Editing Ted Taylor (physicist) (section)

==Early career==
Prior to Taylor's work at Los Alamos, he had firmly declared himself an opponent of nuclear weapons.<ref name=":0"/> While at the midshipmen school, he received news of the [[Little Boy|atomic bombing of Hiroshima]] by the United States.<ref name=":0"/> He immediately wrote a letter home discussing the perils of [[nuclear proliferation]] and his fears that it would lead to the end of mankind in the event of another war.<ref name=":0"/> He showed some optimism, however, as he felt with proper leadership the nuclear bomb could result in the end of wars altogether.<ref name=":0"/> Either way, he was still very curious about the field of [[nuclear physics]] after his time as an undergraduate.<ref name=":0"/>

Taylor began his work in nuclear physics in 1949 when he was hired to a junior position at [[Los Alamos National Laboratory]] in the Theoretical Physics Division.<ref name=":1"/> He received this job after failing out of the PhD program at Berkeley; [[J. Carson Mark]] connected Taylor with a leader at Los Alamos and recommended him for a position.<ref name=":1"/> Taylor was unsure of the details of his new job at Los Alamos prior to his arrival.<ref name=":1"/> He had only been briefed that his first assignment related to investigations of [[neutron transport|Neutron Diffusion Theory]],<ref name=":1"/> a theoretical analysis of neutron movement within a [[nuclear core]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/neutron-diffusion-theory/|title=Neutron Diffusion Theory - Nuclear Power|website=www.nuclear-power.net|language=en-US|access-date=2018-04-19}}</ref> While at Los Alamos, Taylor's strictly anti-nuclear development beliefs changed.<ref name=":0"/> His theory on preventing nuclear war turned to developing bombs of unprecedented power in an attempt to make people, including governments, so afraid of the consequences of [[nuclear warfare]] that they would not dare engage in this sort of altercation.<ref name=":0"/> He continued in his junior position at Los Alamos until 1953, when he took a temporary leave of absence to obtain his PhD from [[Cornell University|Cornell]].<ref name=":1"/>

Finishing his PhD in 1954, he returned to Los Alamos, and by 1956 he was famous for his work in small-bomb development.<ref name=":1"/> [[Freeman Dyson]] is quoted as saying, "A great part of the small-bomb development of the last five years [at Los Alamos] was directly due to Ted."<ref name=":1"/> Although the majority of the brilliant minds at Los Alamos were focused on developing the [[fusion bomb]], Taylor remained hard at work on improving [[fission bomb]]s.<ref name=":0"/> His innovations in this area of study were so important that he was eventually given the freedom to choose whatever he wanted to study.<ref name=":1"/> Eventually, Taylor's stance on nuclear warfare and weapon development changed, altering his career path. In 1956, Taylor left his position at Los Alamos and went to work for [[General Atomics]].<ref name=":1"/> Here, he developed [[TRIGA]], a reactor that produced isotopes used in the medical field.<ref name=":1"/> In 1958, Taylor began working on [[Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)|Project Orion]], which sought to develop space travel that relied on nuclear energy as the fuel source.<ref name=":1"/> The proposed spacecraft would use a series of nuclear fission reactions as its propellant, thus accelerating space travel while eliminating the Earth's source of fuel for nuclear weaponry.<ref name=":1"/> In collaboration with Dyson, Taylor led the project development team for six years until the [[Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty|1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty]] was instituted.<ref name=":1"/> After this, they could not test their developments and the project became unviable.