Science magazine surveys the career of Richard Garwin, polymath physicist
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2522
A lengthy feature article in Science magazine seeks to distill polymath physicist Richard Garwin’s ‘astonishingly varied’ life in science, technology, and technopolitics—a life that has included ‘fundamental contributions to particle physics, a 41-year career in industry, 47 patented inventions, and 60 years of advising multiple parts of the U.S. government on multiple technical issues.’ For the article’s author, veteran science writer Ann Finkbeiner , that multiplicity presents a challenge. How do you tell Garwin’s story coherently?
The volume of important but varied material forces the reporter toward a laundry-list approach. Finkbeiner writes, ‘Nothing ties these fields and functions together, no single intellectual thread. Garwin just likes being useful, he says, and helps solve problems as they arise. And if his solution to a problem causes another problem, then he solves that one, too.’
Somehow she extracts coherence from multiplicity. As a matter of the journalist’s art, her portrait of Garwin rises above the laundry-list problem. But as a matter of practicality, this merely derivative media report on her article exploits it. Here’s a partial laundry list of what the reader learns about:
* Only 12 other people belong, as Garwin does, to all three US national academies: science, engineering, and medicine. * Enrico Fermi called him the only true genius he ever met. * Garwin contributed centrally to development of the hydrogen bomb, then spent six decades helping governments control it, including by helping to shape all of the test-ban treaties since 1958. He has also advised extensively on missile defense. * He advised then Energy secretary Steven Chu about the BP oil spill in 2010 and about Fukushima in 2011. * In 1981, he ‘pioneered gesture recognition for a touch screen, on the IBM color PC monitor.’ * In 1969, ‘he invented the tensioned cables that would hold a deepwater floating airport steady in large waves; floating airports were never built, but the approach was used for oil-drilling platforms.’ * He began contributing to solving the problem of handling health-care data in 1968. * With Leon Lederman, he ‘conceived and conducted, in 4 days, an experiment on the radioactive decay of mu mesons that has become part of the modern view of particle physics.’
Those are only examples from Finkbeiner’s extensive portrait. They leave out what may be most important: her portrayal of Garwin’s cheerful ethic of service. In her opening, Finkbeiner repeats an old joke:
It’s the French Revolution, an aristocrat is placed in the guillotine, the blade won’t drop, ‘God’s will,’ says the guillotiner, and lets the aristocrat go free; next aristocrat, same thing, blade sticks, ‘God’s will,’ goes free. The next in line is Garwin, who looks up at the blade and says, ‘Oh, I see the problem.’
The subtheme of cheerful service threads its way to the end, where Finkbeiner concludes with this:
William Press, at the University of Texas, Austin, and current member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology who has worked with Garwin since 1977, says that whenever he tries to duck out of some issue, ‘I hear Dick’s voice—'Bill, those things don’t just happen. It’s people like me who make them happen.’'
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.