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The Guardian
8 hours ago
- General
- The Guardian
Richard Garwin obituary
The Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi called his student Richard Garwin 'the only true genius I've ever met'. Garwin, who has died aged 97, is perhaps the most influential 20th-century scientist that you have never heard of, because he produced much of his work under the constraints of national or commercial secrecy. During 40 years working at IBM on an endless stream of research projects, he was granted 47 patents, in diverse areas including magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers and touch-screen monitors. Garwin, a polymath who was adviser to six US presidents, wrote papers on space weapons, pandemics, radioactive waste disposal, catastrophic risks and nuclear disarmament. Throughout much of that time, a greater secret remained: in 1951, aged 23, he had designed the world's first hydrogen bomb. Ten years earlier, Fermi had had the insight that an atomic bomb explosion would create extraordinarily high pressures and temperatures like those in the heart of the sun. This would be hot enough to ignite fusion of hydrogen atoms, the dynamical motor that releases solar energy, with the potential to make an explosion of unlimited power. This is known as a thermonuclear explosion, reflecting the high temperature, in contrast to an atomic bomb, which starts at room temperature. Detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945 gave the proof of the first part of this concept, but in secret lectures at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico that summer, Fermi admitted that although an exploding atomic bomb could act as the spark that ignites hydrogen fuel, he could find no way of keeping the material alight. In 1949, the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb and within months President Harry S Truman announced that the US would develop 'the so-called hydrogen or superbomb'. In the same year, Garwin graduated from the University of Chicago with a doctorate in physics and became an instructor in the physics department. Fermi invited him to join Los Alamos as a summer consultant, to help to realise Truman's goal. Early in 1951 Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam made the theoretical breakthrough: a bomb consisting of two physically separated parts in a cylindrical casing. One component was an atom bomb whose explosion would emit both atomic debris and electromagnetic radiation. The radiation would move at the speed of light and flood the interior with rays that would compress the second component containing the hydrogen fuel. The impact of the debris an instant later would complete the ignition. This one-two attack on the hydrogen fuel was the theoretical idea that Teller asked Garwin to develop. Garwin turned their rough idea into a detailed design that remains top secret even today. The device, codenamed Ivy Mike, was assembled on the tiny island of Elugelab in the Enewatak Atoll of the Marshall Islands in the south Pacific. Weighing 80 tonnes and three storeys high, it looked more like an industrial site than a bomb. It was undeliverable by an aeroplane but designed solely to prove the concept. On 1 November 1952, the explosion, which was 700 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima or Nagasakai, instantly wiped Elugelab from the face of the earth and vaporised 80m tonnes of coral. In their place was a crater a mile across into which the waters of the Pacific Ocean poured. The mushroom cloud reached 80,000ft in 2 minutes and continued to rise until it was four times higher than Mount Everest, stretching 60 miles across. The core was 30 times hotter than the heart of the sun, the fireball 3 miles wide. The sky shone like a red-hot furnace. For several minutes, many observers feared that the test was out of hand and that the whole atmosphere would ignite. None of the news reports mentioned Garwin's name; he was a scientific unknown, a junior faculty member at the University of Chicago. A month later he joined the International Business Machines Corporation, IBM, in Yorktown Heights, New York. The post included a faculty appointment at Columbia, which gave him considerable freedom to pursue his research interests and to continue as a government consultant at Los Alamos and, increasingly, in Washington. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the elder son of Leona (nee Schwartz), a legal secretary, and Robert Garwin, a teacher of electronics at a technical high school by day and a projectionist at a cinema at night, Dick was a prodigy; by the age of five he was repairing family appliances. After attending public schools in Cleveland, in 1944 he entered Case Western Reserve University. In 1947, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics and married Lois Levy; the couple moved to Chicago, where Garwin was tutored by Fermi. He earned a master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate, aged 21, in 1949. In his doctoral exams he scored the highest marks ever recorded in the university. In addition to his applied science research for IBM, he worked for decades on ways of observing gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. His detectors successfully observed the ripples in 2015. This has opened a new window on the universe, in revealing the dynamics of black holes. Throughout his career he continued to advise the US government on national defence issues. This included prioritising targets in the Soviet Union, warfare involving nuclear-armed submarines, and satellite reconnaissance and communication systems. A strong supporter of reducing nuclear arsenals, he advised the US president Jimmy Carter during negotiations with the Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev on the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. He believed that the US should nonetheless maintain a strategic balance of nuclear power with the Soviet Union and opposed policies that could upset that: 'Moscow is more interested in live Russians than dead Americans.' After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1993, he chaired the State Department's arms control and non-proliferation advisory board until 2001. In 2002 he was awarded the National Medal of Science, the US's highest scientific award, and in 2016 the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. In presenting the award, Barack Obama remarked that Garwin 'never met a problem he didn't want to solve'. Lois died in 2018. Garwin is survived by two sons and a daughter, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Richard Lawrence Garwin, physicist, born 19 April 1928; died 13 May 2025
Epoch Times
27-05-2025
- Science
- Epoch Times
Will Nuclear Fusion Soon Be the ‘Norm?'
