Richard L. Garwin, a Creator of the Hydrogen Bomb, Dies at 97
Many scientists contributed to the final result, but he was the one who, as a young physicist, designed the world’s most powerful weapon. He went on to advise a dozen presidents.
這是一張黑白照片，他站在一排電腦控制台中間。他穿著白襯衫，繫著領帶，袖子捲起來。1960 年，理查德·L·加溫博士在紐約哥倫比亞大學的 IBM 沃森實驗室。在那裡，以及後來實驗室於 1970 年遷至紐約州威斯特徹斯特縣，他開展了一系列研究項目，為電腦、通訊和醫學領域帶來了技術進步。圖片來源：美聯社
Richard L. Garwin, an architect of America’s hydrogen bomb, who shaped defense policies for postwar governments and laid the groundwork for insights into the structure of the universe as well as for computer marvels like touch-screen monitors, died on Tuesday at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his son Thomas.
A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.
理查德·L·加溫是美國氫彈的設計者，他制定了戰後各國政府的國防政策，為洞察宇宙結構以及觸控螢幕等電腦奇蹟奠定了基礎，於週二在紐約州斯卡斯代爾的家中去世，享年 97 歲。
他的兒子托馬斯證實了他的死訊。
加爾文博士是一位博學的物理學家和地緣政治思想家，他在 23 歲時就研發了世界上第一顆聚變炸彈。他後來成為多位總統的科學顧問，設計了五角大廈的武器和衛星偵察系統，主張蘇美核恐怖平衡是冷戰生存的最佳選擇，並倡導可核查的核武控制協議。
雖然他的導師、諾貝爾獎得主恩里科·費米稱他為“我見過的唯一真正的天才”，但加爾文博士並不是氫彈之父。匈牙利出生的物理學家愛德華·泰勒 (Edward Teller) 和波蘭數學家斯坦尼斯拉夫·烏拉姆 (Stanislaw Ulam) 提出了原子彈理論，他們可能更有資格獲得這個綽號。
無影無蹤的貼文
Making Economics Relevant Again
It was only a decade ago that economics seemed to be an old and tired discipline. The field no longer had intellectual giants like John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman who were shaping public policy by the sheer force of their ideas. Instead, it was devolving into a technical discipline that was even less comprehensible than it was relevant.
Some Wall Street firms had become hesitant to hire Ph.D. economists, and the number of undergraduates majoring in the subject was plummeting. “A good deal of modern economic theory,” John Cassidy wrote in an article titled “The Decline of Economics” that appeared in The New Yorker in 1996, “simply doesn’t matter much.”
Over the last decade, however, economics has begun to get its groove back. Armed with newly powerful tools for analyzing data, economists have dug into real-world matters and tried to understand human behavior. Economists have again become storytellers, and, again, they matter.
They have explained why Americans don’t save enough money — and come up with clever ideas to increase savings. They have discovered that modest increases in the minimum wage don’t actually destroy many jobs — and thus made possible the recent state-by-state push to raise minimum wages. Since the mid-1990s, the number of undergraduates majoring in economics has risen sharply.
But there are more than a few economists who believe that the renaissance has come with a big downside. They argue that the new research often consists of cute findings — which inevitably get covered in the press — about trivial subjects, like game shows, violent movies or sports gambling. Economics may be popular again, but there still is no one like a modern-day Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes.
So when I recently set out to conduct my second annual survey of economists, I decided to try to uncover the next best thing. In its first incarnation, the survey simply asked for the names of the next generation of stars specializing in the economics of everyday life. This year, though, I went the other way — toward the big picture — and asked which economists were managing to do influential work on the crucial questions facing modern society.
Who, in other words, was using economics to make the world a better place?
I received dozens of diverse responses, but there was still a runaway winner. The small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at M.I.T., led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, were mentioned far more often than anyone else.
Ms. Duflo, Mr. Banerjee and their colleagues have a simple, if radical, goal. They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference. And they are trying to do so in a way that skirts the long-running ideological debate between aid groups and their critics.
“Surely the most important societal question economics can help answer is why so many people are crushingly poor and what can be done about it,” David Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said. The macro issues (like how to build a democracy) remain maddeningly complex, Mr. Romer noted. But thanks in part to the poverty lab, we now know much more about how to improve daily life in the world’s poorest countries.
The basic idea behind the lab is to rely on randomized trials — similar to the ones used in medical research — to study antipoverty programs. This helps avoid the classic problem with the evaluation of aid programs: it’s often impossible to separate cause and effect. If aid workers start supplying textbooks to schools in one town and the students there start doing better, it could be because of the textbooks. Or it could be that the town also happened to hire a new school administrator.
In a randomized trial, researchers would choose a set of schools and then separate into them two groups. The groups would be similar in every respect except for the fact that one would receive new textbooks and one wouldn’t. With a test like this, as Vinod Thomas, the head of independent evaluation at the World Bank, says, “You can be much more accurate and much more clear about the effect of a program.”
The approach can sound cruel, because researchers knowingly deny help to some of the people they’re studying. But what, really, is the alternative? It’s not as if someone has offered to buy new textbooks for every child in the world. With a randomized study, you at least learn whether your aid money is well spent.
Ms. Duflo, who’s 35, and Mr. Banerjee, 46, came to economics from opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum. She was studying history at the École Normale Supérieure, one of the most prestigious colleges in France, when she decided that the more scientific approach of economics offered a better way to address global poverty. He dropped out of the similarly prestigious Indian Statistical Institute after two and a half months of studying math; he found the subject too abstract.
By 2003, they were both working on development at M.I.T. At the time, randomized trials were becoming more popular in the United States, but they were still fairly rare in the developing world. So along with Sendhil Mullainathan, a colleague, Ms. Duflo and Mr. Banerjee founded the lab. (It’s named for the father of an M.I.T. alumnus, who owned the exclusive right to sell Toyotas in Saudi Arabia.) Day to day, the lab is now run by Rachel Glennerster, who came from the International Monetary Fund, and it has become a magnet for some of the world’s best development economists, including Marianne Bertrand, Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel.
Mr. Kremer and two other economists, in fact, did the textbook experiment — and found that textbooks didn’t improve test scores or graduation rates in rural western Kenya. (The students were probably too diverse, in terms of preparation and even language, to be helped by a single curriculum.) On the other hand, another randomized trial in the same part of Kenya found that treating children for intestinal worms did lift school performance. That study has led to an expansion of deworming programs and, as Alan Krueger of Princeton says, is “probably improving millions of lives.”
Mr. Banerjee estimates, very conservatively, that $11 billion a year — out of roughly $100 billion in annual development aid worldwide — could be spent on programs that have been proved to work. Unfortunately, nowhere near $11 billion is being spent on such programs. “Right now, we don’t have a lot of things that have been taken up by the policy world,” he said. “But the policy lag is usually substantial. Now that we have a lot more results, I expect that in the next 10 years we will have a lot more impact.”
Mr. Banerjee and Ms. Duflo may not be a modern-day Keynes or Friedman. But they have still managed to do something rather profound. They have brought together the best of the new economics and the best of the old.
As has been the trend over the last decade, they have plunged into the world around them, refusing to accept the idea that economics is merely an extension of math. Yet no one can accuse them of working on some little problem that doesn’t matter.
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