Posted on 09/17/2003 8:18:21 PM PDT by wafflehouse
LOGAN — A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.
Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.
Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.
The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's own Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.
The reactor sat on a table with an attached vacuum pump wheezing away. A television monitor showed what was inside: a glowing ball of gas surrounded by a metal helix.
The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions (a form of hydrogen) to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs.
"Here I am with this thing here," Wallace mused, looking at his surroundings. "Who'da thought?"
Wallace and Farnsworth are much alike. Both are (or were — Farnsworth died in 1971) tinkerers. While Wallace was in grade school, his mother got a flat tire while he was riding with her. He fixed it. For his part, Farnsworth began improvising electric motors at a young age. Both went on to bigger and better things.
"He was never motivated to take science," said Wallace's father, Allen Wallace. "It was really the tinkering that motivated him."
When Craig was a sophomore in high school, browsing the Internet he discovered that Farnsworth had come up with a way to create deuteron ion plasma, a prerequisite to fusion.
While it was not good for production of energy (the source of much embarrassment to the University of Utah in the cold fusion debacle in the late 1980s), Farnsworth's design did emit neutrons, a useful tool for commercial applications and scientific experimentation.
"He (Farnsworth) was after the Holy Grail of excess energy, but everyone agrees that it's mostly useful as a neutron generator," Allen Wallace said.
About 30 such devices exist around the country, owned by such entities as Los Alamos National Laboratories, NASA and universities. ("I bet I'm the only high school student that has one," Craig Wallace said.)
Looking at Farnsworth's plans for the first time, Craig and his father both had the same thought: Now there's a science project.
They set to work. They found a neutron detector in an Idaho Falls scrap metal yard. Craig built a neutron modulator (which slows down the emitted neutrons so they can be detected) out of a few hundred spare CDs. They found a broken turbo molecular pump lying forgotten at Deseret Industries.
Too poor to buy pricey deuterium gas, Craig bought a container of deuterium oxide, or heavy water, for 20 bucks and came up with a way to make it a gas and get rid of the accompanying oxygen by passing it over heated magnesium filings.
Not bad for a backyard amateur who considered himself more mechanic than scientist.
"I teased him that he was now officially a science geek," Allen Wallace said.
One professor Friday stood nervously away from Wallace's reactor — which is notably free from any shielding — but he needn't have worried: Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute. People in airplanes absorb much more than that.
It took two years of gathering materials and six months of assembly, but the final product actually, incongruously, works.
"(This was) the day I achieved a Poisser plasma reaction," Wallace wrote next to a picture of the glowing ball. "Probably the coolest thing I have ever seen."
Others thought it was cool, too. Wallace began winning contests — local, state, national — culminating in second place in the International Intel Science and Engineering Fair last May in Cleveland. He's now beginning work on a USU physics degree.
"The whole thing combines chemistry, engineering, physics," he said. "Put them all together and you come out with something pretty sweet."
Farnsworth would have been proud.
John Logie Baird -- 1888-1946 is considered the original inventor of televison (albeit a different technology than the all electronic tube)
I wonder if that scrap yard had a calendar with naughty pictures of Madame Curie on the wall.
What else? A perpetual motion machine. It will be on the market just as soon as the Feds can determine it's life cycle by testing.
He didn't actually come in "SECOND"
Physics - Presented by Intel Foundation Intel will present Best of Category Winners with a $5,000 scholarship and a high-performance computer. Additionally, a $1,000 grant will be given to their school and the Intel ISEF Affiliated fair they represent.
Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000 PH029 Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You? Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500 PH005 The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040 Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
This is our boy. Chaotice Fluids "First"
PH046 Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
It's pretty credible to me: Here's the relevent part: Wallace's detector measures 36 neutrons per minute just in background radiation from space, and the device's usual output adds only four neutrons per minute. People in airplanes absorb much more than that.
In other words, the machine produces an output of neutrons that is barely over 10% of background levels. One neutron every 15 seconds is, well, not very many. "Notably absent is shielding," the article says elsewhere.
