Who is John Galt?
Occasionally, I've bumped into obscure people who DID change the world as we know it.
1. The entire chip manufacturing industry depends on photolithography as a method of patterning microelectronic circuits. The silicon chip is covered by a polymer that is exposed to ultraviolet light that passes through a mask before it is focused on a chip surface. This light generates strong acid in the photoresist agent. The acid digests and weakens the polymer, so it can be removed by an organic solvent. Then something else is deposited onto the deprotected surface, and the polymer mask is subsequently removed. This operation is repeated many times over, and the circuit gradually emerges.
In the early 1970s, a young chemist at IBM discovered a method for generating photoacids that has been in use ever since. He recognized that irradiation of triarylsulfonium salts of anions that are bases of superacids releases carbocations and radical cations that further react with the progenitor cation and the polymer matrix to eventually eliminate a proton that combines with these bases to make exceptionally strong acids.
Today he is a professor in a third-rate chemistry department in a second-tier university. He is forgotten by the world, yet the whole microchip industry (said to be the linchpin of the age) originated through his research.
2. In the late 1960s the Air Force started to monitor Russian ICBM launches from space; they needed to quantify certain parameters of exhaust gases. As the infrared radiation penetrates the whole atmosphere out into space, reconstructing thermal spectra required modeling of radiative heat transfer through the atmospheric column. They developed the first exact model for radiative transfer, which they called HITRAN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITRAN
CO2 in the globally averaged atmospheric column already absorbs all radiation it can absorb, so the fact that extra CO2 added to the atmosphere should cause warming is inobvious, as the effect originates in the stratosphere; it is caused by tailing gradient in the CO2 concentration at great heights. As it can be washed out by other greenhouse gases present there, calculating the effect is quite a challenge.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/pdf/Radmath.pdf
Before 1956, no one thought that possible, until atmospheric scientists studying radiative transport and climate began using computers. As the first computer models were very crude, and many approximations were made, no one believed these calculations anyway. The decisive breakthrough in this field came in the late 1960s and the early 1970s from using HITRAN code that made few approximations and integrated into the calculation a huge molecular spectroscopy database.
A few years ago I've met the person who developed this program, from which the entire global warming alarmism emanated. He's working in a small company near Boston; an obscure old chap wearing a baseball cap, his T-shirt stained by coffee.
These are just two of the most memorable encounters. I had many more.
Who is John Galt?
1. The entire chip manufacturing industry depends on photolithography as a method of patterning microelectronic circuits. The silicon chip is covered by a polymer that is exposed to ultraviolet light that passes through a mask before it is focused on a chip surface. This light generates strong acid in the photoresist agent. The acid digests and weakens the polymer, so it can be removed by an organic solvent. Then something else is deposited onto the deprotected surface, and the polymer mask is subsequently removed. This operation is repeated many times over, and the circuit gradually emerges.
In the early 1970s, a young chemist at IBM discovered a method for generating photoacids that has been in use ever since. He recognized that irradiation of triarylsulfonium salts of anions that are bases of superacids releases carbocations and radical cations that further react with the progenitor cation and the polymer matrix to eventually eliminate a proton that combines with these bases to make exceptionally strong acids.
Today he is a professor in a third-rate chemistry department in a second-tier university. He is forgotten by the world, yet the whole microchip industry (said to be the linchpin of the age) originated through his research.
2. In the late 1960s the Air Force started to monitor Russian ICBM launches from space; they needed to quantify certain parameters of exhaust gases. As the infrared radiation penetrates the whole atmosphere out into space, reconstructing thermal spectra required modeling of radiative heat transfer through the atmospheric column. They developed the first exact model for radiative transfer, which they called HITRAN.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITRAN
CO2 in the globally averaged atmospheric column already absorbs all radiation it can absorb, so the fact that extra CO2 added to the atmosphere should cause warming is inobvious, as the effect originates in the stratosphere; it is caused by tailing gradient in the CO2 concentration at great heights. As it can be washed out by other greenhouse gases present there, calculating the effect is quite a challenge.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/pdf/Radmath.pdf
Before 1956, no one thought that possible, until atmospheric scientists studying radiative transport and climate began using computers. As the first computer models were very crude, and many approximations were made, no one believed these calculations anyway. The decisive breakthrough in this field came in the late 1960s and the early 1970s from using HITRAN code that made few approximations and integrated into the calculation a huge molecular spectroscopy database.
A few years ago I've met the person who developed this program, from which the entire global warming alarmism emanated. He's working in a small company near Boston; an obscure old chap wearing a baseball cap, his T-shirt stained by coffee.
These are just two of the most memorable encounters. I had many more.
Who is John Galt?