Taylor Wilson

Taylor Wilson ( born May 7, 1994) is an American student. He made headlines in 2008 when he was the youngest person at the age of 14 years, which - according to the press releases - each a functioning " nuclear fusion reactor" built. These are so-called Fusor experiments for fusion with electrostatic confinement. The construction of such systems is a popular, albeit challenging project of amateur hobbyists, and Wilson is the 32th hobbyists, who succeeded in construction.

Life and career

Wilson began early on in a physical area to experiment with it especially bombs, radioactivity and nuclear engineering attracted. His parents have no scientific background (his father Kenneth is a business, Coca -Cola bottler, the mother yoga teacher) and tried in vain to dissuade the very ambitious and unrepentant disciple of his dangerous hobby. Then he showed some talent, he was accepted at the Davidson Academy of Nevada for gifted students, where he came into contact with physicists from the University of Nevada in Reno as Fried Wardt Winterberg. With the support of technicians from the University, he managed to build a fusor, as already several hobbyists before. At one of them in Los Alamos he also had intensive contact and received support from the industry in the procurement of the necessary expensive high- voltage parts.

According to his own words, his motive for the construction of the fusor was ostensibly the cheaper production of isotopes for cancer. The Fusor himself, whose ideas go back to the television Philo T. Farnsworth engineer in the 1960s, is unfit to produce energy from fusion, but it can be used for example as a neutron source. Taylor demonstrated his Fusor U.S. President Barack Obama on a Science Fair ( Science Fair ) in the White House.

He also developed a neutron detector that does not require expensive helium -3 and could be used to detect smuggled nuclear bombs in cargo containers. Wilson filed this invention patent and won the awards " First Place Award in the Physics and Astronomy category ", " Best of Category Award", as well as on the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, endowed with $ 50,000 prize " Intel Young Scientist Award ". The U.S. Department of Homeland Security showed interest.

Currently (2012 ) he studied at the University of Nevada in Reno and at the Davidson Academy of Nevada.

In March 2012, he presented his work to date prior to a TED conference in February 2013, he presented for TED his future projects.