User:RAP1985/sandbox

Ted Taylor was born in Mexico City, Mexico on July 11th, 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 [2] His father had been a widower and with three sons. He then married Barbara in 1922, who was a widow with a son of her own. Ted had four older half brothers, and they were so old that we was essentially raised as an only child. Additionally, both of his maternal grandparents were congregationalist missionaries in Guadalajara. Furthermore, his home was quiet and religious. Ted grew up in a house in Cuernavaca which had no electricity and was on the street corner of Atlixco 13. His home was filled with literature, mainly atlases and geographies, which he would read by candlelight. This habituation followed him into his adulthood, never quite adapting to the societal standards for electricity. Taylor showed interest in chemistry, specifically pyrotechnics, when he received a chemistry set at the age of ten [2]. This fascination was enhanced when Atlixco 13 added a chemistry laboratory that served a small and exclusive university. Through the lab Ted had access to items from local druggists that he otherwise would not have readily available. These items included corrosive chemicals, explosive chemicals, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid, which allowed him to conduct his own experiments. Taylor often looked at the 1913 New International Encyclopedia, which contained extensive chemistry, for new mixtures to make. These included sleeping drugs, small explosives, guncotton, precipitates, and many more. His mother was extremely tolerant of his experimentation however, she prohibited any experiments that involved nitroglycerin. He attended the American School in Mexico City from elementary school through high school [1]. Taylor had a passion for music and in the mornings before school he would quietly sit for an hour and listen to his favorite songs. He was a gifted student and finished the fourth through sixth grades in one year [1]. Being an accelerated student, Taylor found himself three years younger than all of his friends as he emerged into his teens. Taylor graduated early from high school in 1941 at the age of 15 [1]. After graduation he left Mexico to attend the Exeter Academy, located in New Hampshire, for one year while he waited to meet the age requirements for universities in America [1]. While at the Academy he developed an interest in physics, though he displayed poor academic performance in his courses [1]. At Exeter he took Modern Physics which was taught my Elbert P. Little, a teacher who was greatly admired at the university. Elbert P. Little gave Ted a letter grade D on his final winter term examination, however he quickly brushed this failure off. Shortly after he 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 the university in 1945 at just nineteen years old. [1]. After graduation, he attended the midshipman school at Throgs Neck, in Bronx, New York for one year to fulfill his naval active duty requirement [1]. By the end of his time in the Navy he had received the status of Junior Grade Lieutenant. The Navy let him out in the summer of 1946 and he enrolled in the graduate program in theoretical physics at the University of California at Berkeley. During his graduate schooling Ted worked part time at 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. After his disqualification, Ted was offered a position at Los Alamos by J. Carson Mark. As he and his wife Caro packed and left Berkeley, Taylor was unsure of what his work would be in Los Alamos. To his best understanding he was to be “in neutron-diffusion theory.” In 1949, at twenty-four years of age, Ted was shown his desk at Los Alamos and was immediately given drawings of uranium and plutonium bombs.

Taylor married Caro Armin in 1948 and had five children in the following years- Clare Hastings, Katherine Robertson, Christopher Taylor, Robert Taylor, and Jeffrey Taylor [1]. Caro Armin was majoring in Greek at Scripps College, a Liberal Arts University in Claremont California. The drive from the California Institute of Technology was only around an hour, so Taylor went down to visit her whenever he could. Both Caro and Taylor were very shy people, and unsure of what the future held. When they first met they both believed that Ted would be a college professor in a sleepy town, and that Caro would be a librarian. They felt that these professions in a small college town was their speed. After 44 years of marriage the couple divorced in 1992 [1].

Taylor eventually gained acceptance into a physics PhD program at the University of Cornell in 1953 and completed the program in 1954 [1]. At Cornell, Ted maintained his childhood passion for music and had his room equipped with a speaker system. This was uncommon among his experimentalist physicist peers, but his theoretical physicists embraced the music. While at Cornell Taylor picked up the hobby of billiards, and in the afternoons after school he played billiards for almost ten hours a week. He believed that billiards related to particle physics; of capture cross-sections and neutron scattering, of infinite reflectors and fast-neutron-induced fission chain reaction. He believed that the game helped him learn this better. The behavior of the interacting balls on the table, and the nature of their elastic collisions, all within the confinding framework of the reflector cushions.