Basement Fusion: A 14-year-old’s reactor rewrote the bounds of possibility
Taylor Wilson, at 14, convinced a university physics department to let him build a Farnsworth fusor in a sub-basement, where he achieved nuclear fusion confirmed by neutron detectors, becoming the youngest person verified to fuse atoms. The feat underscores how supervised mentorship and access to proper safety can channel teenage obsession into real science, influencing his later career in radiation physics and nuclear technology.