8 ms·

Middle school student achieved nuclear fusion in his family playroom

49 points by austinprete 6y ago

imaginebaggins 6y ago
Youngest? Maybe, but the slickness of those pictures tells me that the real achievement comes from the parents who...nurtured...his inclinations. IMO David Hahn's reactor is still more impressive. Kids these days can't even make a DIY superfund site properly... https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/ https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scou...
- bsder 6y ago
  > who...nurtured...his inclinations. 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.
  - znpy 6y ago
    Indeed. When I was 16 I wasn't able to "get funding" for a lab bench power supply. I resorted to building one off an used ATX computer power supply, but voltages fluctuated a lot and also it was pretty high and non-regulable in current output. That was a recipe for troubles. Indeed, when one of the first boards I was learning on caught fire (mis-configured potentiometer + non-limited current dwaw) I didn't feel safe anymore to continue and basically stopped doing that kind of stuff. So yeah, extremely impressive achievement for a 13 years old student, not downplaying his achievement, but it's wrong to understate the role that his parents and their funding had.
    - PaulAJ 6y ago
      You had a used ATX power supply?! You were LUCKY!. When I were a lad, all we had was a bike dynamo. And you had to crank it by hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
      - znpy 6y ago
        ok boomer
    - unionpivo 6y ago
      Jup my problem was that there was plenty of schematics for power supplies in books and on bcc's, but building a reliable one is not a beginners task.
    - bsder 6y ago
      > (mis-configured potentiometer + non-limited current dwaw) I didn't feel safe anymore to continue and basically stopped doing that kind of stuff. Sorry, this gave me a chuckle as it effectively encapsulates engineers. The "Light Emitting Resistor" is a rite of passage. It's when you finally understand that it's called "Ohm's Law" for a reason.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  Yes, this is a perfect example for the nature vs. nurture debate. 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 :)
  - alexgmcm 6y ago
    It reminds me of what Stephen Jay Gould said: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
  - DharmaPolice 6y ago
    To be fair on the kid, in a video on YouTube [1] he ends by saying he's trying to create an organisation to help kids do experiments who don't have the financial support that he does. I don't know what that means exactly, but it at least demonstrates some awareness to be saying that (even if it's just on behalf of his mom/dad who might have told him to say it). 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvhy141WU14&ab_channel=Afrinik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvhy141WU14&ab_channel=Afrin... (Fox affiliate if that bothers you)
    - insensible 6y ago
      Is there a reason to doubt that a guy who is capable of designing and building a home fusion reactor is also capable of noticing that being able to buy all the gear is a privilege others don't have?
      - DharmaPolice 6y ago
        I try to maintain a healthy level of skepticism where possible. I don't disbelieve this kid and that wasn't my point - I was defending him- there's just a bit of a gap between "noticing you have privilege" and helping to found an organisation to help other kids do experiments. The latter claim might start to set off "too good to be true" detectors, so I'm merely saying that even if that's not 100% true the fact he's talking about it is a positive thing since some young talented people do seem utterly oblivious to their own privilege.
- spaceribs 6y ago
  Stepping back for a moment, it's amazing to me how much the conversation has shifted from merit to privilege in my lifetime. Up until around 2010, you'd be shouted down as a troll for taking down this kid's achievements.
  - codeisawesome 6y ago
    Thank goodness we live after the 2010s then =)
    - DharmaPolice 6y ago
      Meh, I'm literally a Communist and I find the tone unnecessarily negative at times. Yes, obviously the kid is privileged, but there are a shit load of privileged kids and how many of them are doing cool experiments like this?
  - BlueGh0st 6y ago
    And no matter how much privilege may have indeed played a part, it seems very gross to me that people seek to debase their achievements by focusing on aspects that these kids can't even control. It's rude (to a point) to point out how much raw luck may have had in one's achievements, but why is privilege (which is arguably very similar in many ways) fair game? The focus should be on all of the effort that the kid put forth which many other equally privileged or lucky kids would have squandered.
    - watwut 6y ago
      > It's rude (to a point) to point out how much raw luck Why should it be rude?
    - rtpg 6y ago
      I think the point is that the effort is maybe not as much as the lauding implies ("Guy makes WSYWIG editor in 10 seconds" is less impressive if I just use contenteditable) I don't really agree on this reading for this case, but this _definitely_ applies for basically every 30 under 30 list and lots of stuff in VC-land (Theranos etc). Some people get a silver spoon of a situation and get lauded for basically showing up.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  This is why meritocracy as it is now is flawed[0]. Smart people who work crazy hours, achieve a lot and obtain the appropriate status and wealth are also smart enough to know to invest tons and tons of money into their kids’ education and incentivise them to work as hard. Eventually it approaches a “pyramid scheme” where again only rich can win and everyone is unhappy. [0] This is something Daniel Markovits talks about: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-miserable-winners/594760/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...
  - ponker 6y ago
    Except not only the rich can win. My longtime barber is a Vietnamese guy who speaks very broken English. When I go and get a haircut his son was often in the store studying. My barber would tell him a math problem, like 257 times 191 or whatever, then the kid would produce the answer, then my barber would interrupt my haircut to whip out a calculator and check. Kid got a full scholarship to Duke University. And I’ve seen this in other Asian immigrants as well, a cab driver in NYC whose daughter was at Cornell Medical School.
    - krak12 6y ago
      So, entering a prestigious university is considered a success? It seems that the rich man has really won
    - huffmsa 6y ago
      Barbering can be a surprising lucrative career. Especially men's barbering. Has a particularly high dollar/hour rate too. Tooling is $1k for clippers and scissors and razors. Not sure about chairs, but probably another $1k. Suppose you charge $20 a cut, typical cut takes ~15-20 minutes and you're open 360 days a year. 10 cuts/day => $72k/yr. 2-3 hours of work a day. 20 cuts/day => $144k/yr. 4-5 hours of work a day. Find reasonable rent and you're netting a pretty good profit. And yes it's an easy space to enter, but generally, once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.
