d been in an environment that sheltered me from the ‘real world,’ which is much more intellectually diverse. I had to figure out how to make friends.”

  Matthews, who grew up in London, Ontario, was pulled into a four-year gifted program during elementary and middle school. “At the time I loved it; we were doing Shakespearean plays and the teachers were brilliant. Then we were thrown back into normal high school, from the hothouse to the garden. I realized that, in terms of sexuality and dating, us gifted kids were far younger than my ‘normal’ sister and her ‘normal’ peers. They were just so much better adjusted, and they turned out to be happier as adults too.”

  I told Matthews that I too had been pulled into a segregated gifted program in the fifth grade—and that I’d begged my parents to let me leave it in the sixth grade so that I could return to my old friends at my old school.

  “Switching back in order to be with friends,” says Matthews, “is actually the best possible reason to switch back.”

  Matthews and others who approach the issue from a psychological (rather than purely educational) point of view say that these episodes demonstrate that each gifted child has individual needs that require individualized responses. For Taylor, the opportunity to feed his academic growth wasn’t isolating at all; it made his social environment richer. Other children may fare better in the long run if at certain points social relationships are prioritized; sometimes, the academic stretch can wait.

  The trick in larger schools and systems, says Dickinson-Kelley of the Ann Arbor public schools, “is to create an environment for the gifted that doesn’t make kids choose between friends and academic achievement. For young girls, especially, many if not most would give up math and science before they’d give up their friends.

  “You have to think about the whole child, and work closely with the family to consider what kind of acceleration is going to work for kids who are clearly ready to take on additional challenges. We thought a lot about creating a segregated gifted program, and decided that it’s better to have flexible options for accelerated learning without disrupting the social environment.” That can create logistical challenges, Dickinson-Kelley says, because every kid is different.

  It’s not too hard to coax Joey downstairs—even introverts like to see something blow up.

  “There he is!” Taylor says, looking happy to see his brother. “I was just saying this should be more of a fireball than an explosion. But,” Taylor says, bending and flicking the lighter, “you never know.”

  I turn on my phone’s crude video camera. The white bucket, reflecting the floodlight on the deck, is all that appears on the screen at first. Then the small warm flame of the lighter reflects off Taylor’s facemask. He lights the fuse, then jumps up and sprints away.

  “Hey, Taylor’s running farther away than anyone!” Kenneth yells, laughing and stepping back. Everyone else takes another few steps back too, as the sparks creep along the foot-long fuse toward the bucket.

  And then . . .

  Well, what happens next is so over the top that when I show the video, even on my phone’s small screen, almost everyone who watches it flinches. Then they’ll say something like “Whoa!,” “Oh my God!,” or “Holy shit!”

  I wish I’d brought better camera gear, though I doubt that even my best lens could come close to capturing the full sensory intensity of the moment. Words, too, fall short. Massive rising fireball comes close—but it’s a very unusual fireball, an extended explosion that rises out of the bucket in a fiery vertical column so willfully that it seems to have a malevolent intent of its own. There’s a noise, but as Taylor had predicted, it’s not a bang—it’s a freaky mega-whoosh that grows as the column rises, widens, and then blooms thirty feet above us into a tremendous mushroom-shaped ball of orange hell. Suddenly everything nearby—trees, house, spectators—is illuminated, bright beyond daylight.

  Then the heat hits. Hands fly up to shield faces, and I draw in a gasp that offers nothing in the way of lung succor—there’s simply no oxygen in it. My brain registers a tentative impulse of panic just as the fireball dissipates. I gulp another breath, relieved to discover that the life-giving part of the atmosphere has returned.

  For a moment all is silent as everyone gratefully breathes. Then shouts and whoops fill the backyard. I look over at Joey, who has a broad smile stretched across his face, just like everyone else. Taylor approaches the bucket, flips up his mask, and gazes up at the sky that hosted his fireball moments earlier.

  “Owl dat iss alive,” he says, playing the Russian general again, “merely evaporates.”

  27

  * * *

  We’re Just Breathing Your Air

  MY POPULAR SCIENCE profile on Taylor came out just before the 2012 TED Talks. Futurist Juan Enriquez, a longtime favorite at the TED conferences, forwarded the story to Chris Anderson, TED’s curator. “I read it and immediately said, ‘We’ve got to have that kid here,’” says Anderson. A few days later, Taylor was on his way to Long Beach, where he gave a short and enthusiastically received talk titled “Yup, I Built a Nuclear Fusion Reactor.”

  It’s not clear whether Taylor understood that an invitation to speak at TED is widely considered a career-topping signal that one has arrived as an influential thinker, communicator, and achiever. Taylor’s preparation consisted of calling me a couple hours before he was due to go onstage to ask if I’d e-mail a few photographs. But his off-the-cuff talk received a standing ovation and has since been viewed online more than two and a half million times. After he spoke, several venture capitalists and other investors came out of the crowd to invite him to contact them when he was ready to fund his company.

