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Indispensable Outsider Government on Multiple Technical Issues NEWSNEWSFOCUSFOCUS on July 26, 2013 www.sciencemag.org in industry, 47 patented inventions, and 60 years of advising multiple parts of the U.S. Indispensable Outsider government on multiple technical issues. “He’s done so damn many things,” says Peter Richard Garwin has helped advise U.S. presidents, IBM, and secret Zimmerman, formerly chief scientist at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Downloaded from agencies on how to make things work “that it’s hard to single out any one.” Garwin advised then–Energy Secretary THE FIRST THING ANYBODY SAYS ABOUT THE his solutions occasionally raise other prob- Steven Chu on alternatives for dealing with physicist/inventor/adviser Richard Garwin lems. Prime example: In 1951, Garwin was the Fukushima nuclear plant’s meltdown in is that his graduate school adviser 60 years 23 years old and the hydrogen bomb, which 2011 and on plugging the BP oil well blow- ago, Enrico Fermi, said that he was the only worked only in theory, needed proof. So in a out in 2010. In 1981, Garwin pioneered ges- true genius he’d met. The next thing is that few weeks, Garwin designed an experiment, ture recognition for a touch screen, on the Garwin has advised, sometimes impoliti- and a year later Los Alamos National Labo- IBM color PC monitor. In 1969, he invented cally, every administration since Eisen- ratory in New Mexico had built it and called the tensioned cables that would hold a deep- hower’s on every possible technical issue. it Mike, then had taken it to Eniwetok in the water fl oating airport steady in large waves; The third thing is the Garwin joke: It’s the South Pacifi c and set it off. The 11-megaton floating airports were never built, but the French Revolution, an aristocrat is placed in explosion was 1000 times more powerful than approach was used for oil-drilling platforms. the guillotine, the blade won’t drop, “God’s the atomic bomb that fl attened two-thirds of Since 1968, he’s been writing about handling will,” says the guillotiner, and lets the aris- Hiroshima. Garwin didn’t watch it—he was data in health care. The upshot: He is one of tocrat go free; next aristocrat, same thing, busy working on more portable H-bombs— 13 people in the world who is a member of blade sticks, “God’s will,” goes free. The next and in fact has never seen a nuclear explo- all three U.S. National Academies: science, in line is Garwin, who looks up at the blade sion. “I don’t need it,” he told an interviewer. engineering, and medicine. and says, “Oh, I see the problem.” “I have a good imagination.” Nothing ties these fields and func- Garwin himself agrees that the third, an Garwin went on to an astonishingly var- tions together, no single intellectual thread. old joke, could have been written for him. He ied career that included fundamental contri- Garwin just likes being useful, he says, and is a compulsive problem-solver—although butions to particle physics, a 41-year career helps solve problems as they arise. And if his ANAND KAMALAKAR CREDIT: 334 26 JULY 2013 VOL 341 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org Published by AAAS NEWSFOCUS Frequent visitor. Garwin has been a White House ment on the radioactive decay of mu mesons A RESTLESS MIND adviser off and on since the 1950s. that has become part of the modern view of particle physics. 1951– Designs solution to a problem causes another prob- The same year Garwin joined IBM, he 1952 experiment lem, then he solves that one, too. If a coher- was introduced for the fi rst time to the cadre for“Mike” H-bomb test ent narrative can be imposed on Garwin of academics advising the government on at all, it is that having solved the hydrogen science and technology. Centered at Harvard bomb, he has spent the last 6 decades work- and the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- .NRO.GOV/NEWS/ ing to help governments control it. ogy, it included engineer Jerome Wiesner, 1952– John F. Kennedy’s science adviser, who in on IBM Watson Precise design 1957 asked Garwin to join the newly form- Scientifi c Laboratory TIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/2.0)], Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in 1928, ing President’s Science Advisory Commit- in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from what tee (PSAC). Garwin served an unusual two researcher is now Case Western Reserve University in 4-year terms on PSAC and led several of its 3 years, working in his father’s sound equip- panels, in particular, those looking into bal- -2.0 (HTTP://CREA ment repair business, and marrying a local listic missile threats and military aircraft. He girl. In 1947, he moved to the University helped lay the basis for GPS, drone aircraft, of Chicago where, in 1949, he received his and the electronic battlefi eld. “I learned a Ph.D. with Fermi on the radioactive decay of lot,” he said. 1957 With Leon Lederman, mu meson atomic nuclei. PSAC also