obilgic 6y ago
Whenever I see a young success story like this, I get even more curious about the parents, which should be a whole nother article imho.
- insensible 6y ago
  The parents are interviewed, and from my experience there might not be quite as much more to the story than it may seem. 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."
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Sure, but the question I'd have for you as parents would be - ok, but how come you you have a forge in your house? Is that your profession? Hobby? Did you build it specifically for your son? What did that involve? How does your son know how to operate a forge in the first place? Like, that's just few questions that come to my mind in like 2 seconds, I'm sure a competent interviewer could think of more.
    - insensible 6y ago
      1. I didn't have a forge in my house. As I said, he made one, using found materials and a few cheap tools he bought with his own limited money, outside. 2. I am a software developer, I have done a bit of small vegetable farming, and my metalworking experience is limited to watching the blacksmith at the historical museum. 3. My son built it specifically for my son. 4. Building it involved his working his butt off hauling discarded materials like cinder blocks from the neighborhood. 5. He studied very hard on many aspects of the craft, for months, online. My input into this was computer access, permission to proceed, "no you can't put it there", (then after he set it up in an approved spot) "neighbor says you have to move it further away from his yard", and buying the fuel since he's not old enough. Then one day dropping my jaw when he walks in the house with a beautiful knife.
progre 6y ago
To do this you would need a way to create a good vacuum and a way to generate some seriously high voltages. For confirmations, you would also need a neutron detector. Totally achievable stuff, many people have done it with home setups, there is even an Instructable here https://www.instructables.com/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/ https://www.instructables.com/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/ Impressive build by the kid! The kind of nuclear fusion that governments spend billions of dollars of research on though is the kind where you actually get some net energy out of the reaction.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  Amusingly, the vacuum pump in the picture (above this text, his right hand resting on it): -- 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/ 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.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I read an article once on how to create a low-tech nuke in a house. The TL;DR is that you mainly need shaped plutonium or a spicy flavor of uranium (a half ball and socket), a pipe, and some explosives. Shoot the ball at the socket using explosives, ?????, city leveled. Getting the plutonium is the hard part though. And I'm probably trivializing it / missing some steps. I'm probably on a List now.
    - zaarn 6y ago
warent 6y ago
It's really strange they insist on calling it a playroom. Sure, he is a child (young man / young teen) but it seems weirdly demeaning and distracting. It's a laboratory, which they correctly name it later on, but why not in the title is beyond me.
- cheschire 6y ago
  Clickbait titles to compete against other clickbait titles are beyond your understanding?
- secondcoming 6y ago
  It's a lab in a playroom. A playroom is a room in a house where children are normally let loose to play and make a mess.
gambiting 6y ago
>>This ultimately inspired him to attempt to build a reactor himself, but Jackson clarified that he was the only person to have any involvement in its design or production. What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  It seems this young man will do well in middle management ;)
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  I wonder if his parents or someone else told him to say that, or he is actually just that arrogant.
- rjkennedy98 6y ago
  I took it in the context that it is a necessary condition for the Guinness Book of World Records that he did it by himself, since the next sentence is about Guinness. If he says he got helped from other people that would invalidate the Guinness record.
- frant-hartm 6y ago
  This simply means he didn't have any help on-site (parents, teachers).
- ordu 6y ago
  > What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. 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.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
There's lots of interesting threads about how hard this is and how much help he received but no one is asking the important question - why is he wearing a hard hat?
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  Because Science. /s
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Because Guiness wanted a good photo for their book.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  You're all wrong. Wrong, I say! 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!
- GuB-42 6y ago
  And a lab coat, but no safety glasses. There is a face shield on the table but it doesn't seem to be the kind that goes with the hard hat. 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.
stefan_ 6y ago
Nuclear fusion is a middle school physics experiment, so yeah.
lonk 6y ago
Fake news
fierarul 6y ago
For posterity I would like to underline 3 of the top 5 comments on HN[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706414 > What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706132 > Whenever I see a young success story like this, I get even more curious about the parents, which should be a whole nother article imho. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705954 > Youngest? Maybe, but the slickness of those pictures tells me that the real achievement comes from the parents who...nurtured...his inclinations. IMO David Hahn's reactor is still more impressive. Kids these days can't even make a DIY superfund site properly... 1. hacker (definition): Someone who is brilliantly persistent in solving technical problems, whether these involve golfing, fighting orcs, or programming. Hacker is a neutral term, morally speaking.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  The unfortunate thing is the way it is presented, it looks like his parents are showing of their smart kid. Almost like a form of objectification. 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.
tnli 6y ago
This article is rather misleading, for most people it evokes the idea of net positive nuclear fusion, which of course is not the case here. Also, a damn neat home project!
BlasDeLezo 6y ago
I smell bullshit

