True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, the Most Influential Scientist You've Never Heard of
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True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, the Most Influential Scientist You've Never Heard of
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633882232 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2017 |
| Pages: | 324 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Joel N. Shurkin is a freelance science writer, former science reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Three Mile Island nuclear-reactor disaster. He is the author of nine published books on science and the history of science, most recently Broken Genius: A Biography of William B. Shockley. He writes regularly for Inside Science News Service at the American Institute for Physics and has written for Slate, Scientific American, and Science Friday. Among his academic positions have been the Snedden Chair in Journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the founder of the science-journalism internship program at Stanford University, and science writer emeritus at Stanford University.
Read an Excerpt
True Genius
The Life and Work of Richard Garwin
By Joel N. Shurkin
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2017 Joel N. ShurkinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63388-224-9
CHAPTER 1
THE TINKERERS
In the summer of 1950, Richard Garwin, a young PhD in physics, and his wife, Lois, went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, with their new son, Jeffrey. They were immediately awed.
They were taken by the scent of the place, the mixture of dust and pine, and by the Jemez Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo range looming twenty miles away. On days when Los Alamos was under a dark cloud, the mountains could be brightly sunlit. The physicist in Garwin noted that when "the cloud covered most of the path over the valley that would otherwise have dimmed the contrast of the view by contributing a background of scattered light." They had driven to Santa Fe and then across the sand-colored landscape, up a perilous mesa road to the place where scientists had gathered to invent the bomb that destroyed two cities in Japan and helped end the greatest war in history.
Returning to Los Alamos for the summer of 1951, Garwin had just spent the winter in Korea and Japan at the behest of the US Air Force because the air force had set up the Tactical Air Command and wanted to know what kinds of technologies and laboratories would be most useful in the war then embroiling the Korean peninsula. Garwin had been a graduate student of the great Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago and was already becoming well known by the defense establishment, a relationship — sometimes smooth, sometimes corrugated — that would last the rest of his long life. He found the work at Los Alamos interesting. Just as important, room and board at Los Alamos was free, and he did not have a full-time job. Instructors at the University of Chicago were paid $4,700 for nine months' work, "which was not really enough to live on," he said.
The first thing he did was to make use of his new security clearance (granted because of his work at the Argonne National Laboratory) so he could read all the secret papers in the library on nuclear weapons.
One day he was chatting with Edward Teller, whom he knew from Chicago. Garwin, like everyone else in physics, knew that Teller was fascinated almost to the point of obsession with the possibility of a hydrogen bomb, a weapon vastly more destructive than the fission bomb developed at Los Alamos. Everyone also knew that Teller did not actually know how to build one.
Garwin asked Teller what was new and how he could be of assistance.
He could do a great deal, it turned out....
Richard Garwin, appropriately enough, came from a family of tinkerers. Immigrant tinkerers.
The original family name was Gawronski, and his paternal grandfather came from Riga — or so Garwin thinks. His paternal grandfather immigrated to Chicago and opened a shoe store. Garwin's father, Rubie (who later changed his name to Robert), was born there in 1898, the third of four brothers. When Robert was seven years old, his father was murdered by his partner, leaving Robert's mother alone with four boys. She moved to Cleveland because the city's large and thriving Jewish community had an orphanage, the Jewish Orphan Asylum, where she put two of the boys, including Robert, because she could not support four children alone. The orphanage had originally been built for the children of Jewish Civil War veterans. It was not an entirely pleasant place. The two brothers spent all their school years there. In 1920, the entire family changed their names to Garwin.
In 1921, Robert got an engineering degree from the Case School of Applied Science (which later merged to become Case Western Reserve). None of the other Garwin boys went to college. Robert served in the US Army during the First World War but never left Cleveland. He never became an engineer either, Garwin said, probably because of anti-Semitism in the profession. Instead, Robert became a science teacher at East Technical High School, specializing in teaching electricity by day and becoming a movie projectionist at night.
Garwin's mother, Leona Schwartz, was a "greenhorn," arriving in 1912 from Hungary where she was born in 1900. Leona was the second of twelve children — nine of whom survived to adulthood. She went to work in a department store instead of high school, and married Robert Garwin in 1923. She worked as a legal secretary.
Richard Garwin was born April 19, 1928.
He was a happy, healthy child, and his aunt Margie, puzzled by his mental development, gave him arithmetic tests ("three times six, plus seven, times two, minus fifteen, divide by ..."), which he handled with aplomb.
"And I was so amazed at his vocabulary and what he knew — at one. Actually, after a while, when I had my children, I realized how advanced he had been at one year old. At that time we didn't know," his aunt remembered. "He had an amazing vocabulary."
His father, Robert, spoke to him more as if Garwin were an intelligent adult than a child, explaining things mechanically.
"I was also curious about the natural and engineering world, and proved to be good at tools and books," Garwin said. "I was notorious for taking things apart and — mostly — putting them back together again." He helped his father build Mahjong sets, a tile game that for decades was a fad with Jewish women despite its Chinese origin. The sets had pegs that held colored washers, which substituted for money, and fake ivory tiles that clicked when they were played.
