Posted on 11/22/2006 3:05:23 AM PST by ajolympian2004
DETROIT — On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager.
He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills, Mich. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college.
But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist."
In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township, Mich., home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build — a large, intricate machine that, on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion — when atoms are combined to create energy — is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," he said.
In fact, on www.fusor.net, the Stoney Creek senior is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion. So, how does he do it?
Pointing to the steel chamber where all the magic happens, Thiago said on Friday that this piece of the puzzle serves as a vacuum. The air is sucked out and into a filter.
Then, deuterium gas — a form of hydrogen — is injected into the vacuum. About 40,000 volts of electricity are charged into the chamber from a piece of equipment taken from an old mammogram machine. As the machine runs, the atoms in the chamber are attracted to the center and soon — ta da — nuclear fusion.
Thiago said when that happens, a small intense ball of energy forms.
He first achieved fusion in September and has been perfecting the machine he built in his parents' garage ever since.
"I was always interested in science," he said. "It's always been my best subject in school."
But, his mom had other ideas.
"I thought he was going to be a cook," Natalice Olson said, "because he liked to mix things."
Lets get a move on people! Thats like getting to post 10 of a moose story without anyone posting A Møøse once bit my sister
I understand you can build this for a couple hundred bucks, and the plans are readily available. So I'm not sure what took him a thousand hours of "research", except a 3.75 GPA isn't all that good these days.
I was thinking about buying one of these for a conversation piece.
BTW, this story appeared a couple of days ago from the Detroit Free Press, but they said he built it in his parent's GARAGE, not the basement.
I wonder if they made him move it because they wanted to put the cars in the garage now....
"The Detroit Free Press reported that 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale."
Wow. That's some story.
"He's just one mistake away from either vaporizing himself, or becoming the next superhero!"
or sterile.......
What state are those high schools in?
Imagine sneaking up behind with with a balloon and popping it at the right time.
D2-D2 reaction - no tritium required!
BFLR = bump for later reading
"Hey, hold muh beer and WATCH THIS!"
...followed shortly thereafter by Ann Arbor disappearing in a blinding white flash.
Trust me, she knew it all along. Moms are like that.
"Nuclear fusion as the savior of mankind has been reappearing in one venue or another for, what, forty years? This looks like a fun science project, but I s'pect it won't draw a long line of investors this week."
The point of the post is that a 17 year old pulled this off in his basement with very little help. I'm not sure he was trying to attract investors. Rather, he was doing science for the love of it, and I'm here to tell you that if you love what you do, enough money will follow.
He should get his college paid for at Stanford. He wouldn't be the first to get there by building a high tech physics machine such as a cyclotron.
Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back. 
I seen it with my own eyes...
Thank you.
My memory sometimes fails me, but I have just enough cognitive abillity to remember the basics.
I think my "Pennsylvania" reference comes from a case where a vet clinic had an ebola monkey and the entire building had to be burned.
Holy cow! That's amazing that he was able to get so far with his nuclear experimentation. Makes one wonder just how long it's gonna be until some terrorist is able to do essentially the same thing and make a fission bomb.
My niece, when she saw that movie with me last year, wanted to know which office was in charge of licensing nuclear accelerators.
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