Those who have watched Young Sheldon will remember how the 10-year-old child prodigy made a nuclear reactor in his bedroom and got a visit from the FBI. Now, believe it or not, the story has actually come true in the city of Memphis, Tennessee, US.
Jackson Oswalt, a 12-year-old teen from Memphis, received an unexpected FBI visit after he successfully built a nuclear fusion reactor in his bedroom. Through an X-post, Jackson shared his journey of inventing the nuclear fusion reactor, a feat he achieved just before his 13th birthday, as he became ‘obsessed with proving himself’.
Then he came across Taylor Wilson’s TED talk where he spoke about achieving controlled nuclear fusion at the age of 14 in 2008. This had a huge impact on Jackson.
That’s when he thought about making something similar. “Seeing this opened my mind to the possibility that somebody so young could do something so crazy. And so, at 11 years old, I decided I was going to do the same,” he wrote.
HOW DID HE DO IT?
Jackson took the first step by learning the science behind creating a nuclear fusion, then building a ‘demo fusor’. He sought financial help from his parents to build it, but he mentions that it was far from a working fusion reactor.
“I rebuilt the vacuum chamber, got a turbomolecular pump from eBay, sourced some Deuterium for fuel (somewhat legally) and rebuilt the inner grid from Tantalum,” he wrote on X.
Jackson said that he got almost every part from eBay and, after working for a year to build the reactor, it started working.
“After a handful of stressful tests just days before my 13th birthday, I successfully achieved fusion and detected these neutrons as proof,” he said.
After Jackson achieved nuclear fusion, the word spread quickly, and he made the Guinness World Record for the youngest person to achieve fusion and received attention from various media outlets.
Further, he shared that he got some less fun attention — the FBI visited his house.
“I also got some less fun attention: one Saturday I was woken up by two FBI agents, who made a quick sweep around my house with a geiger counter to make sure all was good. Fortunately, I remained a free man,” he wrote.
After the achievement, he also got the chance to visit various start-ups around his country.
Nowadays, with child prodigies like Jackson Oswalt building nuclear reactors and India’s Aaryan Shukla wowing the world as a human calculator, we’re definitely witnessing a new era of young geniuses pushing boundaries.