Middle school student achieved nuclear fusion in his family playroom (opens in new tab)

Up until around 2010, you'd be shouted down as a troll for taking down this kid's achievements.

[0] This is something Daniel Markovits talks about: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...

You mean funded. That Pfeiffer Turbopump is several hundred bucks used.

When I was 13 years old, I would have killed someone to own just that analog scope.

While the kid building his reactor is almost certainly intelligent and driven, he was also lucky enough to be born into a family in the upper 1% income bracket, because most people would have neither the space nor the funds to set up such a laboratory.

It's kind of the same with child prodigy musicians. Unless the parents have a piano at home, they'll most likely not notice their kids talent early enough. And most middle-income families these days don't own a house and won't have a piano around for decorative purposes.

BTW, that harpers link is an amazing story :)

You are missing his age. He is not a grown up who could graps the whole complexity of the task. He can see what he have done, but he is unable to grasp what others did to make his achievement possible. Such an inability would be worrying for me, if he was older -- 20 years old, or even 16-18 years old. But for 13 yo kid it is absolutely normal. Cognitive limitations he shows are only to be expected. There is no reason to grumble about society degrading to a hell.

One wonders how many kids swallowed up by poor, resource-starved neighborhoods would have been able to achieve similar feats given more access and resources. Kids generally have nothing but time -- so yeah, if you finance their projects and give them your support and an environment conducive to focusing on hacking on fusion reactors, or becoming chess or math or music prodigies, or whatever, they'll tend to do that. And likewise if you give them an environment conducive to trauma, financial stress, and poverty, well, that's what they'll tend towards.

There are exceptions in both cases -- I'm sure many of us can think of people who came from wealth and ultimately didn't amount to much, and some of the most brilliant and accomplished people I know came from abject poverty. My point is that wealth and resources makes stuff easier -- or even possible in the first place.

[1]

> Building the nuclear fusion reactor was no game for Jackson. He converted an old playroom in his Memphis home into a functioning lab. With the financial support of his parents – he spent between $8,000 and $10,000 over the course of a year collecting the parts he needed to build his nuclear fusion reactor – that was apparently the easy part.

[2]

> Jackson’s father, Chris Oswalt, had no real understanding of what his son was working on. To make sure Jackson was safe he had experts speak to him about the dangers involved with working on a potentially deadly fusion reactor, like being exposed to high levels of radiation or being electrocuted by the 50,000 volts of electricity he uses to warm the fusion reactor’s plasma core.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-...

It's quite the Festival of Debunking a 12 Year Old Kid going here on Hacker News, and it's embarrassingly transparent. Yes, you're all very smart too.

Children are capable of absolutely amazing things when they are told "yes" and given respect and minimum guidance. Of course my example is not as mind-blowing as this, but my son built his own forge and has made beautiful knives and swords from found metal. Tons of research and sweat and persistence on his part, and not ours. And if we were interviewed about it, the soundbites would come out about the same: "Yup, he did it, we were a bit worried, but he was managing the risks and knew and followed the necessary rules, so ultimately we trusted him."

I once wore a baseball hat for a month, day in, day out, sleep, etc. However first, I ripped out the liner, and placed tinfoil inside, replacing the liner afterwards.

I wanted to empirically test -- to see, would I behave differently? Think differently? So I also kept a journal.

Problem was, did I EVER SWEAT! And this was in the winter too.

The solution? A hat which is not directly in contact with the head! And has space under it to breath. Like this hard-hat!

Clearly, this kid knows the truth, knows the forces aligned against us all, and this hardhat, in this pic, is his message to us all.

Beware. Beware of them, of those, placing thoughts in our minds!

Obviously a staged photo, there is even a Newton's cradle, like in Hollywood movies.

There are a few pictures of him working, he is just wearing normal clothes, and no hard hat.

-- Within his home, Jackson’s lab is quite extensive and he describes it as having too many parts to even write down! --

Looks precisely like the model I bought from Amazon, to pull a vacuum for my self-install of my heat pump at home! These sorts of heat pumps come pre-charged with coolant, so after you connect the copper piping between the head (indoor) unit and the external compressor, you then need to pull a vacuum, validate the system is stable, then finally let the coolant into the entire system.

To me, this only highlights how some things are easily done with low cost, off the shelf parts.

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01N6IOBWF/

When I was a kid, there was no way to easily, or effectively find such things anywhere my small rural town. Nor was there any easy way to even find magazines, which might have ads for companies selling such things!

What a world we live in. Awesome.

A playroom is a room in a house where children are normally let loose to play and make a mess.

Look at him, dressed like a dandy, with his accomplishments framed and a much too clean workspace and Hollywood scientist accessories.

That's not how I portrait a hacker, especially not a kid hacker. I want to see him on a workbench with tools all over the place, I want to know how he solved the hundred of problems that arose. I want to see him yelled at by his parents because he didn't follow safety rules. Everything looks too clean to be true. I don't mean that kid is a fraud, but the article doesn't really show his "hacker" side, besides a few pictures taken when he was younger.