49 points by austinprete 6y ago

Youngest? Maybe, but the slickness of those pictures tells me that the real achievement comes from the parents who...nurtured...his inclinations. IMO David Hahn's reactor is still more impressive. Kids these days can't even make a DIY superfund site properly... https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout/ https://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scou...

bsder 6y ago
> who...nurtured...his inclinations. 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.
- znpy 6y ago
  Indeed. When I was 16 I wasn't able to "get funding" for a lab bench power supply. I resorted to building one off an used ATX computer power supply, but voltages fluctuated a lot and also it was pretty high and non-regulable in current output. That was a recipe for troubles. Indeed, when one of the first boards I was learning on caught fire (mis-configured potentiometer + non-limited current dwaw) I didn't feel safe anymore to continue and basically stopped doing that kind of stuff. So yeah, extremely impressive achievement for a 13 years old student, not downplaying his achievement, but it's wrong to understate the role that his parents and their funding had.
  - PaulAJ 6y ago
    You had a used ATX power supply?! You were LUCKY!. When I were a lad, all we had was a bike dynamo. And you had to crank it by hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
    - znpy 6y ago
      ok boomer
  - unionpivo 6y ago
    Jup my problem was that there was plenty of schematics for power supplies in books and on bcc's, but building a reliable one is not a beginners task.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > (mis-configured potentiometer + non-limited current dwaw) I didn't feel safe anymore to continue and basically stopped doing that kind of stuff. Sorry, this gave me a chuckle as it effectively encapsulates engineers. The "Light Emitting Resistor" is a rite of passage. It's when you finally understand that it's called "Ohm's Law" for a reason.
fxtentacle 6y ago
Yes, this is a perfect example for the nature vs. nurture debate. 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 :)
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  It reminds me of what Stephen Jay Gould said: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- DharmaPolice 6y ago
  To be fair on the kid, in a video on YouTube [1] he ends by saying he's trying to create an organisation to help kids do experiments who don't have the financial support that he does. I don't know what that means exactly, but it at least demonstrates some awareness to be saying that (even if it's just on behalf of his mom/dad who might have told him to say it). 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvhy141WU14&ab_channel=Afrinik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvhy141WU14&ab_channel=Afrin... (Fox affiliate if that bothers you)
  - insensible 6y ago
    Is there a reason to doubt that a guy who is capable of designing and building a home fusion reactor is also capable of noticing that being able to buy all the gear is a privilege others don't have?
    - DharmaPolice 6y ago
      I try to maintain a healthy level of skepticism where possible. I don't disbelieve this kid and that wasn't my point - I was defending him- there's just a bit of a gap between "noticing you have privilege" and helping to found an organisation to help other kids do experiments. The latter claim might start to set off "too good to be true" detectors, so I'm merely saying that even if that's not 100% true the fact he's talking about it is a positive thing since some young talented people do seem utterly oblivious to their own privilege.
spaceribs 6y ago
Stepping back for a moment, it's amazing to me how much the conversation has shifted from merit to privilege in my lifetime. Up until around 2010, you'd be shouted down as a troll for taking down this kid's achievements.
- codeisawesome 6y ago
  Thank goodness we live after the 2010s then =)
  - DharmaPolice 6y ago
    Meh, I'm literally a Communist and I find the tone unnecessarily negative at times. Yes, obviously the kid is privileged, but there are a shit load of privileged kids and how many of them are doing cool experiments like this?
- BlueGh0st 6y ago
