VG Richard Gawin interview (1987): designed first hydrogen bomb and was at IBM
aip.org
aip.org
Aaserud: What about theory versus experiment? Did you have any problems with that, or did you do both as easily? I notice on your publication list that they are very interspersed.
Garwin: Well, there is not much theory there, only minor theories. No, I'm an experimenter. The way to be an experimenter is to be able to design an experiment, to see in your mind by analysis how things are going to work. So there's a lot of what would be called theory or anyhow applied physics, applied mathematics, in the design of experiments. From that point of view, I have quite a good theoretical competence, but not from the point of view of pure theory, of field theories or of inventing new theoretical approaches.
So the President's Science Advisory Committee was formed and studied things. Where do we stand relative to the Russians? What is it they can do with these new technologies? What is the relative future? Jerrold Zacharias, of MIT was the spearhead of the secondary-school education reform, the Physical Sciences Study Committee, Biological Studies Committee, Chemistry Revolution and so on, and that was all very good, in my opinion. And also people asked, well, what is it technology can do for us? And it was I guess at that time, or a little bit earlier, that various people were involved in making the U-2 program, which was a simple recognition, long resisted by the Air Force, that the 35-mm camera exists, and that you don't necessarily get better pictures by going to larger film size and very long focal lengths. Those same people, Edwin Land and Ed Purcell and others — myself to some extent — made possible satellite observation as well. President Johnson said about the whole space program, that if it had just given us satellite photography, it would have paid for itself many times over. In fact that wasn't the "space program" at all. It had nothing to do with NASA. It was people, Land and Purcell, trying to do something specific for the country, rather than what NASA tends to do, which is to do things for NASA and hope that something will fall out of that which will help somebody some place — it's a totally self-serving bureaucratic enterprise.
But what was usual was, when the magnet got delivered, I had the crane put it down next to the cyclotron which was going to give us the Pi mesons coming in, and I had designed some air bearings for the magnet. We put some thin steel plates on the floor. And so that night after my magnet had been delivered, I went in and connected the tygon tube to the air bearings, and opened the valve, and now I could push the magnet around with one hand. Of course, the first thing I discovered was that the floor was not level. And if the floor is off by a milli-radian, that is, twentieth of a degree, that 80 ton magnet — 80,000 kilograms — is pushing you with a horizontal force of 80 kilograms. So you levitate it; it's very nice, it sits there, it's obviously not stationary any more; and then you notice that it is springing on you, accelerating like an enormous boat, and you try to push it back and it doesn't stop, and then you realize that all you need to do is turn off the valve and it stops. So then we did that.