True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, the most influential scientist you never heard of

By Joel N. Shurkin (Prometheus Books, 2017), 308 pages, ISBN 9781633882232, $25 hardcover.

Although many Forum on Physics and Society members have heard of Richard Garwin, for others it is probably fair to say that Joel Shurkin is correct in describing him as “the most influential scientist you never heard of.” Shurkin writes that, according to legend, Garwin was described by his thesis advisor Enrico Fermi as the “first real genius he had ever met”. With this introduction to Garwin along with what little I know about him I looked forward to learning more about this remarkable man but unfortunately Shurkin writes very little about Garwin himself. Most of the book describes Garwin's work. We learn hardly anything about who he is, how he worked, and what methods, techniques, or unusual ways of thinking he applied to his work that set him apart from so many others doing similar things. Garwin’s relative anonymity seems to have stemmed from the secret nature of his most influential work, his professional position, and the man himself. Garwin spent most of his professional life working for IBM where his contract stipulated that he could spend one-third of his time working for the government.

This book deals mostly with this one-third of Garwin’s work as a consultant primarily in defense related areas and occasionally elsewhere, but it also describes some of the work he did for IBM and in physics research. Garwin’s work in physics includes the parity experiment done in cooperation with Leon Lederman, and consulting with Lederman’s group at CERN in Geneva. Regarding his work at IBM there are relatively brief descriptions of prescient and inventive proposals for devices ranging from the laser printer which after some hesitation IBM built, to others like the touch screen and a heads up cockpit display that were too far ahead of their time and consequently were only developed decades after Garwin proposed them.

Garwin’s defense work occupies the bulk of the book. His first major defense project was at Los Alamos where he designed a working H-bomb device based on the principles proposed by Teller and Ulam. Most of his subsequent defense work was mainly as consultant and advisor to government agencies and presidents. He was a long standing member of the JASON consulting group and President’s Science Advisory Committee. In these capacities he worked on many things including designs of technological barriers across the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam war, arms control treaties, intercontinental ballistic missile systems, and anti-ballistic missile systems.

In addition to this defense work, Garwin was involved in an advanced design for an air traffic control system and the proposed but never built Super Sonic Transport airliner. He also proposed in 1968 a digital patient information system hooked up to a large and fully networked database that is very similar to what is only now being implemented on a large scale in hospitals and U.S. doctors’ offices. Regrettably, I found enough technical and historical errors in the description of Garwin’s work to cast doubt on the overall accuracy of the author’s accounts of some of these events.

Perhaps the book's most telling insight into Garwin’s persona is summed up by what Shurkin describes as a “Garwin joke” which roughly goes as follows: Somehow Garwin and two other men are arrested during the French Revolution and sentenced to the guillotine. The first two men are spared because the guillotine malfunctions when the blade stops one inch above their necks. When Garwin is placed in the device he looks up at the machine and says “I think I know what your problem is."

This sums up the book’s description of Garwin’s dispassionate, focused, and usually brilliant approach to technological problems and why he was such a sought-after member of the many government panels he served on. His intellect was respected by all and his amoral approach to the consequences of the weapons he worked on and the policies he critiqued made him a particularly trustworthy colleague. Shurkin describes Garwin as gruff but with a sense of humor and relates that William Perry, a former Secretary of Defense, said that Garwin could be “an acquired taste. I liked him a lot. He is very smart and sometimes impatient with anyone not quite as smart as him.” Garwin is described as being famous in Washington for tearing apart admirals and humiliating generals. That is about all that one can find in this book, a book which is neither a personal nor a scientific biography but more a brief history of the many projects that Garwin was involved in. There is much more to be written about who Garwin really is.

Martin Epstein
California State University, Los Angeles
epstein@calstatela.edu

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.