Ted Taylor

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Theodore Brewster Taylor, a brilliant American theoretical physicist, was particularly interested in nuclear energy.

He earned a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

Despite Dr.'s insistence that Dr.

Taylor is relatively unknown to the public, but his most notable contributions to the field of nuclear weapons were his small bomb experiments at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

He has been credited with many milestones in fission nuclear weaponry research, including the design of the country's most compact, most effective, and most effective fission bombs ever tested.

Despite this, Dr.

Taylor was not regarded as a brilliant physicist from a quantitative perspective, but his intuition and creativity helped him to flourish in the field.

Dr. Gregor's later part.

Taylor's career was devoted to nuclear energy rather than weapons, and it included studies into Project Orion, nuclear reactor construction, and anti-nuclear proliferation.

Early life

Ted Taylor was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on July 11, 1925. Both his mother and father were born in the United States. Barbara Southworth Howland Taylor, a poet from the University of México, and his father, Walter Clyde Taylor, were the directors of a YMCA in Mexico City. His father was a widower with three children and his mother, a widow with a son of her own before marrying in 1922. Ted was essentially raised as an only child by Taylor's four half-brothers. Both of his maternal grandparents were Congregationalist missionaries in Guadalajara. In the Atlixo 13 neighborhood of Cuernavaca, Taylor grew up in a house without electricity. His upbringing was quiet and sacred, with his house brimming with books, mainly atlases and geographies, which he would read by candlelight. This ardent interest led him into adulthood.

Taylor, who acquired a chemistry set at the age of ten, showed an early interest in chemistry, particularly pyrotechnics. Taylor was able to obtain items from local druggists that otherwise would not have been readily available, such as corrosive and explosive chemicals, as well as nitric and sulfuric acids, which heightened his fascination. He was able to perform his own experiments as a result of these. He also read through the 1913 New International Encyclopedia, which contained extensive chemistry for new concoctions to make. These included sleeping pills, small explosives, guncotton, precipitates, and many others. His mother was extremely supportive of his experimentation, but no experiments that involved nitroglycerin were allowed.

Taylor expressed an obsession with billiards as he grew up. He played billiards for almost ten hours per week in the afternoons after school. He'd recall this early interest in learning about collision mechanics, particularly as a result of his later work in particle physics. The behavior of the interacting balls on the table and their elastic collisions within the reflector cushions' confining framework helped him to conceptualize the difficult abstractions of cross sections, neutron scattering, and fission chain reactions.

He discovered a passion for music as an infant and would sit for an hour and listen to his favorite songs in the mornings before school. Later, when finishing his PhD at Cornell, he noticed that although his theoretical physicist peers adopted the classical music piped into their rooms, their experimentalist counterparts would universally shut the device off.

Taylor went from elementary school to high school in Mexico City. He went from fourth to sixth grades in one year, and was a gifted student. Taylor found himself three years younger than his peers when he first entered his teens. Taylor graduated early from high school in 1941 at the age of 15. He then attended the Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for one year, where he studied Modern Physics from Elbert P. Little, but not yet meeting the age requirements for American universities. Although Taylor's final winter term examination showed a weak academic result, he piqued an interest in physics. He brushed this loss off quickly and announced that he wanted to be a physicist. He also became interested in throwing discus at Exeter, in addition to education. As he began to throw discus at Caltech, he carried this enthusiasm into his college career.

In 1942, he began his education at the California Institute of Technology and later spent his second and third years in the Navy V-12 program. This accelerated his education and culminated in his graduation in physics from Caltech in 1945 at the age of nineteen.

He attended Throgs Neck, a Bronx, New York, for one year to fulfill his naval active duty requirement after graduation. In mid-1946, he was discharged, but by that time he had been promoted to lieutenant rank.

He began a graduate program in theoretical physics at the University of California in Berkeley, while still working part-time at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, mainly on the cyclotron and a beta-ray spectrograph. Taylor was disqualified from the graduate program after failing an oral preliminary examination on mechanics and heat, as well as a second prelim in modern physics in 1949.

