Jackson Oswalt turned his attention to science after having an ‘epiphany’ when he was a tween
Can you remember what you were doing when you were 12 years old?
While I was eagerly counting down the days until Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie premiered and spending my nights glued to the Wii, Jackson Oswalt from Memphis, Tennessee, had a very different kind of childhood.
At just 12 years old, while most kids were mastering video game levels, Jackson had a sudden epiphany—one that would change his life forever.
According to Guinness World Records, Jackson had a revelation that most kids his age wouldn’t even consider.
“I realized that I could be the absolute best at whatever video game, but in the end, it still wouldn’t mean much. In the grand scheme of things, video games had no role to play. So, I changed my ways.”
But instead of shifting his focus to comic books or movies like most preteens, Jackson turned to something far more ambitious—science. To him, it was the closest thing to video games in real life.
Fascinated by nuclear fusion, he devoured YouTube videos and researched the materials necessary to replicate the process himself. In case you weren’t a science prodigy at 12, nuclear fusion is the reaction that powers the sun—fusing atomic nuclei under extreme heat and pressure to release energy.
Determined to make it happen, Jackson laid out his plan step by step, even recalling on Twitter last year:
“The first step was to build a ‘demo fusor’—a device that creates plasma but doesn’t achieve fusion. This required a vacuum chamber, a vacuum pump, and a neon sign transformer with a homemade AC-DC converter.”
He barely got it working the night before his school’s science fair, joking that in hindsight, it was amazing they even let him walk in the door with it.
After a year of testing, Jackson finally pulled off what no other kid had done before. On the day before his 13th birthday, his experiment was officially verified by Fusor.net, making him the youngest person in history to achieve nuclear fusion.
That alone is mind-blowing—but his story didn’t end there.
One Saturday morning, Jackson was met with an unexpected surprise: two FBI agents standing at his door.
When the FBI agents caught wind of Jackson’s impressive achievement, they paid him a visit—geiger counters in hand. Their mission? To make sure his nuclear fusion experiments hadn’t accidentally unleashed any dangerous radiation. Thankfully, after a thorough sweep of the house, they found no cause for alarm.
“Fortunately, I remained a free man,” Jackson joked, reflecting on the tense yet ultimately uneventful encounter.
Fast forward seven years since his world-changing fusion achievement, and Jackson has shifted his focus to cutting-edge technology. Now, he’s channeling his genius into the realm of AI, contributing to research and hardware development at Midjourney—a leader in the field. His journey from science prodigy to AI innovator proves that the sky’s the limit for this young trailblazer.
