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WY Teen Cut From Science Fair For Entering Too Many
An anonymous reader writes " A Wyoming high school student who built a nuclear reactor in his dad's garage was disqualified from the International Science and Engineering Fair this month on a technicality.' His crime: competing in too many science fairs."
I've heard of several teens building nuclear reactors in their garages it seems. How are they accomplishing this, when foreign states seem to have such difficulty?
He won't lose any high school credit because he wasn't able to compete in his nth science fair. But just think how good his resume after college will read when it says that he was disqualified because he entered too many science fairs in high school.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Maybe he ought to share with Lawrence Livermore (https://www.llnl.gov/) and the ITER project (http://www.iter.org/).
People who take an "unusual" interest in knowing things are dangerous.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Our society encourages people who refuse to learn or take responsibility for their education or that of their children, by throwing money to them every chance we can.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
... if the faculty could figure how to get this kid to coach others.
Regardless, it does seem like he'll have a bright future if he's that motivated.
"To stop the terrorists."
Its only 'fair'.. to all the other kids.
But hey, he's wearing a lab coat. Can't he go on TV to sell Viagra?
We can achieve fusion without too much trouble. The elusive white whale so far has been a sustainable fusion reaction that puts out more energy than you have to put into it.
The Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor is decades old, relatively easy to build (I know someone who built one in his garage), available commercially (as a neutron source) and is generally considered to be not a candidate for fusion power.
Given that the name of the student is Conrad Farnsworth, I have to wonder if there is a family connection, but the article does not go into that.
I made a stink bomb in chemistry class, and not only did I get banned, I also got the black plimsoll across my backside! (c. 1973).
We can achieve fusion without too much trouble. The elusive white whale so far has been a sustainable fusion reaction that puts out more energy than you have to put into it.
Details, details...
"He is one of only 15 high school students in the world to successfully achieve fusion."
Really? Wow.
I predict many job offers for this individual.
Farnsworth said: "I don't want to live on this planet anymore!"
The summary makes it look like he is being held back by bureaucracy, while he's really just using it. He entered ONE project in many fairs. Each of these fairs were lateral contests in a larger competition. Effectively he entered multiple times in the over-all road to the International Fair.
What he did would be like a NCAA team losing in March Madness multiple times, only to move position in the bracket, to try again on each defeat. Sorry, I couldn't think of a car analogy.
The kid was taking the same project to different fairs after failing to qualify. Nothing is stopping him from doing Science. He was more interested in being successful. He wasn't doing this so he could "do more science". He was doing it so he could basically enter more times, giving him an unfair advantage. Say I ran a science fair for a bunch of inner city kids. They worked really hard on their projects. When time for judging comes up, some AP, college-bound kid with a rich ( anything white-collar, to these inner city kids) dad comes in with his garage-built project. He didn't qualify in his home town, but blows these kids out of the water. I would be livid.
However, by seeing the way he plays ball, we know he will fit right in in Academia.
Are you stupid? are all of you?
Fusion in various forms has been achieved for decades!
A controlled, commercial grade reactor is another issue.
Please read more before making such absurd comments
A Farnsworth Fusor is a fusion reactor and can be built at home with a little electrical engineering prowess. Someone needs to do some research before making claims that it can't be done. The problem with that device is that the containment is too good. It's not possible to add fuel once the reaction is started and the reaction produces less energy than is required to start it.
If teleportation of protons (ionized hydrogen, not photons) becomes practical, it may achieve breakeven.
Fusion is "easy". Sustained fusion is difficult.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Sadly, WY has just one University. It's about four hours away from Newcastle where he lives. There are only seven community colleges. None of them are nearby either - the closest are two to three hours away from him. Even to Rapid City, SD, it's an hour and 1/2.
So, while online options might be available, depending on bandwidth to the town of 3,500 people, signing up for evening classes is largely out of the question.
From article: "Conrad Farnsworth is the first person in Wyoming to build a nuclear fusion reactor. He is one of only 15 high school students in the world to successfully achieve fusion.
This is nonsense. Back in the 1970s, about a half dozen of my friends built them (each with slightly different designs, using everything from modified electron guns of old B&W tv sets to cascade flyback transformer accelerator-collider designs. We were poor, and used whatever we could find or build. Sure, we didn't get anywhere near break-even, but we got enough neutrons that we started being paranoid and built paraffin shielding for the better versions). I'm sure we weren't doing anything that other people elsewhere weren't also doing.
And this was in the backwaters of Arkansas, before the internet, going to a school that didn't even have a decent library or teachers that had a clue about what we were doing. If we were doing it on our own in middle school there, the number of people doing it somewhere else (with way more money, fancier schools with more science classes and better equipped labs, better paid teachers, etc.) has to be a lot higher than 15.
