Richard Garwin

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Richard Garwin (1980)

Richard Lawrence Garwin (born April 19, 1928 in Cleveland , Ohio ) is an American experimental physicist and important scientific advisor to the US government .

Life

Garwin's father was an electrical engineer and worked as a teacher at a technical school and as a projectionist in the evenings. He soon repaired projection equipment, amplifiers and loudspeakers, with help from his son, who was an electronics hobbyist and expert from an early age. Garwin studied from the age of 16 at the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland ( Bachelor 1947), where he worked as a projectionist at night, and went to the University of Chicago , where Enrico Fermi had a large group of brilliant (graduate) students around him, many still with experiences from the Manhattan Project of the war years (in Chicago the first nuclear reactor became critical). Garwin achieved top marks in the notoriously difficult examinations for admission to the Graduate Program. At Fermi he developed computers (for quantum mechanical calculations) and a coincidence detector and received his doctorate in 1949, when he was only 21 years old. Garwin then spent three years in Chicago (including developing bladder chambers ) before going to the IBM laboratories in 1952 . One motive was that he did not like working in large groups of experimenters, which were already beginning to dominate accelerator physics at that time. IBM allowed him a third of his time to devote himself to national defense issues. He stayed there from 1967 as a fellow at the " Thomas J. Watson Research Center " in Yorktown Heights, New York until his retirement in 1993, where he was also an adjunct professor at Columbia University and later at the "Kennedy School of Government" at Harvard University was. He was also director of the Watson Research Center - but otherwise avoided excessive bureaucratic burdens - and its "Director of Applied Research".

Since the Eisenhower era in the early 1950s, Garwin was a government advisor on issues relating to military technology and disarmament, as well as e.g. B. in the health system and civil aviation - for example, as a member of an advisory committee under President Richard Nixon, he was responsible for ensuring that no further efforts were made in the development of supersonic airliners. In 1958, Garwin proposed using the sun's radiation pressure to propel spacecraft with the help of solar sails . 1962 to 1965 and 1969 to 1972 he was a member of the "Science Advisory Committee" of the US President and 1966 to 1969 of the Defense Science Board. He was in the scientific advisory group of the "Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff" of the US military and was in 1998 in the "Rumsfeld Commission", which was supposed to assess the threat to the USA from ICBMs . From 1993 to 2001 he was Chairman of the Advisory Commission on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of the United States Department of State . From 1994 to 2004 he was Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City , of which he is a member. He was often in front of congress committees as an expert on a wide variety of topics (national security, energy policy, transport policy, etc.). He is a longtime member of the Pugwash Conferences (and a member of their council) and the JASON Defense Advisory Group . From 1977 to 1985 he was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London .

As a Pugwash member, Garwin is a proponent of disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. For example, he was one of those responsible “behind the scenes” for the nuclear test stop agreement and in the 1980s was very skeptical of President Ronald Reagan's “Star Wars program” (missile defense from space) . In 2006, he foresaw a 50% chance that terrorists could detonate a nuclear device in a major US city in the next five years.

Garwin has published over 500 papers, written numerous books, and holds 45 patents. He is a member of the American Physical Society , the IEEE , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969), the American Philosophical Society (1979), the National Academy of Sciences (in whose council he was re-elected in 2002), the National Academy of Engineering (1978) and the American Philosophical Society. In 1976 he held the Leo Szilard Award , 1983 the Wright Prize for interdisciplinary research and in 1991 the "Science and Peace" Prize in Erice . In 1996 he received the Enrico Fermi Prize , in 1996 the RV Jones Foreign Intelligence Award and in 2003 the US National Medal of Science . In 2002 he received the Grande médaille de l'Académie des sciences . In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom .

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Garwin 2011

Garwin is known for his early experiments to observe the parity violation of the weak interaction , which he carried out in 1957 with Leon Max Lederman and Marcel Weinrich, in competition with simultaneous experiments Valentine Telegdi and CS Wu . Telegdi reports in his memoirs that Garwin, whom he puts as an experimenter on a par with the theorist Murray Gell-Mann (both also colleagues from Chicago in the mid-1950s), picked up a remark about the possibility of such an experiment from Lederman in a restaurant and immediately set to work, whereby the electronic equipment he had adapted to the experiment gave her group a big head start. In 1959/60 he was involved with Telegdi at CERN in the experiment on the precise measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (an important prediction of quantum electrodynamics was thus confirmed).

He also worked on US nuclear weapons. From 1950 he was accompanied by Fermi in Los Alamos , who did not encourage him to participate in the hydrogen bomb project . Edward Teller (also a former colleague from the University of Chicago) brought Garwin in 1951 to test the Teller- Ulam design for the hydrogen bomb. Garwin had the best possible expertise for this through his work on particle detectors with chambers made of liquid hydrogen in Chicago and, according to Teller, was the main designer of the first ignited hydrogen bomb (" Mike test " 1952). At that time, large containers with liquid, cooled hydrogen were required to build the hydrogen bomb, and Garwin was also an electronics expert. In the summer of 1951, Garwin interviewed experts from various areas in Los Alamos and, before returning to Chicago in the fall, developed the “hard” design concept, which was then further elaborated. Garwin was also involved in the Corona project of the US spy satellites in the 1960s. At the 40th anniversary of the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) he was honored as one of the ten founders of the US spy satellite system.

Garwin - who urgently needed a fast way to compute the Fourier transform in applications - also played a role in the development of the Fast Fourier Transform by James Cooley and John W. Tukey in 1963 at IBM.

Inventions

Garwin was instrumental in the development of laser printers , inkjet printers and the touch screen at IBM in the 1970s.

Fonts (selection)

  • with Georges Charpak : Megawatts and Megatons - a turning point in the nuclear age? Random House 2001 (extended version of the French Feux Follets et Champignons Nucleaires. 1997)
  • Nuclear Weapons and World Politics. 1977
  • Nuclear Power Issues and Choices. 1977
  • Energy. The Next Twenty Years. 1979
  • Science Advice to the President. 1980
  • Managing the Plutonium Surplus. Applications and Technical Options. 1994
  • with Georges Charpak, Venance Journe: De Tchernobyl en tchernobyls. 2005

Web links

Commons : Richard Garwin  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Remarks

  1. ↑ In 1960 he turned down an offer to become head of the laboratory
  2. ↑ The sailing ship . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1958 ( online - June 18, 1958 ).
  3. ^ AAAS News Release
  4. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter G. (PDF; 931 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Accessed March 10, 2018 .
  5. ^ Member History: Richard L. Garwin. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 17, 2018 .
  6. ^ The White House: President Obama Names Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. November 16, 2016, accessed November 22, 2016 .
  7. ^ Oral History Project, Caltech 2002
  8. ↑ Garwin himself never watched a nuclear weapon test, AAAS 2006
  9. ↑ Teller emphasized Garwin's major role in both 1979 and 2001 interviews before his death, while downplaying Ulam's role. (see New York Times: Who Built The H-Bomb? Debate Revives )
  10. ^ E. Oran Brigham The Fast Fourier Transform , 1974, excerpt, pdf
  11. ↑ United States Patent 4675569 (English)
  12. ↑ IBM News room: Richard L. Garwin receives the National Medal of Science , October 27, 2003 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Garwin, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Garwin, Richard Lawrence (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Cleveland , Ohio