In contrast, if the cold fusion experiments were generating the heat they were said to generate from fusion, Pons and Fleischmann would have been promptly killed from all the neutrons that would have had to have been generated. Many, many orders of magnitude different.
At the recent MIT demonstration of cold fusion, FReepers were present,
and several presented, including a demo.
You might download some recent papers and get up-to-date.
Well, the guy who invented the thing died in 1971, so it is hardly new ground. While it is mildly impressive that a high school kid built it, the machine itself is rather simple to be terribly impressed by its construction: the vaccuum pump connected to it is more complex and harder to build.
And it sounds like he is operating it at a ridiculously low energy level, albeit enough to demonstrate the principle.
And a plasma screen to view it, of course!
Physics - Presented by Intel Foundation
Intel will present Best of Category Winners with a $5,000 scholarship and a high-performance computer. Additionally, a $1,000 grant will be given to their school and the Intel ISEF Affiliated fair they represent.
Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
First Award of $3,000
PH029 Is Eating Blueberry Pie Bad for You? Jennifer Anne D'Ascoli, 17, Academy of the Holy Names, Albany, New York
PH053 Chaotic Fluids: An Examination of Phase Transitions in Taylor-Couette Flow Mairead Mary McCloskey, 17, Loreto College, Coleraine, Co Derry, Northern Ireland
Second Award of $1,500
PH005 The Effect of Salinity on the Production and Duration of Antibubbles Michael J. Pizer, 14, University School of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
PH040 Magnetoplasmadynamics: Ionization and Magnetic Field Ray Chengchuan He, 19, Hempfield High School, Landisville, Pennsylvania
PH046 Nuclear Fusion Reactor Apparatus Craig J. Wallace, 18, Spanish Fork High School, Spanish Fork, Utah
PH054 Electron-Phonon Interactions in Carbon Nanotubes Edward Joesph Su, 18, William G. Enloe High School, Raleigh, North Carolina
Third Award of $1,000
PH024 A Siphoned Flowing Soap Film as a Model for Density-stratified Fluid Systems Jonathan Jacques Kamler, 17, Townsend Harris High School, Flushing, New York
PH026 Superconductivity in High Pressure Phases of Lithium Wei Gan, 18, Thomas Sprigg Wootton High School, Rockville, Maryland
PH028 The "Blackberry" Cluster: Thermodynamic Equilibrium and Potential Medical Applications of Giant Nanoscale Inorganic Molecules in Solution Brandon Stuart Imber, 17, Commack High School, Commack, New York
PH034 An Investigation of the Properties of the Plasma Plume Created by Laser Ablation Kevin E. Claytor, 16, Los Alamos High School, Los Alamos, New Mexico
PH052 Is the Wind Predictable? Nolan Herman Reis, 16, Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, California
Fourth Award of $500
PH012 Absorption of Radioactive Isotopes Using Natural Zeolites Vanessa Anne Spini, 17, Gold Beach High School, Gold Beach, Oregon
PH018 Spectroscopy Never Sounded So Good Andrew Jared Herron, 18, Dallastown Area High School, Dallastown, Pennsylvania
PH039 Modeling the Dynamics of a Pneumatic Water Sprayer Ross Andrew Coleman, 18, Winner High School, Winner, South Dakota
PH044 IV. Measurements of Internal Electrostatic Confinement Electron Density using Microwave Interferometry Tianhui Li, 18, Oregon Episcopal School, Portland, Oregon
PH051 An Investigation into Automobile Aerodynamics Molly von der Heydt, 15, Falmouth Academy, Falmouth, Massachusetts
PH061 Design and Construction of an Air-cored Resonant Transformer and Quantification of Arc-induced Ozone Abram Levi Coley, 18, Big Sky High School, Missoula, Montana
PH062 A Study of DNA Adsorption Kinetics on OTS Surfaces Joseph Michael Barone, 17, West Islip High School, West Islip, New York
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