Editing Ted Taylor (physicist) (section)

==Early life==
Ted Taylor was born in [[Mexico City]], Mexico, on July 11, 1925.<ref name=":0"/> His mother and father were both Americans. His mother, Barbara Southworth Howland Taylor, held a PhD in [[Mexican literature]] from the [[National Autonomous University of Mexico|Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México]],<ref>{{cite web|url=http://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w61d86g2|title=Taylor, Barbara Howland @ SNAC|website=snaccooperative.org|access-date=2018-04-19}}</ref> and his father, Walter Clyde Taylor, was the director of a [[YMCA]] in Mexico City.<ref name=":0"/> Before marrying in 1922, his father had been a widower with three sons and his mother a widow with a son of her own.<ref name=":0"/> Both of his maternal grandparents were [[Congregational church|Congregationalist]] [[missionary|missionaries]] in [[Guadalajara]]. Taylor grew up in a house without electricity in the Atlixo 13 neighborhood of [[Cuernavaca]].<ref name=":0"/> His upbringing was quiet and religious, and his home filled with books, mainly atlases and geographies, which he would read by candlelight.<ref name=":0"/> This interest followed him into adulthood.<ref name=":0"/>

Taylor showed an early interest in chemistry, specifically [[pyrotechnics]], when he received a chemistry set at the age of ten.<ref name=":1" /> 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.<ref name=":0" /> These allowed him to conduct his own experiments.<ref name=":0" /> He also often read through the 1913 [[New International Encyclopedia]], which contained extensive chemistry, for new concoctions to make.<ref name=":0" /> These included sleeping drugs, small explosives, [[nitrocellulose|guncotton]], [[precipitate]]s, and many more.<ref name=":0" /> His mother was extremely tolerant of his experimentation but prohibited any experiments that involved [[nitroglycerin]].<ref name=":0" />

Growing up, Taylor also showed an interest in [[cue sports|billiards]]. In the afternoons after school he played billiards for almost ten hours a week.<ref name=":0"/> He would recall this early interest as his introduction to the mechanics of collisions, relating it to his later work in [[particle physics]].<ref name=":0"/> The behavior of the interacting balls on the table and their [[elastic collision]]s within the confining framework of the reflector cushions helped him to conceptualize the difficult abstractions of cross sections, neutron scattering, and fission chain reactions.<ref name=":0"/>

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.<ref name=":0" /> Later, while completing his PhD at Cornell, he noted that while his [[theoretical physics|theoretical physicist]] peers embraced the classical music piped into their rooms, their [[experimental physics|experimentalist]] counterparts would uniformly shut the system off.<ref name=":0"/>

Taylor attended the [[ASF Mexico|American School]] in Mexico City from elementary school through high school.<ref name=":1" /> A gifted student, he finished the fourth through sixth grades in one year.<ref name=":1" /> Being an accelerated student, Taylor found himself three years younger than his friends as he entered his teens.<ref name=":0" /> Taylor graduated early from high school in 1941 at the age of 15.<ref name=":1" /> Not yet meeting the age requirements for American universities, he then attended the [[Phillips Exeter Academy|Exeter Academy]] in New Hampshire for one year,<ref name=":1" /> where he took Modern Physics from Elbert P. Little.<ref name=":0" /> 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.<ref name=":1" /> He quickly brushed this failure off, and soon confirmed that he wanted to be a physicist.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /> Apart from education, he also developed an interest in [[discus throw|throwing discus]] at Exeter.<ref name=":0" /> This interest continued into his college career, as he continued to throw discus at Caltech.<ref name=":0" />

He enrolled at the [[California Institute of Technology]] in 1942 and then spent his second and third years in the [[V-12 Navy College Training Program|Navy V-12 program]].<ref name=":1" /> This accelerated his schooling and he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Caltech in 1945 at age nineteen.<ref name=":0" />

After graduation, he attended the [[United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School|midshipman school]] at [[Throggs Neck|Throgs Neck]], in the Bronx, New York, for one year to fulfill his naval [[active duty]] requirement.<ref name=":1" /> He was discharged in mid-1946, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of [[Lieutenant (junior grade)|lieutenant]].<ref name=":0" />

He then enrolled in a graduate program in [[theoretical physics]] at the [[University of California, Berkeley|University of California at Berkeley]], while also working part-time at the [[Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory|Berkeley Radiation laboratory]], mainly on the [[cyclotron]] and a beta-ray spectrograph.<ref name=":0" /> 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.<ref name=":0" />

Taylor married Caro Arnim in 1948 and had five children in the following years: Clare Hastings, Katherine Robertson, Christopher Taylor, Robert Taylor, and Jeffrey Taylor.<ref name=":2">{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/us/theodore-taylor-a-designer-of-abombs-who-turned-against-them-dies-at-79.html|title=Theodore Taylor, a Designer of A-Bombs Who Turned Against Them, Dies at 79|last=Fox|first=Margalit|date=2004-11-05|work=The New York Times|access-date=2018-04-19|language=en-US|issn=0362-4331}}</ref> Arnim was majoring in Greek at [[Scripps College]], a liberal arts university in [[Claremont, California]], and Taylor would visit her whenever he could.<ref name=":0" /> Both Arnim and Taylor were very shy people, and unsure of what the future held.<ref name=":0" /> When they first met they both believed that Taylor would end up as a college professor in a sleepy town, and that Caro would be a librarian.<ref name=":0" /> After 44 years of marriage the couple divorced in 1992.<ref name=":2" />

Taylor died on October 28, 2004, of coronary artery disease, at the age of 79.<ref name="washingtonpost-obituary">{{cite news|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17358-2004Nov1.html|title=Theodore Taylor Dies; Tried To Redirect Nuclear Power|newspaper=Washington Post|date=2004-11-02|access-date=2021-06-01 |first=Joe |last=Holley}}</ref>