Author Tom Clynes doesn’t do optimistic. The contributing editor forPopular Science is usually attracted to stories about Ebola epidemics or eco-mercenaries. But when his life and family began to fall apart and he found himself in the middle of a messy divorce, he met Taylor Wilson, a boy who had just created a nuclear fusion reactor in his garage.
世界をより良くしようと切望するこの若き楽天的な天才に魅了され、テイラーについて彼の新作となる著書The Boy Who Played With Fusionを執筆も献身をすることを決心した。
Talking from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he describes how meeting Taylor made him rethink his relationship with his own children; why we are ignoring gifted children in favor of under-achievers; and why it is crucial to give our brightest and best the support they need.
The book opens with you accompanying Taylor and his father down an abandoned mineshaft in search of “hot rocks.” Set the scene for us. 私たちはちょうどテイラーが現在住むレノの北側に位置するネヴァダ州のヴァージニア山地にある放棄されたウラン鉱に行き、ウラン鉱石を探しに行ったんだ。道中彼はひっきりなしにしゃべり続けてたよ。彼は科学フェアなどで角っちょに座り込んで内気に自分のオヘソをじっと見つめるタイプとは間逆だよ。彼は原子力のありとあらゆる事を福音するのをこよなく愛しているんだ。
We went into an abandoned uranium mine in the Virginia Mountains in Nevada, just north of where Taylor now lives in Reno, to find uranium rock. On the way, he’s talking my ear off. He’s the total opposite of the science fair introvert sitting in the corner staring at his naval. He loves to evangelize about everything nuclear.
Eventually we will make yellow cake out of the ore we collect in Taylor’s garage. We have to pop this chain link fence to get into the mine. We have a pickaxe, shovel and flashlight and go down a few passageways where we find some veins of radioactive water running down the side of the mine. It literally glows. [Laughs]
When we go back over the fence Taylor’s Geiger counter brushes against his thigh and he realizes that his pant legs are radioactive. So, he rips off his pants and sits there in his boxer shorts, trying to figure out what kind of radiation it is. “It’s not loose contamination, “ he says, “so it makes me think it’s been on the pants for a while. But, how? My jeans are generally not radioactive at the start the day!” [Laughs]
―テイラーについてと、どうやって彼のことを耳にしたかを教えてください。
Tell us about Taylor and how you first heard about him?
I’m a contributing editor of Popular Science. In 2010, I started nosing around this community of high-end nerds who were not working in billion dollar research labs like a lot of nuclear researchers but doing crazy things in their garages—tinkering with nukes, transmuting elements and building atom-smashing machines.
Someone mentioned this 14-year-old kid from Texarkana, Arkansas, which is not exactly a hotbed of science in this country. But he’d just become one of only 32 people to build a nuclear fusion reactor themselves. So, I decided to get in touch with him. I was drawn in by his audacity, enthusiasm and optimism, and the fact that he just goes out and does things that everybody else thinks are impossible.
―彼の科学的は発見は痛々しい実体験から拍車がかかりました。「閉じ込められた星」-star in a jarを教えてください。
His scientific discoveries were spurred by a painful, personal event. Tell us about the “star in a jar.”
When Taylor was 11, he found out that his grandmother was dying of cancer. He and his grandmother were extremely close. She was his biggest supporter and had allowed him to use her garage as his laboratory for a long time.
He had been experimenting with radioactive materials for over a year and he had this epiphany in his garage. He asked his grandmother if he could have some of her urine to test while she was going through nuclear medicine procedures.
He tested it with a Geiger counter and also dissected bits of her tumors and lungs, which she had coughed up, and threw them in a petri dish. He knows this is weird but this is the kind of kid he is. Then, he started thinking about how people around the world get these medical isotopes. He learned that they’re made in these multi-million dollar cyclotrons and they’ve got to be shipped by private jet to the points of distribution, and then moved very quickly because they have such short half-lives. They’re also extremely expensive.
So Taylor started thinking, what if there’s a cheaper, better way to do this, so that these kinds of treatments could be brought more within reach of places like sub-Saharan Africa?
