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Cover 2000 Number 4.Indd C ALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY engineeringE& andS science Volume LXIII, Number 4, IN THIS ISSUE Living with Faults Sailing with Light Cooking with Oil Tensile cracks and fissures W E Pre-1999 surface concrete fence Pre-1999 ground surface 2 m plastic foil Slumping deposits 1 m 1 m 0 ? 0 -1 m -1 m -2 m 2 m -2 m 0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 10.0 cultivated yellowish fine- to brownish yellowish medium to cobbly gray soil medium-grained sand fine-grained mud coarse-grained sand gravel Kerry Sieh and his colleagues dug this trench (on cover and at left) exposing the Chelungpu fault in Wufeng, Taiwan, a few months after the fault broke and produced the devastating earthquake of September 1999. At the fault, the earth was shortened a couple of meters and the right side rose more than a meter; the fault’s motions are shown by the red arrows in the drawing above. The red fence in the background was a temporary replacement for a shattered concrete wall. The river gravel at the bottom of the trench shows that the area has also been subject to river floods—one more reason not to build there. See the story beginning on page 8. Cover photo and drawing courtesty of Jian-Cheng Lee of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. 2 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE NO . X engineering& and science C a l i f o r n i a Institute of Technology Volume LXIII, Number 4, 2000 E S 2 Random Walk 8 Acts of God, Acts of Man: How Humans Turn Natural Hazards into Disasters — by Kerry Sieh Earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides may be unpredictable, but the places where they are likely to occur are not. We now know where not to build, but will we? 18 Solar Sailing: The Next Space Craze? — by Joel Grossman Spacecraft that don’t need rocket fuel riding laser beams to Alpha Centauri at one-tenth the speed of light. Sound nuts? Maybe not. 30 In Defense of Robert Andrews Millikan — by David Goodstein Was he a fraud, a chauvinist, and an anti-Semite? Departments 39 Obituaries: Brad Sturtevant, J. Harold Wayland 43 Faculty File Engineering & Science (ISSN 0013-7812) is published Blair A. Folsom quarterly at the California Institute of Technology, 1200 President of the Alumni Association East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125. Annual J. Ernest Nunnally subscription $10.00 domestic, $20.00 foreign air mail; Vice President for Institute Relations Robert L. O’Rourke single copies $3.00. Send subscriptions to Caltech 1-71, Associate Vice President for Institute Relations Pasadena, CA 91125. Third class postage paid at Pasade- na, CA. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material con- STAFF: Editor — Jane Dietrich tained herein forbidden without authorization. © 2000, Managing Editor — Douglas Smith California Institute of Technology. Published by Caltech Writer/Editor — Barbara Ellis and the Alumni Association. Telephone: 626-395-3630. Contributing Writers — Jill Perry, Robert Tindol PICTURE CREDITS: 2, 5, 7, 39, 44 – Bob Paz; 3, 16, 21, 22, 24, Copy Editors — Emily Adelsohn, 25, 29 – NASA; 10, 20 – Doug Cummings; 10, 11 – C. T. Lee; Michael Farquhar, Elena Rudnev 11, 13, 15, 17 – Kerry Sieh; 12-13 – Aykut Barka; 13 – Timothy Business Manager — Debbie Bradbury Dawson; 14-15 – Earth Consultants International; 16 – Charles Circulation Manager — Susan Lee Rubin; 20 – SOHO, NOAA; 21, 26 – ESLI; 23 – Richard Photographer — Robert Paz Dowling/WSF, Louis Friedman, Planetary Society; 24 – Carnegie Graphic Artist — Douglas Cummings Mellon; 24 – DLR; 27 — RPI; 28 – Energia, Ltd.; 32, 34-35, 37 – Caltech Archives; 36 – American Scientist; 41-42 – Floyd Clark Visit Caltech on the Web at http://www.caltech.edu Random Walk Elachi (left) and Stone at the press conference. T HE L AB N AMES O NE OF I TS O WN Charles Elachi (MS ’69, and so knows the school well. of Caltech, and I intend to the Space Shuttle that have PhD ’71) has been named He is an expert in remote continue that tradition. My allowed scientists to see the new director of the Jet sensing, and in recognition commitment is to continue through the clouds that Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), of his work, he was one of the tradition of excellence blanket Earth. (The technol- which Caltech manages for the youngest members ever and boldness in exploring our ogy also penetrates the top NASA, effective May 1. elected to the National solar system, understanding layer of soil in arid regions, President David Baltimore Academy of Engineering. the origin of galaxies, and revealing hints of what lies made the announcement at He has long been a leader of applying that knowledge to below.) He has participated a press conference on January planetary exploration at JPL better understand the changes in a number of archaeological 31, where Elachi and Balti- and is widely respected