Innovations of the Big Dig 3 – Scheme-Z => Zakim Bridge, Conclusion

Here’s the last of the major innovations described in the WGBH podcast, The Big Dig, along with my take on how it all turned out.

Along with the straight construction challenges of the Dig, described in the previous posts, Fred Salvucci had a geometric challenge at the north end of the Central Artery tunnel. The road there had to rise up to connect with the elevated decks of I-93 going north, with Rt 1 heading east towards the Tobin Bridge, with Storrow Drive heading west along the south bank of the Charles, and also somehow get across the Charles without wrecking it and the Orange Line subway that ran nearby. People would need to drive on all these connections at speed with minimal merging, something that had caused thousands of accidents on the old artery. 

His team worked through 31 different plans for how to hook up all these roads, and finally settled on the 26th, Scheme Z. This almost killed the entire project. It was a huge mass of multi-level road decks, rising over a hundred feet into the air:

Model in MassDOT office, 1990, credit Charlie_MTA

This is looking southeast from Cambridge, with the Charles River in the upper right. The two towers support a bridge that would rise up out of the tunnel, and then all the connections would be those loops on the Cambridge side. It would have added as many lane-miles as depressing the Artery removed! Everyone really, really hated it. 

Yet Salvucci stood by it through the storm of criticism. By 1990 he had been working on the Dig for about 15 years. He and the governor, Michael Dukakis, had gotten the project through all the state-level blockages, and then through federal approval. With Tip O’Neill’s help, they even got it through a veto by Ronald Reagan. 

[Aside: what is it with Republicans and public works projects? The only one who backed them was Eisenhower with the Interstate Highway system, and he justified that in military terms. Herbert Hoover actually hated the famous dam that bears his name because it displaces private power utilities in LA. That was a sly dig by FDR. Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes and Trump built nothing of note. Manhattan has been jammed for the last decade because then GOP NJ governor Chris Christie refused to allow a new tunnel to be built to it under the Hudson.] 

Scheme Z was the last major piece to work out, and to Salvucci’s mind it was the best solution. All those lightweights who were just then starting to pay attention to this vast effort had no idea of what really needed to be done.

1990, though, was his last year on the project. Dukakis was term-limited out as governor, and replaced by the Republican Bill Weld. That meant that Salvucci was replaced as well as Secretary of Transportation. The new administration knew that the Dig had to carry on, but wanted nothing to do with the Scheme Z controversy. They cast about for new designers and had the fortune to find two brilliant ones, Christian Menn, a world-famous Swiss bridge designer, and the young Miguel Rosales, born in Guatemala and trained at MIT:

Christian Menn (1927-2018) and Miguel Rosales (1961-)

Menn, who was nearly retired, did the concept for the bridge, and Rosales, who had graduated only a couple of years earlier, headed the design. He still has an active office in Boston and has since built bridges all over the world. They replaced the spaghetti of elevated roads with a single immensely wide span, the now-famous Zakim-Bunker-Hill bridge:

Underside of Zakim-Bunker Hill bridge looking south, credit Mathew Miller

It has become an icon of the city!  It’s the only actually attractive feature of the roadworks themselves. It solved the tangle problem by having a lane cantilevered off of each side for entrances and exits, and then distributing the other ramps on both sides of the river. It’s named for Leonard P. Zakim, a Boston activist, civil rights leader, and friend of the Dukakis’s. Bruce Springsteen knew him too, and played “Thunder Road” at the bridge’s opening. The obelisk tower peaks resemble the Bunker Hill Monument in nearby Charlestown. It was actually the widest bridge in the country until the reconstruction of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco was finished in 2013.

Here is that same south tower under construction during a tour that some friends and I got of the Dig in April 2000:

Peak of the South Tower while the cable stays are being strung, 4/22/20

We got to climb up those scaffolds and look out over the city, something no one will ever be able to do again. Looking north from high in the tower:

The north tower of the Zakim bridge from the top of the south tower, 4/22/20

Those elevated roads to the left and right are now gone. That’s the kind of mess that the Dig replaced.

It did have some glitches in its development. Menn was visiting it in 1999 as it was under construction and noticed that the cables weren’t properly attached to the support beams on the deck. Grrr, said the project managers, and took two years to correct it. 

