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.
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