  A few weeks later, Taylor asked his English teacher, Alanna Simmons, if he could get the next week’s readings in advance, because, he said, “I’m going to be out of town.” Simmons asked where he was headed.

  “I’m going to the White House to meet the president,” Taylor said. In 2009, President Obama, as part of an effort to move the United States from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade, had begun host
ing an annual science fair to recognize the achievements of the nation’s top young scientists. Obama used the occasion this time to announce that his budget proposal would include some two hundred million dollars in initiatives to support teachers and others in educating the roughly one million additional STEM graduates needed over the next decade to fill the growing number of jobs requiring these skills.

  Under the gaze of the Abraham Lincoln portrait, Taylor demonstrated his fusor and his weapons-detection system and chatted confidently with the president, who joked that Taylor must have one of the most radioactive garages in the nation. While the other kids waited patiently, Taylor and Obama riffed off each other. At one point, Obama said, “Why haven’t we hired you yet?”

  “I kinda thought that was what I was here for,” Taylor said.

  “What do your parents think about all this stuff you’re doing?” Obama asked.

  “Well, you can ask my mom; she’s right over there,” Taylor said, “but basically, once they figured out that I knew how to handle it, they’ve given me a pretty free rein.”

  The president continued his rounds, stopping to shake the hands of the other students and check out their displays. On his way out of the room, he made a quick detour to Taylor and told him, as he shook his hand once more, “You may be working for me soon.”

  I wasn’t the only one who entertained at least a brief thought that it might turn out to be the other way around. Forbes’s Eamonn Fingleton reported on the 2012 Halifax International Security Forum, which featured a who’s who of national security notables from forty nations. “But for my money,” wrote Fingleton, “the show was stolen by someone who did not figure on any of the panels—Taylor Wilson . . . a Nevada-based scientific prodigy who built a nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ garage at the age of 14, Wilson held court on the fringes of the conference, confidently dispensing wisdom on everything from nuclear terrorism to the future of the world energy industry. Named the Intel Young Scientist of the Year . . . he already has a lot to be confident about and sports an extremely-young-man-in-a-hurry manner that reminds some of the early Bill Gates.”

  Suddenly, Taylor was overwhelmed by fan mail and media inquir­ies, some of which seemed, at least at first, absurd. Among them were several requests for comment on the Fukushima meltdown in Japan. Could the teenager possibly have anything relevant to say about the disaster? I wondered.

  As it turned out, Taylor had begun taking local air, water, and snow samples the day after the accident. Seven days later, Fukushima’s fallout arrived in Reno in the form of elevated levels of four radioactive isotopes in his sample group, which he expanded to include spinach, milk, and fruits bought at a nearby organic market.

  “I’ve been getting lots of calls from TV producers who want to do features,” he told me over the phone. Many panned out, though not always without mishap. During the taping of an extensive CNN feature, the charging resistors on a new fusion device he was building blew up. And while he was driving the crew of NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams out to the Red Bluff Mine, he rolled over his dad’s SUV (no one was hurt). The Atlantic featured him in its “Brave Thinkers” package, and Time magazine, in a roundup of “30 People Under 30 Changing the World,” went so far as to deem him “the Next Einstein.”

  Suddenly, the eyes of the world were on Taylor, and he was loving it.

  Though the quiet draw of scientific inquiry has long attracted introverts, science needs its extroverts too—perhaps now more than ever. Indeed, the scientific community’s lack of effective communicators may be a big part of the reason why important basic research is underfunded and why science is punching below its weight when it comes to influencing policy on important issues such as climate change, vaccinations, and science education.

  As the public (and the politicians it elects) becomes less science-literate, the lack of scientist-communicators has allowed many “scientific” debates to become dominated by nonscientists. Loud, zealous, and often misinformed or self-interested, these voices have become increasingly influential and immune to reasoned response.

  “What happens is that as the noise from outside scientific circles gets louder, the more the sideshow gets perceived as the center ring,” says NASA climatologist and climate modeler Gavin Schmidt. “Scientists need to be in that ring, correcting science that gets misrepresented. But most of us would prefer not to; most of us aren’t attention-seekers.”

  Partly because of scientists’ reticence (the media have played a role too), the gap is widening between the informed conclusions of scientists and the public’s understanding. This has affected policymaking in profound ways, setting up scenarios (such as we’ve seen with runaway greenhouse-gas emissions and preventable pandemics) that will become increasingly problematic as their effects compound.

