Theodore Brewster Taylor (July 11, 1925 – October 28, 2004) was an American theoretical physicist, specifically concerning nuclear energy. His higher education included a PhD from Cornell University in theoretical physics. His most noteworthy contributions to the field of nuclear weaponry were his small bomb developments at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. Although not widely known to the general public, Taylor is credited with numerous landmarks in fission nuclear weaponry development, including having designed and developed the smallest, most powerful, and most efficient fission weapons ever tested by the U.S. program. His vision and creativity allowed him to thrive in the field. The later part of Taylor's career was focused on nuclear energy instead of weaponry, and included his work on Project Orion, nuclear reactor developments, and anti-nuclear proliferation.
Early life Ted Taylor was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on July 11, 1925. His mother and father were both Americans. His mother, Barbara Southworth Howland Taylor, held a PhD in Mexican literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his father, Walter Clyde Taylor, was the director of a YMCA in Mexico City. Before marrying in 1922, his father had been a widower with three sons and his mother a widow with a son of her own. Taylor's four half-brothers were old enough that Ted was essentially raised as an only child. Both of his maternal grandparents were Congregationalist missionaries in Guadalajara. Taylor grew up in a house without electricity in the Atlixo 13 neighborhood of Cuernavaca. His upbringing was quiet and religious, and his home was filled with books, mainly atlases and geographies, which he would read by candlelight. This interest followed him into adulthood.
Taylor showed an early interest in chemistry, specifically pyrotechnics, when he received a chemistry set at the age of ten. 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. These allowed him to conduct his own experiments. He also often read through the 1913 New International Encyclopedia, which contained extensive chemistry, for new concoctions to make. These included sleeping drugs, small explosives, guncotton, precipitates, and many more. His mother was extremely tolerant of his experimentation but prohibited any experiments that involved nitroglycerin.
Growing up, Taylor also showed an interest in billiards. In the afternoons after school, he played billiards for almost ten hours a week. He would recall this early interest as his introduction to the mechanics of collisions, relating it to his later work in particle physics. 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.
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. 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.
Taylor attended the American School in Mexico City from elementary school through high school. A gifted student, he finished the fourth through sixth grades in one year. Being an accelerated student, Taylor found himself three years younger than his friends as he entered his teens. Taylor graduated early from high school in 1941 at the age of 15. Not yet meeting the age requirements for American universities, he then attended the Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for one year, where he took Modern Physics from Elbert P. Little. 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. He quickly brushed this failure off and soon confirmed that he wanted to be a physicist. Apart from education, he also developed an interest in throwing discus at Exeter. This interest continued into his college career, as he continued to throw discus at Caltech.
He enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in 1942 and then spent his second and third years in the Navy V-12 program. This accelerated his schooling, and he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1945 at age nineteen.
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. He was discharged in mid-1946, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
He then enrolled in a graduate program in theoretical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, while also working part-time at the Berkeley Radiation laboratory, mainly on the cyclotron and a beta-ray spectrograph. 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.
Early career Prior to Taylor's work at Los Alamos, he had firmly declared himself an opponent of nuclear weapons. While at the midshipmen school, he received news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the United States. 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. He showed some optimism, however, as he felt with proper leadership the nuclear bomb could result in the end of wars altogether. Either way, he was still very curious about the field of nuclear physics after his time as an undergraduate.
Taylor began his work in nuclear physics in 1949 when he was hired to a junior position at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Theoretical Physics Division. 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. Taylor was unsure of the details of his new job at Los Alamos prior to his arrival. He had only been briefed that his first assignment related to investigations of Neutron Diffusion Theory, a theoretical analysis of neutron movement within a nuclear core. While at Los Alamos, Taylor's strictly anti-nuclear development beliefs changed. His theory on preventing nuclear war turned to developing bombs of unprecedented power in an attempt to make people, including governments, so afraid of the consequences of nuclear warfare that they would not dare engage in this sort of altercation. He continued in his junior position at Los Alamos until 1953, when he took a temporary leave of absence to obtain his PhD from Cornell.
Finishing his PhD in 1954, he returned to Los Alamos, and by 1956, he was famous for his work in small-bomb development. 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." Although the majority of the brilliant minds at Los Alamos were focused on developing the fusion bomb, Taylor remained hard at work on improving fission bombs. His innovations in this area of study were so important that he was eventually given the freedom to choose whatever he wanted to study. Eventually, Taylor's stance on nuclear warfare and weapon development changed, altering his career path. In 1956, Taylor left his position at Los Alamos and went to work for General Atomics. Here, he developed TRIGA, a reactor that produced isotopes used in the medical field. In 1958, Taylor began working on Project Orion, which sought to develop space travel that relied on nuclear energy as the fuel source. The proposed spacecraft would use a series of nuclear fission reactions as its propellant, thus accelerating space travel while eliminating the Earth's source of fuel for nuclear weaponry. In collaboration with Dyson, Taylor led the project development team for six years until the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was instituted. After this, they could not test their developments, and the project became unviable.
Late career Taylor's career shifted again after Project Orion. 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. In 1964, he served as the deputy director of the Defense Atomic Support Agency (a branch within the Department of Defense), where he managed the U.S. nuclear weapons inventory. 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. Taylor also worked as a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Princeton University. His focus eventually turned to renewable energy, and In 1980 Taylor started a company called Nova Incorporated, which focused on nuclear energy alternatives as a means of supplementing the energy requirements of the earth. He studied energy capture from sources like cooling ice ponds and heating solar ponds, and eventually turned to energy conservation within buildings. Concerning this work in energy conservation, he founded a not-for-profit organization in Montgomery County, Maryland called Damascus Energy, which focuses on energy efficiency within the home. Taylor also served as the President of the United States' commission concerning the Three Mile Island Accident, working to mitigate issues associated with the reactor meltdown.
Private life Taylor married Caro Arnim in 1948 and had five children in the following years: Clare Hastings, Katherine Robertson, Christopher Taylor, Robert Taylor, and Jeffrey Taylor. Arnim was majoring in Greek at Scripps College, a liberal arts university in Claremont, California, and Taylor would visit her whenever he could. Both Arnim and Taylor were very shy people, and unsure of what the future held. When they first met, they both believed that Taylor would end up as a college professor in a sleepy town, and that Caro would be a librarian. After 44 years of marriage the couple divorced in 1992.
Taylor died on October 28, 2004, of coronary artery disease, at the age of 79.
Legacy