What do you do if you’re a brilliant physicist who co-designed the hydrogen bomb (“Big Mike”) and then needed to use your talent in other ways, forever? Then you are Richard Garwin.
You died this year, after working for many decades on arms control inside a number of international groups. You worked for 60 years in the JASON group that gives deep and accurate scientific analysis to the government, banishing shoddy thinking from Star Wars defense initiative, the half-baked hafnium bomb idea, and ill-thought-out attempts to exit the ban on nuclear testing.
You also devised effective ways to return spy satellite data with charge-coupled devices rather than parachuted exposed film rolls (really!). You held 47 patents, even for washing mussels (the shellfish). You collaborated in groups that addressed the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors in 2011.
Touching the lives of everyone who takes JPEG images with a camera or a smartphone, you pushed the application of the remarkable math of the Fast Fourier Transform to image processing. You advised 13 US Presidents – a long reach because you lived to age 97 and because you never quit.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
Source: Nature 641: 1097 (29 May 2025)
