No, really, a 17 year-old kid in Michigan created small-scale nuclear fusion on his own:
On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager.
He’s on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills. He’s a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college.
But to his friends, Thiago is known as “the mad scientist.”
In the basement of his parents’ Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren’t privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build — a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion — when atoms are combined to create energy — is “kind of like the holy grail of physics,” he said.
His parents are understandably proud, if a bit confused:
Thiago’s mom, Natalice Olson, initially was leery of the project, even though the only real danger from the fusion machine is the high voltage and small amount of X-rays emitted through a glass window in the vacuum chamber — through which Olson videotapes the fusion in action..
But, she wasn’t really surprised, since he was always coming up with lofty ideas.
“Originally, he wanted to build a hyperbaric chamber,” she said, adding that she promptly said no. But, when he came asking about the nuclear fusion machine, she relented.
“I think it was pretty brave that he could think that he was capable to do something so amazing,” she said.
(…)
“I thought he was going to be a cook,” Natalice Olson said, “because he liked to mix things.”
Yea, things like protons and neutrons.