When Margie's family got a television set, Garwin and his brother, Edward, took it apart to see what was inside and then put it back together again. For his twelfth birthday, he asked for a calculus textbook, Margie said.
In 1940, Robert realized their house was "underwater," meaning they owed more than the house was worth. So, like many others, they walked away from their home and somehow got a mortgage for a new, two-family house in the largely Jewish suburb of University Heights. Robert told the builder to double the size of a two-car garage even though they only had one car. He built a workshop in the space the car didn't need.
Projectionists were highly skilled, unionized workers. But when sound movies threatened the industry many, including Robert, had to learn the new technology, which included adjusting and maintaining sound-on-film speakers and amplifiers. The local school board had a rule that its teachers could not hold two jobs — it was the Great Depression, and the feeling was that as many people as possible should have jobs — so he quit teaching and became a full-time projectionist and then opened a motion picture equipment and sound repair business in a twenty-foot extension to the Washington Boulevard garage he built when they bought the house. His brother Joe joined the business, Gartec Theater Equipment, and eventually it grew big enough for them to hire employees. Robert gave classes to other projectionists in the city for many years, and ran the business until his death in 1979.
The family, cousins, aunts, uncles, came and went. The Cleveland house was crowded. Garwin's aunt Irene lived with her husband and daughters on the first floor until they were divorced; Garwin, his parents, and Garwin's brother Edward lived on the second, and his father had a workshop to himself in the attic. He and his father were an engineering team, throwing together projects.
Garwin was not the only member of the family to benefit from Robert's intellect and talent. Edward also went on to become a distinguished physicist, with a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, studying under Valentine Telegdi, who would become one of Garwin's friends and competitors. Edward spent most of his career at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto, California, helping to build the two-mile-long electron accelerator and the Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring. Edward died in 2008.
Remembering his father, Garwin said, "He was a very capable person, and I liked it because he did interesting things." To call someone "capable" is the highest compliment one scientist has for another. "He was very good with his hands and thinking things through, and he wanted to teach me everything he knew. I did not resist."
Both families shared the basement, with its coal pile, the furnace, and washtubs. Garwin and his father built a darkroom in the basement, next to the coalbin.
"Of course, by the time I was twelve years old, I was very much interested in science already. He [Robert] had a lot of books around the house, engineering manuals and so on, which I read at an early age. I was a good student. My handwriting was terrible, but otherwise I was a good student. I learned to type at the age of seven or eight, because otherwise the teachers wouldn't accept my work."
"I would read the Mechanical Engineer's Handbook or the Electrical Engineer's Handbook," he wrote later, "and I had read much of the encyclopedia in grade school, but without mastering it all. From 1940 to 1947, I helped my father in his sound equipment business, with tasks ranging from splicing film and cleaning equipment to building amplifiers, and the like." He analyzed the cathode "follower" vacuum tube circuit, an amplifier used in sound projection, to study how it and the other tubes used in amplification worked.
"But throughout my youth I was shy and not good at sports," he wrote once. He was the kid who was chosen last for a baseball team. He did like to swim.
"My father had a .22-caliber single-shot rifle, and a .22-caliber automatic pistol (both for target practice — not for hunting), with which I became a good shot."
He also played with chemistry sets. "I am ashamed to say that I risked my own life and that of my family by producing some explosives, knowing full well that Sir Humphrey Davy had lost several fingers to one of them." (The chemical pioneer Humphrey Davy damaged his right eye in an experiment with nitrogen trichloride. It was Pierre Louis Dulong who lost his fingers — and an eye.)
Garwin also acquired a knack for glassblowing — strictly utilitarian. He lined a wooden bench, which they used for glassblowing, with marble plates to keep it from catching fire. They bought professional glassblowing equipment — ribbon burners, controllable torches — and hooked up an old vacuum cleaner to pump air and natural gas into what became the furnace. He wasn't making art; he was making chemistry equipment, tubes and condensers.
He also signed up for the Westinghouse Talent Search, a nationwide contest that rewarded young people for designing science experiments. Garwin's involved measuring the voltage required to decompose water by passing a current through it under pressure. He set up a heavy glass shield for protection, which came in handy when the experiment exploded with a deafening bang. It didn't matter; the teacher forgot to turn in the report on time.
Garwin was assigned to what was called a "major work program" at school, something like a gifted student's program in modern jargon. Because he skipped two grades, he graduated at the age of sixteen from Cleveland Heights High School.
He had decided on physics as a career. He applied to the University of Chicago and Allegheny College, but the Case School of Applied Science offered him a half scholarship, and family finances being what they were, Case won. He lived at home, taking the bus to school. He went to classes and immediately returned home, taking no part in the extracurricular activities or social life the school offered. He did not have time nor interest, and, with the war looming, everyone was in a rush. He finished in three years, again acceleration as the result of wartime needs. He got perfect grades in every course but one, and that one exception involved a registration mix-up.
