13-year-old Aidan Dwyer whose parents had been hoping to install solar panels on their Long Island house, but their yard was too small and their roof wasn’t suitable. There was, however, enough room for a tree. Perhaps, Aidan postulated, trees arranged their branches to improve the collection of sunlight. If he used the Fibonacci sequence to imitate that design with solar panels replacing leaves, maybe the structure could fit his family’s limited space, look pretty—and power the house. He did chores to earn the money to buy about $75 worth of materials. With help from his father—and after many mistakes—Aidan ended up with two models: a traditional flat-panel array and a tree-shaped solar collector designed to mimic the branch sequence of an oak tree. Over the course of months he compared measurements. To his delight, the tree structure’s numbers were higher.
He submitted the results to the Young Naturalist Awards, a national contest run by the American Museum of Natural History. Of 700 entries, his was picked as one of 12 winners. As the report went viral, attacked and championed in hundreds of comments, museum officials became worried. “We do think it’s really important that information that we put forth is scientifically accurate,” said Rosamond Kinzler, senior director of science education at the museum. They were also concerned for Aidan, she said.
“It looks like there is some validity to what he’s come up with. But even if there wasn’t any validity, I wanted to give this young man the opportunity to sort of say, ‘Here’s what I learned and here’s what I did,'” said Andrew Zolli, the executive director of PopTech, a nonprofit organization focused on innovation. He has been invited to address 300 undergraduate engineering students at New York University in the spring. He has filed a provisional patent application for his research. He has had, and declined, friend requests on Facebook from venture capitalists.
“Our mandate is to look for great minds, talents, technology innovations around the world,” said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the CEO of Masdar, a company owned by the Abu Dhabi government that founded and hosts the conference. “We need thousands of Aidans to help transform the way we produce and consume energy.”
Many people on the Web called the Long Island teenager a “genius” who had achieved a true “breakthrough” in solar power. Others praised him for proving that nature’s own designs are superior to man’s.
But there was one little problem: To prove his hypothesis, Aidan had measured the wrong thing. As readers figured out the mistake, the Internet went supernova. Commenters and bloggers attacked Aidan with vitriol usually saved for political enemies and the Kardashians. Blogs decried his experiment as “bad science” and “impossible nonsense.” Someone called him “an alien—a cool one, though.” Aidan and his family watched in amazement as strangers around the world debated his intelligence and abilities, as well as his opinion of subjects generally beyond the scope of a suburban boy his age: politics, evolution and the state of modern society, for example. He got some constructive advice, said Aidan’s mother, Maureen. “Then there were people who were just “Haters,” Aidan chimed in with a grin.
Categories: Environment, Internet, North America, Science and Technology, United States