When it did open in 2003, people noticed that multi-colored lights had been installed on it. They’re normally set to make its white cables glow blue at night, but can be set to any color. ”Wasting taxpayer money!” many screamed, but everyone else loved it. They’ve been set to red-white-and-blue when the Patriots are in the playoffs, to all purple when Prince died, and all green for the death of honorary Irishman Mayor Tom Menino.

Overall, the Big Dig had a slew of problems. Corrupt contractors used sub-standard concrete in the slurry walls, the light fixtures corroded way too quickly, there was unexpected flooding in the lowest roads, and worst of all, a too-heavy ceiling panel that pulled out of its epoxy mounts and killed someone. The general problem was too much cost-cutting. The project ran way over-schedule and over-budget, and some bad compromises were made. The ceiling panels, for instance, were supposed to be much lighter metal panels, but they saved some money by making them with concrete, and that turned out to not save money at all.

Yet the Dig overall saved the city in a quite direct way. The Artery was a nightmare, and has been replaced by the beautiful Rose Kennedy Greenway. The Seaport District, which used to be abandoned warehouses and parking lots, has had about $20 billion of investment in it since 2000. That’s more than the $15 billion Dig itself. It has now had about 70 major building projects, including the Boston Convention Center, the striking Institute for Contemporary Art, and the best outdoor music venue in the area, the Leader Bank (formerly Harbor Lights) Pavilion. The fill from all the tunnels was used to cap the waste dumps on Spectacle Island out in the harbor, and it’s now a striking park.

The city became cleaner, greener, and more open. The result has been skyrocketing real estate prices! There’s a down side to making your area more attractive. Yet few would say that noisy and dirty highways should be kept in order to keep apartment rents low. Highways used to be Hallmarks of Progess, and now they’re eyesores in places too poor to get rid of them. The Dig showed one way to go forward, but it was such an expensive lesson that few other places can follow.

Innovations of the Big Dig 2 – Slurry, Jacking, Freezing

Let me again recommend the WGBH podcast, The Big Dig, which was the inspiration for these posts. It’s full of great stories, but I’d like to concentrate on the innovations that made this vast project possible. Last time I talked about a key part of the concept, moving the ugly and filthy Central Artery into a tunnel. The tunnel had to be dug while the Artery was still active above it, but how? The key was:

Slurry Walls

This is a technique pioneered in Italy for the construction of the Milan Red Line in the 1950s. Its first use in the US was in Boston in the 1970s, where it was used for the Red Line extension in Cambridge from Harvard Square to Alewife The driver of the Big Dig, Fred Salvucci, was involved in that project, and learned about it there. It works like this:

Credit Sanjay Singh

A big claw excavates a slot in the ground, and as it works the open space is filled with a slurry of a clay material called bentonite. The slurry is semi-liquid, so the claw can drop down through it to get at the soil at the bottom. It holds the sides apart during the digging. Once the slot is done, a cage of reinforcing rods is put in, filled with concrete, and the slurry is pumped out. The result is a wall that extends down into the earth. 

The Big Dig was far and away the largest use of slurry walls in North America. 8000 meters were built, to a depth of about 40 meters. Two were built, one for each side of the tunnel. Beams to support the above-ground Central Artery were then laid across them. Then the space between was excavated, and more beams were put in to support the walls. The whole space down to the tunnel level was dug out, and then the tunnel was roofed and the space above filled in.

I actually got to see the tunnel being built on a tour in April 2000:

Inside the Central Artery Tunnel while it is roofed, April 2000

The slurry walls are on the sides. The space is held open by huge I-beams like the one in the middle. Here’s one being lowered in from way above us:

We were walking around amidst all this activity with people working high overhead. I was thinking “Civilians really shouldn’t be here,” but the Dig had remarkably few accidents for a project its size. I did pick up a big bolt as a souvenir:

So if it collapses, you’ll know why.

