Posted on 02/21/2012 9:07:37 AM PST by justlurking
Propulsion, the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I just want to see the propulsion stuff.
A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his sons boundless appetite for knowledge.
Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up. And he wantsno, he obviously needsto tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.
[...]
This is before Taylor would transform the familys garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma corebecoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
I think this is the article you freepmailed me about.
Loved this article! Thanks for posting it.
The inventor of the Fusor, which the kid in this article replicated.
The Boy Who Invented Television:
A Story of Inspiration, Persistence
and Quiet Passion
by Paul Schatzkin
Jan. 30: Chris Capella looks upward as he walks beneath the newly renovated Saturn V moon rocket in Huntsville, Ala.
Pretty much yes.
That’s a great book. RCA ripped him off big time.
Definitely.
Way cool, darth!
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