at the on our own planet.” The new expeditions in the Egyptian more were joined by retiring Laboratory. I look forward to post brings Elachi full circle, desert, the Arabian peninsula, JPL director Edward Stone, having a close working as he recalled being inspired and the Western Chinese the Morrisroe Professor of relationship with him.” as an 11-year-old in Lebanon desert, using satellite data to Physics; and NASA adminis- “Charles Elachi brings by JPL’s launching of Ex- search for old trading routes trator Daniel Goldin. Elachi formidable talents to his new plorer 1—43 years ago to the and buried cities. Some of has served in a variety of job, as both a scientist and a day, he noted. “Maybe that’s these expeditions have been research and management leader,” said Goldin. “In a good omen for me,” he featured in National Geo- positions at JPL since 1971. addition to already being joked. He grew up to receive graphic, on PBS, and in Most recently, he has been responsible for many of JPL’s a BSc in physics from the Caltech News (“The Road head of the Space and Earth missions in solar system University of Grenoble, to Ubar,” April, 1992). He Science Programs; other exploration, Earth sciences, France, and the Dipl.Ing. in has also served as principal positions include manager for and astrophysics, he has led engineering from the Poly- investigator on numerous radar development and leader efforts to create road maps technic Institute, Grenoble, NASA research and develop- of the radar remote-sensing of our exploration strategies both in 1968, and then ment studies and flight team. decades into the future. He earned his Caltech MS and projects. He is currently the Elachi “knows JPL better is both an effective adminis- PhD in electrical engineering. team leader of the Cassini than anyone and will be best trator and a visionary.” He also earned an MBA from Titan radar experiment and a able to lead the Laboratory in Elachi said he was honored USC in 1978, and an MS in coinvestigator on the Rosetta the coming years,” Baltimore to be entrusted with the geology from UCLA in 1983. Comet Nucleus Sounder said. “Charles has an extraor- leadership of JPL. “For the Elachi is perhaps best Experiment. He is the author dinary record of accomplish- last 40 years JPL has enjoyed known for his role in the of more than 200 publica- ment in his 30 years at JPL. a tradition of excellence as a development of a series of tions on space and planetary He is an alumnus of Caltech, NASA center and division imaging radar systems for exploration, Earth observa- 2 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE NO . 4 tion from space, active microwave remote sensing, wave propagation and scattering, electromagnetic theory, lasers, and integrated S NIFF M E A T UNE optics, and he holds several patents in those fields. He has written three textbooks on remote sensing and has taught EE/Ge 157, Introduc- When Hamlet told the iorally relevant to them. tion to the Physics of Remote courtiers they would eventu- But the study likely applies Sensing, since 1982. ally “nose out” the hidden to other animals, including In 1988, the Los Angeles corpse of Polonius, he was humans, because the olfactory Times selected him as one of perhaps a better neurobiolo- systems of most living crea- “Southern California’s rising gist than he realized. Accord- tures appear to follow the stars who will make a differ- ing to research by Caltech same basic principles. After ence in L.A.” In 1989, neuroscientists, the brain placing electrodes in the Asteroid 1982 SU was creates subtle temporal codes brains of individual fishes, renamed 4116 Elachi in to identify odors. Some neu- they were subjected to recognition of his contribu- ral signals change over the sequences of 16 odor compo- tions to planetary exploration. duration of a sniff, giving nents found in foods they Elachi is the second Caltech first a general notion of the normally seek. Analyzing the alumnus to be named director type of odor, then a more signals from the mitral cells of JPL. The first, William subtle discrimination that showed that the information Pickering (BS ’32, PhD ’36), leads to precise recognition the fish could extract about a headed the lab from 1954 to of the smell. In the February stimulus became more precise 1976. ■—JP 2 issue of the journal Science, as time went by. The finding Gilles Laurent, associate was surprising because the professor of biology and signals extracted from the computation and neural receptor neurons located systems, and postdoc Rainer upstream of the mitral cells W. Friedrich, now at the Max showed no such temporal Planck Institute in Heidel- evolution. “It looks as if the berg, Germany, report that brain actively transforms certain neurons respond to an static patterns into dynamic odor through a complicated ones and in so doing, man- process that evolves over a ages to amplify the subtle brief period of time.
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