helped Garwin define his experiment TIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE (NRO) (HTTP://WWW Garwin stayed on at Chicago as an ideal job: sitting in a room for 8 hours while 1960s instructor and in 1950 began spending sum- generals, admirals, scientists, and corpora- “Poppy” surveillance mers consulting at Los Alamos because, as he tions explained their problems and he and satellite work said, the university paid its faculty members the rest of the panel proposed answers. on July 26, 2013 for 9 months but his family ate for 12. In his He later found the same congenial setting second summer there, Edward Teller, also at when he joined a secret government advi- TIONAL BIRD RESCUE RESEARCH CENTER [CC-BY Chicago and consulting at Los Alamos, told sory group called JASON, also made up him that he and Los Alamos physicist Stani- of mostly academic scientists. Garwin and slaw Ulam had a theory that an atomic bomb IBM had agreed from the start that his job 1970 could be used to trigger a hydrogen bomb, would include spending a third of his time Faults super- but the theory needed a proof-of-principle. giving advice to the government. sonic transport Garwin thought through the options—the Often that time was devoted to highly while serving on President’s configurations, dimensions, and materials classifi ed “black” programs, which bypass www.sciencemag.org Science Advisory that would focus the radiation of an atomic open peer review or qualifi ed congressio- Committee bomb “primary” and trigger thermonuclear nal oversight, making the advice of inde- fusion in the “secondary”—and decided that pendent scientists especially valuable. designing a real bomb would be just as easy. Since the early 1960s, Garwin worked on The Mike test worked, Teller said, “almost several types of spy satellites, though he precisely” as designed. Later, when Teller won’t say exactly what he did or for whom. 1973 Brokers fast Fourier trans- got credit for fathering the H-bomb, Garwin Some satellites, whose names haven’t been Downloaded from ; STEVEN G. JOHNSON/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; AP; BY INTERNA TIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/2.0)], VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; IBM ARCHIVES; BBY NA didn’t argue: By then Garwin had learned, as declassified and which Garwin talked form algorithm he said, that when serving the government National Security Adviser Henry Kiss- development you could either get something done or get inger into backing, used charge-coupled NEW YORK TIMES credit for it, but not both. devices that stored images and sent them -2.0 (HTTP://CREA THE Meanwhile, particle physics was becom- back via radio. These satellites’ sensitiv- 1995 Co-authors JASON review of Compre- ing a science of large teams, large machines, ity to light needed improving. Still others, hensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and long waits for experiments, none of like the Poppy series, collected not images, which Garwin found agreeable. So in 1952, but radar signals showing the locations, 2002 he took a job at IBM’s Watson Scientific frequencies, and ranges of Soviet radars. National Laboratory, then in New York City, where he Garwin helped Poppy “a lot,” he says, Medal of could, he said, “decide one day what I was “because I asked, ‘Is this how it works?’ Science going to do the next day.” At IBM he worked And they said, ‘No, that’s not how it works.’ on everything from the properties of materi- And I said, ‘Why doesn’t it work that way?’ als under extremely cold conditions, to pro- And they made it work that way.” totypes of computers controllable by gaze, Garwin thinks he’s been most useful to to the little accelerometer that protects the black programs at the CIA and National 2010 Recruited by DOE brains of laptops or other smart devices when Reconnaissance Offi ce (NRO). Apparently to help with they’re dropped. In 1957, he took leave from they agreed: The CIA awarded him the the Deepwater an IBM project to develop a superconduct- R.V. Jones award, and NRO declared him Horizon ing computer, and with Leon Lederman con- one of the 10 Founders of National Recon- oil spill CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): BY THE OFFICIAL CTBTO PHOTOSTREAM [CC-BY PRESS/2005/2005-06.PDF) [PUBLIC DOMAIN], VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS ceived and conducted, in 4 days, an experi- naisance. Garwin’s special contribution to www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 341 26 JULY 2013 335 Published by AAAS NEWSFOCUS the intelligence community, says Robert A. sees. He’s showing politicians what, if McDonald, director of NRO’s Center for politics could be sidestepped, might then the Study of National Reconnaissance in be possible—“maybe we should be ask- Virginia, is that he pushed them to “stretch ing whether we could deploy missiles their technological limits,” and gave them, near Vladivostok,” Jeanloz says.
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