He asked his Mother at the age of 5, as she recalls, "What was the world like on Day Number One?"

Years went by and questions added up, from the ways of math and music to the workings of the sun.

Now Tianhui "Michael" Li is 18, and he has built a nuclear reactor to study nuclear fusion.

It was not a fission reactor of the kind that powers a city. His was small. Before he took it apart, it fit on a tabletop with enough room left to pull up a chair.

Michael is a senior at Oregon Episcopal School, a step outside of Portland. His spark and drive and research skills already have won recognition from some of the nation's brightest scientific minds.

Even before all this, Michael Li was busy enough. Others say he displays an extraordinary range of interests and skills. He is known around school as the founder of the school's Geopolitical Society and its Science Bowl team, as a former editor of the school newspaper and as a richly talented classical pianist whose plentiful use of sticky-notes as a learning tool ("relax wrists"; "tone, more tone") makes the room resemble autumn. He likes to learn it all.

"You can just pour it into him," says his piano teacher, Carol Rich of Portland State University," and he won't fill up."

The old science magazines talk about fusion as the modern alchemy, the ancient dream of nearly infinite energy -- the energy source of the stars. In that sense, Michael is kind of an adventurer who wants to make the dream come true, but first he needs to catch the next bus home.

Piano practice awaits, plus mounds of backed-up homework, though he has ways of saving time. One way is by not wasting it on things such as learning to drive.

"I don't have a car," he says, so what would I drive in?"
 

Another way he saves time is by wearing, as he has almost every school day for the past 3 1/2 years, a fresh green sweatshirt and khaki pants. He keeps several in rotation. Some say Einstein did the same with suits.

Michael's capacity for curiosity sparked his latest episodes with nuclear fusion -- the kind of reaction that happens inside the sun. Amid the interest around school, when others ask how he sees himself, he shows that another way to save time is to not spend it talking about himself. Instead, he quotes George Orwell, the author of "1984," and he rattles computer keys to bring up Orwell's words: 

Mostly from the outside in, here is a glimpse of the tale so far:

He arrived from China at the age of 5. He lived with his mother and the TV. He learned his first English from "Sesame Street."

In second grade when someone asked Tianhui his name, he saved explanations by replying, "Michael," a name he pulled from the blue.

By third grade in Portland Public Schools, he ranked in the 99^th percentile of his peers in the Talented and Gifted program.

In the fifth grade, he followed his mother through a "Street of Dreams" open house for freshly built homes, pausing to let a salesman know that the blueprint on display did not reflect the floor plan.

The summer of his eighth-grade graduation, he returned to China for several weeks of mostly sitting with a board on his lap. He held it with his left hand, and he wrote with his right. His grandfather, at his side, began to teach him calculus.

Back in Portland it was time to find a high school, and so his mother, Zaiyi Chen, took him to an open house where he met the physics teacher.

"I love quantum mechanics," the physics teacher says Michael told him first thing, "and I want to build a particle accelerator."

Within minutes it was clear to Bill Lamb, the teacher, that Michael at least had read and understood the popularizations . As he does for each incoming freshman, Lamb scanned the literature for project options that would challenge.

"Let's see if I can find him something to do," Lamb recalls thinking, "that won't kill him."

He devoured whatever Lamb gave him to read. Then he pointed out an article -- a gosh-wow piece from Analog Science Fiction & Fact magazine -- that really caught his eye.

"The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor," the headline said, "And How to Make it Work."

Written and annotated by consultant and science fiction writer Tom Ligon, the story detailed how even a high school student with a safety-minded adviser could build a tabletop reactor.

Fusion power, Michael's readings explained, happens when light atoms, such as those of hydrogen, crack into one another hard enough for their nuclei to fuse and release huge loads of energy. The resulting hot-gas plasma -- sometimes far hotter than the center of the sun -- is more than metals can contain. And decades of experiments to suspend the plasma in magnetic fields have remained only experiments.

Against that, the part that caught Michael's eye was a speculative reason for hope. Although the next generation of magnetic field research reactor might need to be the size of an aircraft carrier, the story said, there remains the potential for cheap and light-weight fusion through a proven but not fully explored device.

Michael learned they called it the "IEC" for short, the "Inertial Electrostatic Confinement device" for long, and the "Farnsworth fusor" for something halfway.

Michael started to scrounge. With help from instructor Lamb and others, he found things in the school science lab, home and secondhand shops. He e-mailed scientists here and there. He ended up with an approximately 4-gallon bell jar about the shape of an artillery shell, a vacuum-pump motor to suck the air out before bleeding gases in, a 15,000-volt transformer typically used for the kind of neon sign that backlights bars with "Bud," and clumps of stainless-steel wire that he learned to spotweld into a couple of wire-mesh spheres the size of grapefruits. These spheres fitted -- one within the other -- into the bell jar.

Thus powered by the neon-sign transformer, the spheres would serve as the wire-mesh cradle for potential nuclear fusion.

The time had come to try his personal IEC. He was only a freshman. Yet he had that pioneering spirit -- "Fusion technology," he would later write, "has been the holy grail of applied physics research for the last half century" -- so it made sense for him to flip the switch and power up. The wire mesh of his IEC soon resembled melting cheese.

