Brilliant Young Man Learns His First Real Lesson

While on a road trip to Helena this weekend, I read a news story about a teenager who had managed to construct a fusion reactor in his garage. This is an astounding achievement, especially for a young man still in high school. For those of you who don't understand, nuclear fusion is when the nuclei of two light atoms (typically hydrogen, the lightest ) are joined to create heavier elements. This is rather difficult to accomplish because the positive charge of the protons in each nucleus repels each other, requiring a tremendous amount of force to overcome it and drive the nuclei together, which in turn releases a tremendous amount of energy. Such fusion occurs naturally in stars because they are so massive that their own gravity squeezes the nuclei together. A garage is a different story. Moreover, fusion is the holy grail of energy production because it is clean and leaves no radioactive waste (unlike the fission featured in nuclear reactors, which splits the nuclei of heavy elements and leaves quite a mess behind).  The problem is that modern science requires so much energy to create fusion that the yield is a net loss. Perhaps the young man's experiment could chart a path to cheap and clean energy production in the future. Regardless, he deserves to be celebrated.

However, the remainder of the news article promptly reminded me of the world we inhabit: the International Science and Engineering Fair disqualified the young man from competing, stating that he had competed in too many science fairs already. I guarantee you this is a pretext to exclude someone who makes everyone else's tinkerings with wind farms, ethanol, and solar panels look foolish by comparison. Perhaps some benefactor has a child enrolled in the competition. Perhaps these "scientists" don't want their government plunder funding revealed as an abject waste of time. Or perhaps they think it's unfair that a young man should achieve great things. It could be any or all of them. 

The young man expressed anger and confusion of a sort that I am all too familiar with, but he has learned a valuable lesson about excellence -- it alienates the vast majority of people. If he continues down this path, he will have a lonely and difficult life, but he will be true to himself and may give the world something it has never seen. Surely the world will gladly snatch his achievements for itself and express little or no gratitude for it.  Yet the world will never comprehend that excellent people ultimately do what they do for themselves and their love of truth and beauty, not for you.