Perhaps there are only 15 self-promoting extroverted kids among the many doing this sort of thing who would think their efforts are deserving of media attention, but the number of people doing these sorts of experiments has to be orders of magnitude higher than that.
From article: "Conrad Farnsworth is the first person in Wyoming to build a nuclear fusion reactor. He is one of only 15 high school students in the world to successfully achieve fusion. He made it using parts he ordered online, traded with other fusioneers and created himself."
So this and 15 other high school students have been able to achieve what no other scientist in the world has been able to achieve to date? Hmmm.
The article doesn't say that only 15 high schoolers have been able to do this and no other scientists have. OTOH, it is pretty impressive that some high schoolers have been able to achieve what professional scientists have by spending a fraction of the cost on education and materials. These kids, wherever they may be in the world are similar to the kids that were building rockets at the dawn of the space age or breadboard computers prior to the PC.
If that capability isn't enough to win a science fair, I wonder what did win?
> If teleportation of protons (ionized hydrogen, not photons) becomes practical, it may achieve break-even
It is extremely unlikely that any non-equilibrum reactor will ever reach break even. This includes the fusor, Forward's design, focus fusion, and many other designs. The bremsstrahlung is simply too great for any realistically sized reactor to stop thermal transport out of the core more rapidly than the reaction rate can replace it.
Well, we also don't have trouble creating fusion reactions that put out *far* more energy than we put in to them.
The problem is doing anything useful with that energy other than making a really big boom.
This name coincidence is really cool, and he built a fusion device, I would call it "take shelter, buy a gun and much canned food" the DOOMSDAY DEVICE is on the rise!
No. Exactly this. I'm referring to propping oneself up on the work of others; worrying more about getting grants and being published in Journals. I didn't say he would excel, but he sure is cut out for it.
That's the kid's own website, right?
No, it's not. You may have been confused because his name is Farnsworth, which isn't a particularly common name; as another poster said, it would be interesting to know if there's a family connection with the Farnsworth the fusor is named for. Fusor.net, AFAICT, is a site run by and for fusor hobbyists, people who like to tinker with the kind of machines this kid built.
And for those who are saying "Oh, he just downloaded some tutorials off the net"--well, if you could or would have done something like that as a teenager, good for you, but most people couldn't or wouldn't. It's not groundbreaking research, but putting together a working fusor is a pretty neat accomplishment for a high-school kid.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If a reactor can't win on the first try what will? I haven't followed these kid shows in a long time but I wonder what won over this in the show he lost in.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
This is clearly Rodney McKay starving for attention and compliments. Hasn't he been accosted by the FBI about his job in the Stargate program yet?
I concur. Very little "science" is done here. The kid cobbled together a cookbook "fission" reactor and then hawked it until he won somewhere. The disregard for anything but winning, the derivative nature of the work, the hurt feeling caused by "the man keeping him down" all reek of self promotion and playing the system show me an excellent and lucrative future in the status quo. But that is the whole point, isn't it?
Where do we go from here
Almost anything is a nuclear reactor if you play with the definition. There are isotopes decaying in my thumb right now. It's a nuclear reactor.
But it's not a fusion reactor. If you want to trivialize what the kid did, at least compare apples to apples.
It takes absolutely no talent to waste power like this. Well, perhaps it does, to use so much power while getting so little useful result.
Think about carefully next time you're driving down the road in a vehicle that gets around 12% effeciency from the gasoline it burns.
I'll think about that, and I'll think about the fact it could probably be 30% more efficient than that, if it wasn't for all the crap additives like ethanol and MTBE they are stuffing into it to keep cars manufactured prior to 1981 (prior years did not have oxygen sensors to control fuel mixture) from polluting.
Then I'll wonder exactly how many pre-1981 cars are actually still on the road, and I'll wonder about the percentage of total fuel usage by all cars which is accounted for by pre-1981 cars.
Then I'll start in again with my sneaking suspicion that the reformulation lobbying by Chevron in California is less about a concern for pollution, and more about a concern for Chevron to have their markets there protected from imports from out of state refineries unable to keep up with California's frequently changing reformulation requirements. You know, for the children, not so that they can have a higher profit margin due to sole-sourcing or anything.