Garwin had been a college sophomore on August 5, 1945, when the government announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. "I thought it was very interesting and a big achievement that one could obtain energy from the nucleus," he told interviewer W Patrick McCray. "Of course anybody who had been following it would've known that, but I hadn't. I guess in 1945 I was already in college, but people didn't talk about nuclear energy. People who knew anything about it realized it was classified and most of those people weren't at the universities anymore anyhow. They'd gone into war work of one kind or another."
"There was no television at the time — newsreels and photographs published in the newspapers," he wrote, "but the world was agog with this. ... By then I did know something about atomic physics and a little bit about nuclear physics, so I could understand to some extent what had happened. Of course, I moved quickly to obtain a copy of the Smyth Report, published August 1945 by the War Department, which revealed what details could be told of the atomic bomb program (Manhattan Project) in the United States." He did have one distraction: one of his brother's friends, Howard Levy, spent considerable time at the Garwin home. Occasionally, Levy's sister Lois would call to see whether Howard was there and to ask someone in the Garwin home — often Garwin — to send him home. Their mother and Garwin's would later become friends, and Garwin knew Lois from junior high school.
Her father, Harry, was born in London, her mother, Bernice, in Providence, Rhode Island. Lois initially grew up in the small town of Willoughby, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. Her father was a haberdasher until the Great Depression when he opened a grocery store in Cleveland. Lois worked there half of every day, going to school the other half, and also did the cooking for herself and her brother. She found some escape, mostly at the Cleveland Playhouse program. Paul Newman was a classmate.
"Well, he pursued me," she told Dan Ford in an interview in California years later about Richard's courtship. "I wouldn't say he was flirtatious, no. He was very serious. Very serious, in fact. I could tell that he would think of things to talk about ahead of time. But he did pursue me." He was aware she was a hall monitor, which meant he knew where to find her at school.
Lois had two years of college at Flora Stone Mather, a women's division of Western Reserve University, and she and Garwin married on April 20, 1947. He was nineteen. They are still married sixty-nine years later.
He began a lifetime of inventions. One was an intense television projector, making use of a more powerful electron beam than in the standard television tube. He didn't complete it. He also tried to grow diamonds at relatively low temperatures, but that didn't work.
Garwin graduated from Case in 1947. He was given a Standard Oil of New Jersey scholarship to do graduate work at Chicago. A professor at Case told Garwin and his father one day at lunch that he would be out of his mind to turn down Chicago, which had the best physics department in the country, with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller on faculty.
"The University of Chicago was my choice because of the presence of a stellar faculty in physics and allied departments, including notably Enrico Fermi," Garwin recalled.
"He was very reluctant to go to Chicago and leave me behind," Lois told Dan Ford. "Sounds — it's so juvenile. When we started having children, we used to discuss, what are we going to tell our children to keep them from marrying young? Not that we hadn't had a success, but we realized how lucky and how unusual it was to marry at such an early age and make a success of it. Well, times had changed so drastically by the time our children were twenty or whatever, none of them was interested in getting married. I mean, it was the farthest thing from their minds. So you see, the things you worry about are the things that never happen."
Lois was in college in Cleveland until the Garwins moved to Chicago where she began work at Blue Cross of Chicago. In the summer of 1948, back in Cleveland, she went to work first at Blue Cross, and then Ohio Bell.
They could support themselves with Lois's job and Garwin's scholarship, but the problem was finding a place to live. With the war over, millions of GIs took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights to go to college. Simultaneously, millions of people from the South, many of them African Americans, looking to escape poverty, were migrating north, and Chicago was a prime destination. The Garwins could only find temporary shelter and moved thirteen times in the first twelve months to eleven different places. Often that meant housesitting while residents were away. Sometimes they had to spend nights in neighborhood hotels through the year. Garwin described his graduate work as both a joy and a strain with the constant worry about where they were going to live.
Their first child, Jeffrey, was born on November 18, 1949. They eventually took over a one-room studio apartment with a fold-out bed on South Shore Drive and Seventy-Seventh Street, and eventually moved closer to campus on East Fiftieth Street, an apartment created by fellow physics graduate student Harold Agnew out of a wraparound porch. "This was heaven for us, and we were able to buy furniture and to have a place for Jeffrey's crib when he came home from the hospital."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from True Genius by Joel N. Shurkin. Copyright © 2017 Joel N. Shurkin. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction i
Chapter 1 The Tinkerers 11
Chapter 2 Fermi 21
Chapter 3 The Super 29
Chapter 4 Garwin's Design 47
Chapter 5 Garwin, Lederman, and the Marx Brothers 59
Chapter 6 IBM and Lamp Light 75
Chapter 7 Advising Presidents-Or Not 103
Chapter 8 JASONS 115
Chapter 9 Vietnam and McNamara's Wall 125
Chapter 10 Super Sonic Transport 145
Chapter 11 Offense 159
Chapter 12 The Great Gap 175
Chapter 13 Treaty 195
Chapter 14 Star Wars 205
Chapter 15 Gravity 217
Chapter 16 Health, Pandemics 227
Chapter 17 Far Out 233
Chapter 18 Rumpled 249
Chapter 19 Decline of Influence 265
Afterword 271
Notes 273
Index 301