Yet he had spotted the glow of the plasma gases before the stainless steel gave way, and that had been his first-step goal.

He was ready to go for fusion, but then he hit the wall.

"I can't do the math," he told Lamb.

Lamb replied that Michael could do the project anyway, but that if he truly wanted to describe the workings of the sun and those of his IEC, then he needed to learn differential equations.

"There's an old saying," Lamb tells students, "that 'there's no royal road to mathematics.' No matter how good you are, you eventually reach that point where your talent and intuition don't carry you forward. That's where most people quit."

Michael pushed for the math, so Lamb hooked him up with a theoretical physicist, another student's father who volunteered to help.

Sophomore year was a test of will. Project time evaporated as he hunted for a bigger power supply, a better vacuum system and things that would not melt.

His mother drove him here and there on evenings and weekends. By the start of his junior year, he was well into meetings with a mentor who could finally help it happen -- Doug Jones, an Aloha consultant who specializes in atomic identification techniques. As Michael later wrote, Jones' basement might resemble the Houston command center in the movie "Apollo 13."

The first time Michael attempted fusion there, a tongue of flame and a snapping arc saluted the power blowing out.

He retooled, and three months later they tried again.

Michael pumped air out of the vacuum chamber, bled deuterium in, powered up and waited.

They heard the chirping start. It was the neutron detector. It chirped at the rate, as Michael later reported, of 1,200 counts a minute.

That meant Michael had gone nuclear. It marked the start of Chapter Two: He was ready to test theory. Theory says IEC fusion will not have a single spot in the center where fusion happens, but rather several layers within the plasma of superheated gases. Michael concluded that knowing exactly what happens within the glow, and where, would be another step toward the grail of creating a useful power source.

His next step was NASA. Last summer, he landed a seven-week internship at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Propulsion Research Center at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

He knew that mainstream science did not consider the IEC a likely source of commercial power-producing fusion. Yet he found niches that remained unexplored.

"He had an unusual amount of knowledge and understanding of technical things," recalls Chris Dobson, a NASA scientist investigating plasma as a possible propellant for interstellar flight. "And his energy -- the guy goes full-tilt all the time."

When Michael returned to school and his Southwest Portland home last fall, he produced a report -- "Three Year Study of Inertial Electrostatic Confinement."

Oregon Episcopal School recommended that he enter it in a national contest.

A few weeks later, the school received notice that of nearly 1,600 students around the nation, he was among the top 300.

Two weeks after that, he learned he was one of 40 finalists.

He was invited, along with the others, to appear for a week of interviews by a dozen judges in Washington, D.C.

Lamb took him to Portland State University and the University of Oregon for practice grilling by experts in the field.

Last month, his mother put him on the flight to Washington, D.C.

He arrived at the Science Talent Search, sponsored by Intel and promoted as the nation's oldest and most prestigious competition for budding scientists.

"The Junior Nobel Prize," some like to call it.

Finalists stayed in the Mayflower Hotel, each attending four interviews before separate three-judge panels.

Projects ranged from 18-year-old Naveen Sinha's "Bubble-based Resonance-Doppler Technique of Liquid Characterization" to 17-year-old Emma Schmidgall's "Inferring Surface Lattice Structure from Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Measurements of the High-temperature Superconductor Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu08+d."

Such projects had brought them to the door, but questions hardly touched on those. Judges instead looked for well-rounded brilliance, and they asked the kinds of questions that had no single answers. The idea was to spot research ability, creative thinking and the ability to apply science to the real world. They were hunting for potential Nobel winners for the coming generation.

Before a black-tie crowd of hundreds, a speaker read the winners' names.

Out of 1,581 original contestants, Michael made the top three.

"In second place, and the recipient of a $75,000 scholarship -- from Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, Oregon," the speaker said, "Tianhui 'Michael' Li."

First place, and a $100,000 scholarship, went to Jamie Rubin, 16, of Fort Myers, Fla., who found a new way of treating a kind of infection.

Michael's project, competition officials said, had represented a radically different and significantly less-expensive way of controlling nuclear fusion than conventional methods.

He was the only finalist from the Pacific Northwest.

His picture appeared in national Chinese-language newspapers.

Later, on the phone, the chairman of the 12-person judging committee, Dr. Andrew Yeager, director of the stem cell transplantation program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said Michael had struck him as "a real sparkler -- engaging, clearly bright, wonderfully interactive."

Bill Lamb, who has taught three decades at high school and college level, said he would rank Michael among his top half-dozen students over all those years.

"The thing you have to realize is what makes him so special," Lamb said, "It's not that he's that smart, though he's that smart. The kid just works as hard as anybody I've ever seen."

Asked for a one-minute summary of the state of the world during the past two decades in terms of science, politics, religion and economics, he replies that he is only 18.

Philosophers might imagine it comes down to just being born, then working hard.

Others might see it as the fusion of mathematics and music, the sense of seeing inside a star.

As for the rest, including Michael Li, evidence shows it also has something to do with having fun.

By SPENCER HEINZ
The Sunday Oregonian
April 20, 2003
503-221-8072
spencerheinz@news.oregonian.com

Index of Simply Sharing

Links to Share