I just caught this on AP and decided to check out the source. Something does not make sense in the way this story was crafted by the author. There are rules of engagement in EVERY competition (sports, spelling bees, etc) and how then can this kid (or worse, the kid's teacher), who claims to have been preparing for this event for years not know them??? The facts (not the writer's spin, but the facts) appear to be that this kid tried in one fair and failed to advance, so he then jumped into another state's fair to get around this first failure. This is cheating, plain and simple. What is this lesson teaching him about ethics and morality here? We should all be ashamed. The loss of ethics and honesty here is especially critical, in fact, of paramount importance, when we are talking about science teachers and future scientists, since we have to trust their honesty above all else. If they cheat, everyone loses. It is a shame, then, that the administrators at UW rushed to decide to throw the state director, their subordinate, under the bus, saying her actions were not condoned by them and she acted outside her authority. It is THEIR heads that should roll, not the state director's who was only doing what they were paid to do. If you don't believe me, think about this -- what if this kid ended up winning and the international science fair officials found out later that he was ineligible because of the rules of the International Science Fair Association, and it was later learned that the state director knew he was ineligible but kept her mouth shut. Do you think the UW administrators would not still fire her? Certainly they would. The actions of the UW administrators plainly reveal that they are doing everything they can to protect their own jobs and keep the public's eye off them. Truth, ethics, and morality are the true victems here, not this kid who regrettably cheated. His teacher should be fired as well.
Are you stupid? are all of you?
Welcome to the H. L. Mencken principle...
No, he's a liar and cheater and won't fit into scientific academia, but but he will prosper in University administration.
"disqualified from the International Science and Engineering Fair"
I'll show you! ...I'LL SHOW YOU ALL!!!!!
Muahahahahaha...
He entered many fairs? The article I read mentioned two, Wyoming State Fair and one for South Dakota. It's something his school has been doing for at least a few years as they live so near the border.
I wouldn't exactly call entering two fairs that were geographically very close to the school gaming the system.
Easy eh? Work on it and get back to me.
Here you go,
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'd be very interested to know a) why this kid didn't advance in his home state and b) why other kids did? Was the judging really objective or was there some bias somewhere? Did the judges base their decision on criteria other than real science? I don't think we've heard the whole story here.
But let's consider this: you write a research paper and submit it to one peer-review journal. They reject it. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to submit it to other journals? What if it turns out that your paper totally blows away popular theory and the rejection was simply a case of the reviewers sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalalalala...we're not listening to you..."?
For my own part, I do understand what it means to get screwed because somebody gamed the system. In my senior year in undergrad engineering, I was up for best senior project. A fellow student also entered and won. Her secret weapon turned out to be the fact that her boyfriend, who was a student at MIT with all the resources of such a place at his fingertips, was the one who did all the work. Everyone in the class told me that I got screwed. Was I pissed? Sure. The bitch got a special piece of paper at graduation. Where is she now? Who knows. Me, I started two successful businesses. The real lesson here is not to allow someone else determine your fate. Do your own thing and the market will decide if your efforts should be rewarded. Of course I say this and yet people make a crapload of money on shamwows. Doing your own thing doesn't necessarily mean it must be technically/scientifically brilliant.
I wouldn't exactly call entering two fairs that were geographically very close to the school gaming the system.
How is getting to have twice as many chances to enter as all the other kids not gaming the system? How does the distance enter into it? How far apart do the two fairs have to be for it to stop being fair?
~Idarubicin
It wasn't a "technicality." It was a rule, and even a fairly reasonable one.
So he was disqualified for not following the rules, then tried to get around that by playing the ever-popular "Duh, I didn't know the rules..." card. The one that always works with police and courts. Any fault lies with him, his parents, or his advisors. One of them should have had the sense to check it out.
Three Squirrels
Both TFS and TFA make it sound like the kid competed in LOTS of events, and kept entering until he won. He did no such thing. He competed in two events. One a regional, the other a state. Just like the rules said he could. He just entered the state one first. Because he qualified from the regional to the international, it doesn't even sound like it is a case of regional qualifies for state which qualifies for international. Especially since he went straight to the state, and then qualified from the regional. The rule allows for two fairs, he went to two fairs. It just happened that one of the regional fairs, was in a different state (yet closer than apparently regional in his home state)
If you can qualify for the international straight from a regional, then the rule is stupid.
Doomsday device. It's a weird coincidence that his name is Farnsworth. Now it would be really weird if it were Wernstrom.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
No. Exactly this. I'm referring to propping oneself up on the work of others;
Maybe you should have actually read the article.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You speak as if "all the other kids" are only allowed to enter one fair. You are wrong. They can all enter at least two fairs.
The only issue is that this kid entered a regional fair after he entered a state level fair. It didn't matter if he placed in one or the other, or both. The only issue is the timing of a regional fair was later in the year than the state fair.
Because that is the only reason he was disqualified, the people in charge are planing to rewrite the rule to take these circumstances into account.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I believe that the point is that this kid is so into science that he was penalized for actually using his mind and entering science fairs. A lot of them. Guess they think he should be on the street corner selling or doing drugs instead
I wonder if this is the same brilliant kid that gave the Ted talk a while ago on a break through of nuke tech
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Impossible. Liberals have no balls.
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This difference in attitude runs throughout each religion, and illustrates a source of world problems today.
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