Before he was old enough to drive, a 14-year-old talked a university physics department into lending him a sub-basement — the machine he assembled there fused atoms in a plasma hotter than the sun's c

When an elite physicist's refusal only delayed the inevitable, a teenager's obsession with nuclear fusion would rewrite what's possible in a basement laboratory.

The first physicist Taylor Wilson pitched turned him down flat. Friedwardt Winterberg, an eminent professor at the University of Nevada, Reno who had studied under Werner Heisenberg, listened to the 13-year-old explain that he intended to build a fusion reactor and erupted. You want to play with tens of thousands of volts and deadly X-rays? The project, he thundered, was too hazardous for most doctoral candidates. Go learn calculus first.

Taylor’s parents were quietly relieved. Their relief did not last, because down the corridor from Winterberg’s office were two other physicists, and one of them said yes.