Commentary The dream of humanity to imitate the forces that created their habitat has been alive for at least as far back as the time when humans with a single language decided to build a city with a tower that reached the heavens. For such a people, 'nothing they plan will be impossible to them,' it is recorded. For at least the same time frame, humanity has sought comfort through technology. While primitive heat producers like coal and wood are still used today, the discovery that petroleum, natural gas, and even moving water could generate a newly discovered phenomenon known as 'electricity' transformed the industrial revolution into the modern era. Not until the 1930s did German scientists build on Enrico Fermi's discovery that neutrons could split atoms to recognize that splitting atoms would release significant energy—energy that could be used for both bombs and electricity generation. By the 1950s, scientists began building nuclear fission-based power plants that today provide about a tenth of the world's electricity. Scientists and engineers also began to envision the potential of nuclear fusion—the reaction of light atomic nuclei powers the sun and the stars. Since that time, they have worked feverishly, but with little success, to replicate this energy-rich reaction using deuterium and tritium. One group of scientists and engineers decided to try an alternative approach. Related Stories 5/22/2025 5/21/2025 Founded in 1998, California-based TAE Technologies has been developing a reactor that runs on proton-boron aneutronic fusion—that is, a fusion reaction that fuses a hydrogen nucleus with non-radioactive boron-11 instead of fusing hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium. Their goal is to develop commercial fusion power with the cleanest-possible environmental profile. All efforts at fusion require chambers that can withstand temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius and immense pressure that are needed to fuse two isotopes together. To accomplish this requires huge amounts of energy—and until recently, more energy than the fusion produced. Most fusion researchers, including those building the ITER project being built in France, rely on a donut-shaped tokamak reactor chamber, in which a stream of plasma must be held away from its walls by electromagnets for any energy to be produced. The tokamak design uses a toroidal magnetic field to contain the hydrogen plasma and keep it hot enough to ignite fusion. Sadly, as with ITER, project costs have soared and timeframes have fallen by the wayside despite occasional breakthroughs. Over decades, tokamak designs became gigantic, with huge superconducting magnetic coils to generate containment fields; they also had huge, complex electromagnetic heating systems. Spurred by the failures of wind and solar to fully satisfy the desire for 'clean energy,' governments and private investors began investing heavily into fission and fusion projects. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has tapped into a $60 million state fund intended to bolster both fission and fusion energy in atomic energy's American birthplace. New The old method used for a stellarator reactor relied on perturbation theory. The new method, which relies on symmetry theory, is a game changer. It can also be used to identify holes in the tokamak magnetic field through which runaway electrons push through their surrounding walls and greatly reduce energy output. The TAE Technology reactor is entirely different than any of the tokamak or stellarator fusion chambers. In 2017, the company introduced its fifth-generation reactor, named Norman, which was designed to keep plasma stable at 30 million C. Five years later the machine had proven capable of sustaining stable plasma at more than 75 million C. That success enabled TAE to secure sufficient funding for its sixth-generation Copernicus reactor and to envision the birth of its commercial-ready Da Vinci reactor. But in between, TAE developed Norm. Norm uses a different type of fusion reaction and a new reactor design that exclusively produces plasma using neutral beam injections. The TAE design dumps the toroidal field in favor of a linear magnetic field that is based on the 'field-reversed configuration' (FRC) principle, a simpler, more efficient way to build a commercial reactor. Instead of massive magnetic coils, FRC makes the plasma produce its own magnetic containment field. The process involves accelerating high-energy hydrogen ions and giving them a neutral charge, then injecting them as a beam into the plasma. That causes the beams to be re-ionized as the collision energy heats the plasma to set up internal toroidal currents. Norm's neutral beam injection system has cut the size, complexity, and cost, compared to that of Norman, by up to 50 percent. But not only is an FRC reactor smaller and less expensive to manufacture and operate, says TAE, it can also produce up to 100 times more fusion power output than a tokamak—based on the same magnetic field strength and plasma volume. The FRC reactor also can run on proton-boron aneutronic fusion, which, instead of producing a neutron it produces three alpha particles plus a lot of energy. The fewer neutrons also do less damage to the reactor; the energy being released as charged particles is easier to harness. Less shielding is required, and, perhaps best of all, boron-11 is relatively abundant and not radioactive. So, while 'Norm' may not be the final step in developing commercial fusion energy, TAE's hope is that fusion energy will the 'norm' as early as the mid-1930s. FRC technology has materially de-risked Copernicus, according to TAE CEO Michi Binderbauer. If Norm is as advertised, it will accelerate the pathway to commercial hydrogen-boron fusion—a safe, clean, and virtually limitless energy source. But is humanity ready for free energy to be the 'norm?' From Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Aliens Might Be Talking, but Our Ears Aren't Quantum Enough to Hear Them, a Scientist Says