  And no matter how much privilege may have indeed played a part, it seems very gross to me that people seek to debase their achievements by focusing on aspects that these kids can't even control. It's rude (to a point) to point out how much raw luck may have had in one's achievements, but why is privilege (which is arguably very similar in many ways) fair game? The focus should be on all of the effort that the kid put forth which many other equally privileged or lucky kids would have squandered.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > It's rude (to a point) to point out how much raw luck Why should it be rude?
  - rtpg 6y ago
    I think the point is that the effort is maybe not as much as the lauding implies ("Guy makes WSYWIG editor in 10 seconds" is less impressive if I just use contenteditable) I don't really agree on this reading for this case, but this _definitely_ applies for basically every 30 under 30 list and lots of stuff in VC-land (Theranos etc). Some people get a silver spoon of a situation and get lauded for basically showing up.
strogonoff 6y ago
This is why meritocracy as it is now is flawed[0]. Smart people who work crazy hours, achieve a lot and obtain the appropriate status and wealth are also smart enough to know to invest tons and tons of money into their kids’ education and incentivise them to work as hard. Eventually it approaches a “pyramid scheme” where again only rich can win and everyone is unhappy. [0] This is something Daniel Markovits talks about: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-miserable-winners/594760/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritoc...
- ponker 6y ago
  Except not only the rich can win. My longtime barber is a Vietnamese guy who speaks very broken English. When I go and get a haircut his son was often in the store studying. My barber would tell him a math problem, like 257 times 191 or whatever, then the kid would produce the answer, then my barber would interrupt my haircut to whip out a calculator and check. Kid got a full scholarship to Duke University. And I’ve seen this in other Asian immigrants as well, a cab driver in NYC whose daughter was at Cornell Medical School.
  - krak12 6y ago
    So, entering a prestigious university is considered a success? It seems that the rich man has really won
  - huffmsa 6y ago
    Barbering can be a surprising lucrative career. Especially men's barbering. Has a particularly high dollar/hour rate too. Tooling is $1k for clippers and scissors and razors. Not sure about chairs, but probably another $1k. Suppose you charge $20 a cut, typical cut takes ~15-20 minutes and you're open 360 days a year. 10 cuts/day => $72k/yr. 2-3 hours of work a day. 20 cuts/day => $144k/yr. 4-5 hours of work a day. Find reasonable rent and you're netting a pretty good profit. And yes it's an easy space to enter, but generally, once men find "their barber", they're locked in for pretty much the rest of their life and become a regular customer every 2-3 weeks.

obilgic 6y ago

Whenever I see a young success story like this, I get even more curious about the parents, which should be a whole nother article imho.

insensible 6y ago
The parents are interviewed, and from my experience there might not be quite as much more to the story than it may seem. 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."
- gambiting 6y ago
  Sure, but the question I'd have for you as parents would be - ok, but how come you you have a forge in your house? Is that your profession? Hobby? Did you build it specifically for your son? What did that involve? How does your son know how to operate a forge in the first place? Like, that's just few questions that come to my mind in like 2 seconds, I'm sure a competent interviewer could think of more.
  - insensible 6y ago
    1. I didn't have a forge in my house. As I said, he made one, using found materials and a few cheap tools he bought with his own limited money, outside. 2. I am a software developer, I have done a bit of small vegetable farming, and my metalworking experience is limited to watching the blacksmith at the historical museum. 3. My son built it specifically for my son. 4. Building it involved his working his butt off hauling discarded materials like cinder blocks from the neighborhood. 5. He studied very hard on many aspects of the craft, for months, online. My input into this was computer access, permission to proceed, "no you can't put it there", (then after he set it up in an approved spot) "neighbor says you have to move it further away from his yard", and buying the fuel since he's not old enough. Then one day dropping my jaw when he walks in the house with a beautiful knife.