Taylor married Caro Arnim in 1948 and had five children in the ensuing years: Clare Hastings, Katherine Robertson, Christopher Taylor, Robert Taylor, Jeffrey Taylor, and Jeffrey Taylor. Arnim was majoring in Greek at Scripps College, a liberal arts college in Claremont, California, and Taylor would return to her whenever he could. Both Arnim and Taylor were very shy people and were uncertain of what the future held. Taylor and I had hoped that Taylor would be a college professor in a sleepy town, and that Caro would be a librarian. The couple separated in 1992 after 44 years of marriage.

Taylor died of coronary artery disease on October 28, 2004.

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Early career

Taylor had adamantly stated himself against nuclear weapons prior to his employment at Los Alamos. He heard of the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima while at the midshipmen school. He immediately wrote a letter home discussing the dangers of nuclear proliferation and his doubts that it might result in the death of mankind if another war were to occur. He expressed some optimism, but he noted with appropriate leadership that the nuclear bomb might have resulted in the demise of wars as a whole. Whether you like it or not, he was still curious about nuclear physics as an undergraduate.

Taylor first started working in nuclear physics in 1949 when he was recruited to a junior position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Theoretical Physics Division. He started this position after failing out of Berkeley's PhD program; J. Carson Mark linked Taylor with a Los Alamos chief and suggested him for a position. Prior to arriving in Los Alamos, Taylor was uncertain of the specifics of his new job. He had only been told that his first assignment was related to Neutron Diffusion Theory, which was a theoretical study of neutron movement within a nuclear core. Taylor's solely anti-nuclear growth convictions changed at Los Alamos. His theory of preventing nuclear war turned into the production of bombs of unprecedented vigour in the hope of convincing people, including governments, that nuclear war has nothing to do with. He remained in his junior position at Los Alamos until 1953, when he took a temporary leave of absence to complete his PhD from Cornell.

After finishing his PhD in 1954, he returned to Los Alamos, and by 1956, he was known for his involvement in small-bomb research. "A major component of the small-bomb development of the last five years [at Los Alamos] was mainly due to Ted," Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying. Although the majority of Los Alamos' brilliant minds were concentrated on creating the fusion bomb, Taylor remained hard at work on improving fission bombs. His contributions in this field were so critical that he was eventually given the opportunity to study whatever he wanted to study. Taylor's view of nuclear war and weapon development changed eventually, possibly transforming his career path. Taylor left Los Alamos in 1956 and went to work for General Atomics. He created TRIGA, a reactor that produced isotopes used in medicine. Taylor began working on Project Orion in 1958, which sought to establish space travel that depended on nuclear energy as the fuel source. The new spacecraft would propellant by a sequence of nuclear fission reactions, thus increasing space travel while reducing the Earth's source of nuclear energy. Taylor, a member of Dyson, supervised the project development team for six years until the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted. They could not test their theories after that, but the scheme was ineffective.

Late career

After project Orion, Theodore Taylor's career changed dramatically. He developed an even greater fear of the ramifications of his entire life's work, and began taking precautionary steps to avoid these fears. He served as the deputy director of the Defense Atomic Support Agency (a Department of Defense) in 1964, where he oversaw the US nuclear inventory. In 1966, then founded the International Research and Technology Corporation, a Vienna, Austria-based consultancy firm that wanted to avoid the development of new nuclear weapons programs. Taylor has also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Princeton University. Taylor eventually turned to renewable energies, and in 1980, he founded Nova Incorporated, which concentrated on nuclear energy as a way to supplement the earth's energy needs. He investigated energy capture from sources like cooling ice ponds and heating solar ponds, and eventually switched to energy conservation within buildings. Concerning this work in energy conservation, he founded Damascus Energy, a not-for-profit group in Montgomery County, Maryland, that focuses on home energy conservation. Theodore Taylor served on the President of the United States' commission into the Three Mile Island Accident, assisting the reactor meltdown.

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