- Finkbeiner, Ann.
The Jasons.
New York: Viking, 2006.
ISBN 0-670-03489-4.
-
Shortly after the launch of Sputnik thrust science and technology
onto the front lines of the Cold War, a group of Manhattan Project
veterans led by John Archibald Wheeler decided that the government
needed the very best advice from the very best people to navigate
these treacherous times, and that the requisite talent was not
to be found within the weapons labs and other government
research institutions, but in academia and industry, whence
it should be recruited to act as an independent advisory panel.
This fit well with the mandate of the recently founded
ARPA (now DARPA), which was
chartered to pursue “high-risk, high-payoff” projects,
and needed sage counsel to minimise the former and
maximise the latter.
The result was Jason (the name is a reference to Jason of the
Argonauts, and is always used in the singular when referring to the
group, although the members are collectively called
“Jasons”). It is unlikely such a scientific dream
team has ever before been assembled to work together on difficult
problems. Since its inception in 1960, a total of thirteen known
members of Jason have won Nobel prizes before or after joining
the group. Members include Eugene Wigner, Charles Townes (inventor
of the laser), Hans Bethe (who figured out the nuclear reaction
that powers the stars), polymath and quark discoverer Murray
Gell-Mann, Freeman Dyson, Val Fitch, Leon Lederman, and more, and
more, and more.
Unlike advisory panels who attend meetings at the Pentagon
for a day or two and draft summary reports, Jason members
gather for six weeks in the summer and work together intensively,
“actually solving differential equations”, to produce
original results, sometimes inventions, for their sponsors.
The Jasons always remained independent—while the sponsors would
present their problems to them, it was the Jasons who chose what
to work on.
Over the history of Jason, missile defence and verification of nuclear
test bans have been a main theme, but along the way they have
invented adaptive optics, which has revolutionised ground-based
astronomy, explored technologies for
detecting antipersonnel
mines, and created, in the Vietnam era, the modern sensor-based
“electronic battlefield”.
What motivates top-ranked, well-compensated academic scientists to
spend their summers in windowless rooms pondering messy questions
with troubling moral implications? This is a theme the author returns
to again and again in the extensive interviews with Jasons recounted
in this book. The answer seems to be something so
outré on the modern university
campus as to be difficult to vocalise: patriotism, combined with
a desire so see that if such things be done, they should be done as
wisely as possible.
October 2006 