Theodore Brewster "Ted" Taylor (July 11, 1925 – October 28, 2004) was an American theoretical physicist, specifically concerning nuclear energy.
His most noteworthy contributions to the field of nuclear weaponry were his small bomb developments at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.
[2] This fascination was enhanced when a small and exclusive university in the area built a chemistry laboratory in his neighborhood, after which Taylor had access to items from local druggists that otherwise would not have been readily available, including corrosive and explosive chemicals, as well as nitric and sulfuric acids.
[1] The behavior of the interacting balls on the table and their elastic collisions within the confining framework of the reflector cushions helped him to conceptualize the difficult abstractions of cross sections, neutron scattering, and fission chain reactions.
[1] As a child, he developed a passion for music, and would quietly sit for an hour and listen to his favorite songs in the mornings before school.
[1] Later, while completing his PhD at Cornell, he noted that while his theoretical physicist peers embraced the classical music piped into their rooms, their experimentalist counterparts would uniformly shut the system off.
[2] Not yet meeting the age requirements for American universities, he then attended the Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for one year,[2] where he took Modern Physics from Elbert P.
[1] This developed his interest in physics, though he displayed poor academic performance in the course: Little gave Taylor a grade D on his final winter term examination.
[1] After graduation, he attended the midshipman school at Throgs Neck, in the Bronx, New York, for one year to fulfill his naval active duty requirement.
[1] After failing an oral preliminary examination on mechanics and heat, and a second prelim in modern physics in 1949, Taylor was disqualified from the graduate program.
[1] He immediately wrote a letter home discussing the perils of nuclear proliferation and his fears that it would lead to the end of mankind in the event of another war.
[2] He received this job after failing out of the PhD program at Berkeley; J. Carson Mark connected Taylor with a leader at Los Alamos and recommended him for a position.
[2] Freeman Dyson is quoted as saying, "A great part of the small-bomb development of the last five years [at Los Alamos] was directly due to Ted.
[2] In 1958, Taylor began working on Project Orion, which sought to develop space travel that relied on nuclear energy as the fuel source.
[2] In collaboration with Dyson, Taylor led the project development team for six years until the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was instituted.
He developed an even greater fear of the potential ramifications of his entire life's work, and began taking precautionary measures to mitigate those concerns.
[7] Then, in 1966 he created a consulting firm called the International Research and Technology Corporation, located in Vienna, Austria, which sought to prevent the development of more nuclear weapons programs.
[7] Theodore Taylor also served on the President of the United States' commission concerning the Three Mile Island Accident,[4] working to mitigate the issues associated with the reactor meltdown.
During his time at Los Alamos, he was responsible for designing the smallest fission bomb of the era, named Davy Crockett, which weighed only 23 kilograms (50 lb), measured approximately 300-millimetre (12 in) across, and could produce between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent.
[1] First tested in a bomb called "Scorpion", it used a reflector made of beryllium, which was drastically lighter than the materials previously used, such as tungsten carbide (WC).
[1] He was included in high priority situations reserved for important personnel, and was even taken to The Pentagon as a consultant on strategies and the potential outcomes of a nuclear war with Russia.
Perhaps the greatest fear that propelled Taylor to work so fervently in these areas was the realization that the consequences of nuclear material ending up in the wrong hands could be severe.
[10] This book likely was a culmination of much of Ted's work in the field, as he often toured nuclear reactor sites and provided insight on potential weak points in their security measures.
According to reviews, the book focused on techniques to enhance sustainability and expanded on different sources of energy that could be used alternatively to meet the power needs of the earth.
[11] In his writing, Taylor argued that the most dangerous and devastating events that could possibly occur during nuclear research would most likely happen at reactors that are incapable of running efficiently and maintaining a safe temperature.
[11] Taylor also wrote the book Nuclear Proliferation: Motivations, Capabilities and Strategies for Control with Harold Feiveson and Ted Greenwood.
[12] Taylor further collaborated with George Gamow on a study called, "What the World Needs Is a Good Two-Kiloton Bomb", which investigated the concept of small nuclear artillery weapons.
[13] The patent concerning the prompt negative temperature coefficient was groundbreaking because it provided a markedly safer reactor even in the event of misuse.
[1] The book would inspire Princeton student John Aristotle Phillips, and several other imitators, to prove Taylor's contention that "anyone" could design a plausible nuclear weapon using declassified and public information.
According to Freitas and Merkle,[15] the only known extant source on Taylor's concept of the "Santa Claus machine" is found in Nigel Calder's Spaceships of the Mind.