progre 6y ago

To do this you would need a way to create a good vacuum and a way to generate some seriously high voltages. For confirmations, you would also need a neutron detector. Totally achievable stuff, many people have done it with home setups, there is even an Instructable here https://www.instructables.com/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/ https://www.instructables.com/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/ Impressive build by the kid! The kind of nuclear fusion that governments spend billions of dollars of research on though is the kind where you actually get some net energy out of the reaction.

bbarnett 6y ago
Amusingly, the vacuum pump in the picture (above this text, his right hand resting on it): -- 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/ 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.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I read an article once on how to create a low-tech nuke in a house. The TL;DR is that you mainly need shaped plutonium or a spicy flavor of uranium (a half ball and socket), a pipe, and some explosives. Shoot the ball at the socket using explosives, ?????, city leveled. Getting the plutonium is the hard part though. And I'm probably trivializing it / missing some steps. I'm probably on a List now.
  - zaarn 6y ago

warent 6y ago

It's really strange they insist on calling it a playroom. Sure, he is a child (young man / young teen) but it seems weirdly demeaning and distracting. It's a laboratory, which they correctly name it later on, but why not in the title is beyond me.

cheschire 6y ago
Clickbait titles to compete against other clickbait titles are beyond your understanding?
secondcoming 6y ago
It's a lab in a playroom. A playroom is a room in a house where children are normally let loose to play and make a mess.

gambiting 6y ago

>>This ultimately inspired him to attempt to build a reactor himself, but Jackson clarified that he was the only person to have any involvement in its design or production. What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else.

fxtentacle 6y ago
It seems this young man will do well in middle management ;)
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
I wonder if his parents or someone else told him to say that, or he is actually just that arrogant.
rjkennedy98 6y ago
I took it in the context that it is a necessary condition for the Guinness Book of World Records that he did it by himself, since the next sentence is about Guinness. If he says he got helped from other people that would invalidate the Guinness record.
frant-hartm 6y ago
This simply means he didn't have any help on-site (parents, teachers).
ordu 6y ago
> What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. 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.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

There's lots of interesting threads about how hard this is and how much help he received but no one is asking the important question - why is he wearing a hard hat?

Jaruzel 6y ago
Because Science. /s
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Because Guiness wanted a good photo for their book.
bbarnett 6y ago
You're all wrong. Wrong, I say! 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!
GuB-42 6y ago
And a lab coat, but no safety glasses. There is a face shield on the table but it doesn't seem to be the kind that goes with the hard hat. 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.

stefan_ 6y ago

Nuclear fusion is a middle school physics experiment, so yeah.

lonk 6y ago

Fake news

fierarul 6y ago

For posterity I would like to underline 3 of the top 5 comments on HN[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706414 > What a crock of shit. I understand the whole worship of individualism, but this is just taking it absurdly far. Look at Schwarzenegger, and how frequently he keeps saying that he only got to where he is because of help from other people - nothing that you do is ever only your own accomplishment. And then on the other side you have a 13 year old kid who says he was the only one involved in design and production(!!!) of this device - give me a break. He might be super bright, but somehow this kind of article grinds my gears like nothing else. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24706132 > Whenever I see a young success story like this, I get even more curious about the parents, which should be a whole nother article imho. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705954 > Youngest? Maybe, but the slickness of those pictures tells me that the real achievement comes from the parents who...nurtured...his inclinations. IMO David Hahn's reactor is still more impressive. Kids these days can't even make a DIY superfund site properly... 1. hacker (definition): Someone who is brilliantly persistent in solving technical problems, whether these involve golfing, fighting orcs, or programming. Hacker is a neutral term, morally speaking.

GuB-42 6y ago
The unfortunate thing is the way it is presented, it looks like his parents are showing of their smart kid. Almost like a form of objectification. 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.

tnli 6y ago

This article is rather misleading, for most people it evokes the idea of net positive nuclear fusion, which of course is not the case here. Also, a damn neat home project!

BlasDeLezo 6y ago

I smell bullshit