The winner of the Nobel Prize Enrico Fermi called his student Richard Garwin “the only real genius I have ever met”. Garwin, who died at the age of 97, is perhaps the most influential scientist in the 20th century that you have never heard of, because he produced a large part of his work under the constraints of national or commercial secrecy. For 40 years, working at IBM on an endless flow of research projects, he obtained 47 patents, in various fields, including magnetic resonance imaging, high -speed laser printers and touch screen monitors. Garwin, a polymathe who was an advisor to six American presidents, wrote articles on space weapons, pandemics, the elimination of radioactive waste, catastrophic risks and nuclear disarmament.
During a large part of this time, a greater secrecy remained: in 1951, at the age of 23, he had designed the first hydrogen bomb in the world.
Ten years earlier, Fermi had had an overview that an explosion of the atomic bomb would create pressures and temperatures extraordinarily high like those in the heart of the sun. It would be hot enough to trigger the fusion of hydrogen atoms, the dynamic engine that releases solar energy, with the potential to make an unlimited explosion of power. This is known as a thermonuclear explosion, reflecting the high temperature, unlike an atomic bomb, which begins at room temperature.
The detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945 gave proof of the first part of this concept, but in secret conferences at LOS Alamos Laboratory in the New Mexico this summer, Fermi admitted that although an explosive atomic bomb can act as the spark that lights hydrogen fuel, it could not find any way to keep the material.
In 1949, the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb and in a few months, President Harry S Truman announced that the United States would develop “the so-called hydrogen or superbomb”. The same year, Garwin graduated from the University of Chicago with a doctorate in physics and became an instructor in the Physical Department. Fermi invited him to join Los Alamos as a summer consultant, to help achieve Truman’s goal.
At the beginning of 1951, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam made the theoretical breakthrough: a bomb composed of two parts physically separated in a cylindrical case. A component was an atomic 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 which would compress the second component containing the hydrogen fuel. The impact of debris a moment later would finish the ignition. This one-two attack against hydrogen fuel was the theoretical idea that Teller asked Garwin to develop.
Garwin has transformed their approximate idea into a detailed design that remains high -end still today. The apparatus, named Ivy Mike, was assembled on the small island of Elugelab in the Atoll Enewata of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. Weighing 80 tonnes and three floors high, it looked more like an industrial site than a bomb. It was not delivered by an airplane but designed only to prove the concept.
On November 1, 1952, the explosion, which was 700 times more powerful than the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima or Nagasakai, was instantly wiped out of the earth and sprayed with 80 m of coral. In their place there was a mile crater in which the waters of the peaceful ocean sank. The cloud of mushrooms reached 80,000 feet in 2 minutes and continued to increase until it is four times higher than Mount Everest, extending over 60 miles in diameter. The nucleus was 30 times warmer than the heart of the sun, the fire ball 3 miles wide.
The sky shone like a red heat oven. For several minutes, many observers feared that the test be uncontrollable and that the whole atmosphere ignites.
None of the information mentioned the name of Garwin; He was an unknown scientist, a member of the Junior faculty of the University of Chicago. A month later, he joined the International Business Machines Corporation, IBM, in Yorktown Heights, New York. The post included an appointment of the faculty in Columbia, which gave it considerable freedom to continue its research interests and continue as government consultant at Los Alamos and, more and more, in Washington.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, the eldest son of Leona (née Schwartz), legal secretary, and Robert Garwin, professor of electronics in a technical high school per day and projectionist in a cinema at night, Dick was a prodigy; At the age of five, he repaired family devices.
After having attended public schools in Cleveland, in 1944, he entered the Western Reserve University box. In 1947, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in physics and married laws Levy; The couple moved to Chicago, where Garwin was taught by Fermi. He obtained a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate, aged 21, in 1949. In his doctoral exams, he marked the highest brands ever recorded at university.
In addition to his research in science applied for IBM, he worked for decades on ways of observing gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. Its detectors successfully observed undulations in 2015. This opened a new window on the universe, revealing the dynamics of black holes.
Throughout his career, he continued to advise the United States government on national defense issues. This included the hierarchy of objectives in the Soviet Union, war involving nuclear weapons submarines and satellite recognition and communication systems. According to the supporter of the reduction of nuclear arsenals, he advised the American president Jimmy Carter during the negotiations with the Soviet president Leonid Brejnev on the Treaty of Strategic Limitation of Strategic Weapons of 1979. He thought that the United States should nevertheless maintain a strategic balance of nuclear energy with the Soviet Union and oppose the policies that could disrupt: ” Russians alive than dead Americans. “
After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1993, he chaired the advisory advice for the control of armaments and non-proliferation of the State Department until 2001. In 2002, he received the National Medal of Sciences, the highest scientific price in the United States, and in 2016 Presidential Freedom Medal, the highest civil prize in the country. By presenting the price, Barack Obama pointed out that Garwin “never encountered any problem that he did not want to solve”.
Laws died in 2018. Garwin is survived by two sons and a daughter, five grandchildren and a great-grandfather.