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: For 75 years, scientists have consistently pondered the Fermi Paradox, which asks why we don't hear from other civilizations when there are so many Earth-like worlds in the galaxy. A recent study analyzes whether these civilizations might be using quantum communication technologies beyond our own, which could explain why we don't 'hear' them. Although interstellar quantum communication is possible, the technology to detect such communications is still far from our reach. In 1950, Enrico Fermi asked the question that all of us have likely pondered at some point in our lives: Where are all of the aliens? He wasn't the first to consider this question—Soviet sci-fi legend Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, for one, asked a similar query in some of his unpublished manuscripts—and he certainly wouldn't be the last. If anything, the question has accumulated ever greater urgency as astronomers have slowly realized that there are likely billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, and we're discovering more tantalizing, potentially-life-supporting planetary candidates all the time. This 'Fermi Paradox' has spawned dozens of theories, ideas, and hypotheses in the 75 years since. Maybe a 'Great Filter' lies in our distant past—the unlikely development of eukaryotic cells is a compelling candidate—or maybe (and this is the real bummer) it still lies ahead in our future. Are the aliens just not interested? A galaxy-spanning intelligence scoring a solid 'III' on the Kardashev Scale would likely be indifferent about a sub-I species intent on poisoning its own atmosphere. In other words, maybe we're an ant among giants. Or, maybe more simply, aliens are reaching out to us, but we're just not listening—not in the right way, at least. In a study published back in 2020 in the journal Physical Review D, University of Edinburgh physicist Arjun Berera determined that quantum communication—that is, communication that leverages photon qubits rather than the more classical radio waves we use today—could maintain what's known as coherence over interstellar distances. This idea got Berera's colleague Lantham Boyle, a fellow theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, to start pondering if aliens throughout our galaxy (and beyond) could be using communication technologies outside of the classical realm (specifically quantum communication) that we simply can't hear. 'It's interesting that our galaxy (and the sea of cosmic background radiation in which it's embedded) 'does' permit interstellar quantum communication in certain frequency bands,' Boyle told back in September. This curiosity eventually led to the writing of a paper, which has been uploaded to the pre-print server arXiv, titled 'On Interstellar Quantum Communication and the Fermi Paradox.' In the paper, Boyle sets out to determine if an institute like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) could somehow incorporate quantum communication detection as part of their never-ending search for interstellar beings. While the answer to that question is technically yes, it's practically a very strong, no-bones-about-it 'no.' The problem is the size of the dish we'd need to construct in order to hear this quantum convo. For example, Boyle calculated that interstellar quantum communication would need to use wavelengths of at least 26.5 centimeters in order to avoid quantum depolarization due to the cosmic microwave background (CMB). That's all well and good, but that means that to communicate quantumly with Alpha Centauri—the nearest star to our own—we'd need a diffraction-limited telescope with a diameter of roughly 100 kilometers (60 miles), which is an area larger than the city of London. To put it mildly, SETI doesn't have that kind of budget. 'We have seen that the sender must place nearly all of their photons into our receiving telescope, which implies that the signal must be so highly directed that only the intended receiving telescope can hope to detect any sign of the communication,' Boyle wrote. 'This is in sharp contrast to classical communication, where one can broadcast photons indiscriminately into space, and an observer in any direction who detects a small fraction of those photons can still receive the message.' Of course, if such an advanced civilization is capable of overcoming these engineering challenges, it's also likely that they could just glimpse our little corner of the cosmos and know we're not technologically equipped to hear what they're sending. So, who knows? Maybe some silicon-based lifeforms orbiting a M-type star in the Large Magellanic Cloud have a regular quantum correspondence with the reigning Kardashev III civilization in Andromeda all about the peculiar apes on one particular spiral arm of the Milky Way that won't return their calls. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
