Ted Taylor (physicist)

For other people named Ted Taylor (physicist), see Ted Taylor (physicist) (disambiguation).

Theodore Brewster Taylor (July 11, 1925 – October 28, 2004), was a prominent Mexican-born American theoretical physicist and nuclear weapons designer.

Biography

Taylor was born in Mexico City, Mexico, the son of a daughter of a congregationalist missionary and a director of the YMCA. He spent much of his childhood in Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City. From 1943 to 1946 he served on active duty in the United States Navy. He received a PhD from Cornell University in 1954.

From 1948 to 1956 he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he gained some fame as a designer of small, efficient nuclear weapons. He was assigned to explore the bounds of fission weapons in an era when most weapons designers were focused on fusion. In 1956 he moved to General Atomics, where he directed Project Orion, with his friend Lew Allen as contract manager. He also was involved in the design of small nuclear reactors to produce radioactive isotopes for medical use, the TRIGA reactors. He led the team that designed the largest pure fission bomb ever detonated, the Super Oralloy Bomb ("SOB"), which had a yield of 500 kilotons in its only test (Ivy King). He similarly designed the small "Scorpion" on the small end of the scale which is documented in John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" book. This knowledge of bombs requiring minimal amounts of fissile material contributed to his concerns about nuclear terrorism.

After the end of Project Orion, he worked for the Defense Atomic Support Agency, involved with controlling the US stockpile of nuclear weapons. Beginning in 1966 he advocated nuclear disarmament, and worked as a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1966 to 1968 evaluating the International Atomic Energy Agency in regard to nuclear non-proliferation. He worked as a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz and Princeton University; in addition to nuclear proliferation, a topic on which he wrote several books, he studied renewable energy and energy conservation, including ice pond technology.

The Santa Claus Machine and Pugwash

According to Freitas and Merkle , the only known extant source on Taylor’s concept of the “Santa Claus machine” is found in Nigel Calder's Spaceships of the Mind. The concept would use a large mass spectrograph to separate an ion beam into atomic elements for later use in making products.

Taylor was a member of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and attended several of its meetings during the 1980s. After his retirement he lived in Wellsville, New York. He died on October 28, 2004 of coronary artery disease.

Freeman Dyson On Ted Taylor

Freeman Dyson said of Taylor, "Very few people have Ted's imagination. ... I think he is perhaps the greatest man that I ever knew well. And he is completely unknown."

Further reading

• Nigel Calder Spaceships of the Mind, Viking Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0670660213
• Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph C. Merkle. Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, 2004, 3.10
• John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, Ballantine, 1973, 1974. ISBN 0-345-28000-8, This book about proliferation is largely an account of Taylor's ideas, including his idea that it is "easy" for rogue actors to produce nuclear bombs.
• George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, Henry Holt and Company, 2002. ISBN 0-8050-5985-7
• Mason Willrich, Ted Taylor, Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards: A Report to the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, Ballinger, 1974, ISBN 0-88410-208-4
• Taylor, Theodore B., Humpstone, Charles C., The Restoration of the Earth, Harper and Row, 1973
• Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons, an anti-proliferation essay by Taylor (1996)
• Oral History interview transcript with Theodore Taylor 13 February 1995, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives