Matthew Bunn in The Conversation:
Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein’s – who called Garwin “the only true genius” he’d ever met.
A polymath curious about almost everything, he was one of the few people elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine for pathbreaking contributions in all of those fields. He held 47 patents and published over 500 scientific papers. A giant trove of his papers and talks can be found in the Garwin Archive at the Federation of American Scientists.
Garwin was best known for having done the engineering design for the first-ever thermonuclear explosion, turning the Teller-Ulam idea of triggering a fusion reaction with radiation pressure into a working hydrogen bomb – one with roughly 700 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. He did that over the summer when he was 23.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.