  “I could see someone like Taylor having an important role in closing that gap,” says Phaneuf, echoing the observations of many in the scientific community. “He has amazing passion, and the ability to share that passion and connect with people and explain complex subjects in layman’s terms. The field needs those skills, and it needs people like him who can really popularize science itself.”

  When I next visit Taylor in Reno, it’s clear that he’s become a celebrity at Davidson. “He’s this famous and really smart guy, that’s how most people know him here,” one of Taylor’s classmates tells me. “I mean, how many people are being shadowed by these high-profile magazine journalists?”

  Director Colleen Harsin says that, though Taylor’s achievements have brought the school a lot of useful publicity, she’s worried that he could become too one-sided: “One challenge with a kid like Taylor is, okay, you’re doing a fabulous job, now you need to do other things as well.” As I’m leaving Harsin’s office (where, the last time we’d met, she’d warned of the pitfalls of putting high-achieving kids on pedestals), I notice that the lobby walls have been hung with framed magazine and newspaper articles featuring Taylor, the school’s star student.

  But in a conventional sense, as Taylor readily admits, he isn’t a particularly good student. Halfway through the first semester of his sen­ior year, Taylor is carrying a C minus in Davidson’s accelerated physics class, though he is acing his upper-level physics class (radiology) at UNR. Just as he did back in Arkansas, Taylor continues to ignore schoolwork having anything to do with material that he’s already learned or that doesn’t interest him. Also, Taylor’s expertise at gaming the teachers seems to be growing as fast as his acclaim. “We’d all give him special dispensation,” Ochs, who taught at Davidson that year, would tell me later, “and he’d usually turn things in three or five days late. But almost everyone tolerated it, because . . . well, because he was Taylor.”

  “How are you, Mr. Wilson?” teacher Darren Ripley asks as Taylor walks into his precalculus class after a trip to New Mexico that kept him out of school for three days.

  “I’m back, and that’s all that matters,” Taylor says, taking a seat. “There’s a little bit of homework that I didn’t get to, but I can do it tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Whoops, forgot my backpack,” Taylor says, hopping up. “Be right back.”

  “It’s your world, Taylor,” Ripley calls after him, smiling. “We’re just here breathing your air.”

  In a couple of minutes, Taylor returns to the classroom and sighs loudly as he plops into his chair.

  “Okay, now that we’re all here,” Ripley says, picking up his chalk, “shall we sally forth?”

  Ripley has watched Taylor transition “from a scrawny fourteen-year-old to a scrawny seventeen-year-old who’s suddenly dressing like the models in GQ. His peers give him a lot of flak for that, and I jump right on, because I know he can take it.”

  I’ve also noticed the changes. Taylor, when I first met him, wore hooded Hollister sweatshirts; now he’s spiffy in checked shirts and skinny ties. There’s something else too: During one of the network TV specials about him, he makes a not-so-casual
reference to “my girlfriend.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s big news!” he says when I ask him about it. “Shelly’s a student at Davidson. But the problem is, her parents won’t let her date anyone.”

  Not even a suitor who’s hung out with the president?

  “Nope, that didn’t seem to make any difference. They’re pretty conservative. And so I only see her at school. And once at a dance. But we write notes back and forth at night.”

  Unfortunately, I don’t get the chance to meet Shelly.1 But we do run into Taylor’s good friend Ikya, whom I’ve met during earlier visits. Ikya starts excitedly telling Taylor a story, but Taylor gets distracted by an incoming text and interrupts her. “Okay, just a minute,” he says as he types into his phone.

  Ikya looks at me and sighs. “He never wants to hear about me.”

  That afternoon, I sit at a table in the school director’s office with Harsin and Jan and Bob Davidson, who have driven down from their house in Lake Tahoe to meet with Taylor. Bob wants to introduce Taylor to a patent attorney who can help him protect his ever-expanding series of inventions.

  Taylor is running late, so I bring up the worry that several of Taylor’s mentors have expressed: that he might overreach and fly too high, too fast. Are the Davidsons worried about Taylor getting too far ahead of himself?

  “I think Taylor may have to make a few mistakes to learn,” Bob replies. “That’s okay. It’s very often you see these high performers having a fine line between confidence and narcissism. But you need some of that chutzpah if you’re going to make a go of it in this world.”

  “Y’all talking about me?” Taylor says, walking in and opening the candy jar Harsin keeps on her table. “Sorry I’m late, but it’s been a huge day.” He unwraps a watermelon ball and pops it into his mouth, then leans back casually on Harsin’s desk. “They think the AMS”—alpha magnetic spectrometer—“telescope on the space station picked up a signal that came from dark matter. And did you hear about James Hansen’s study, about how nuclear power has already saved one point eight million lives by replacing fossil fuels? And then there’s the situation on the Korean Peninsula. I’m very excited!”