Tunnel Jacking and Ground Freezing

The slurry wall was fine for digging the main channel for the Artery, but wouldn’t do for the harbor tunnel. It had to cross beneath the dozen railroad tracks for the city’s main train station, and be dug while the trains were in operation. The ground beneath the tracks was just glop, so it couldn’t be excavated from underneath. The answer was to do enormous concrete castings of the tunnel sections and ram them through underneath the tracks. Here are giant hydraulic rams pushing a casting forward:

The huge brown steel cylinders are the rams. As they moved, those shorter cylinders would be put in as spacers. From above it looked like this:

This is looking south from South Station. The main tracks are in the center, and three tunnels (one on the bottom, one on the left, and one in the upper left) are converging to merge beneath the tracks before going under Fort Point Channel and then Boston harbor. The tunnels can be dug down from above and then the sections cast and rammed into place. 

Yet there were some spots that could not be supported by big beams above, like right next to the tracks. That’s where ground freezing came in:

The black pipes are carrying a saline solution cooled to well below 0^o C. They run through pipes underground and keep the soil frozen while tunnels are being rammed beneath them. They had to maintain this for a few months until the tunnels themselves could support the ground above them. It was artificial permafrost at latitude 42^o . They timed it so this was done in the winter and spring! Summer heat would have screwed it up.

Fortunately, they did not have to do either of these for the water crossings. There they could excavate trenches at the bottom of Fort Point Channel and the Harbor, float the tunnel sections over them, and then sink them into place. The sinking took days, but they were placed to centimeter precision. The underwater parts of the Dig were actually relatively easy, exactly because they didn’t have to worry about existing structures.

Next up, fixing the worst design flaw in the whole project – Scheme Z.

Innovations of The Big Dig 1 – the Concept

WGBH, the main Boston public radio station, has just done a great series on The Big Dig. You can find the podcast here: The Big Dig, and the start of the series on Youtube here: The Big Dig began with activists who hated highways. It’s written and narrated by Ian Coss, and goes over the full history of the massive project. His main interest in what it says about how we’ll deal with even bigger projects in the future, like protecting cities from sea level rise. It was vastly expensive, about $16B, but saved Boston in a direct way. The entire story is fascinating, but let me concentrate on one part of it, the brilliant innovations that made the whole thing possible. There’s a lot to cover, so let me do this in more than one part. Let’s start with the key concept:

Fred Salvucci in 1989, credit Framingham News, Paul Lehto

Combining the Artery and Harbor Tunnels – The entire Big Dig project was driven by one Fred Salvucci, a Boston-born MIT-trained civil engineer who was an anti-highway activist in the 1960s. His own grandmother’s house had been taken by one of the projects, leaving her with nothing. In the early 70s he was in charge of transportation for the city of Boston under Mayor Kevin White. He was at all the meetings arguing about what should be built, and his opponent was often a road guy named Bill Reynolds. In spite of their differences, they would go drinking together at Jacob Wirth’s, a downtown dive with sawdust on the floor. It’s now gone, displaced by the glossier Boston that the Dig helped create. As Salvucci recalls, Reynolds said to him:

“You know, I’ve been trying to figure out why you guys don’t like highways, cuz highways are beautiful things. They’ve built America, they’ve built a middle class. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason you don’t like highways is because the elevated Central Artery is such a big, ugly, dysfunctional thing. It’s like a giant neon sign flashing saying: highways are bad, highways are ugly, highways don’t work. So I’ve come to the conclusion that to get the root of the problem, we have to tear down the Central Artery and rebuild it underground.”

Salvucci replied “Gee Bill, that’s a wonderful image, but we’re gonna have to put a sign up at the Charles River: city closed for alterations, come back in 10 years. How the hell are we gonna do this thing without shutting the city down?”

Reynolds told him to just solve it, and that’s just what he did. Salvucci would walk under the Artery from City Hall for lunch, and the plan formed. There was nothing underneath the Artery. If the elevated highway supports could be held up by putting beams beneath them, the whole tunnel could be dug beneath it.

Yet that wasn’t enough. There was a competing massive infrastructure project, one to build a third tunnel under Boston harbor to connect the city with its airport. Business people desperately wanted the Tunnel because the existing tunnels were small and jammed. I remember one time when a truck lost its brakes in one of the tunnels and jammed itself between the roof and a BMW. That shut down the city for a day.

Transit people didn’t care about the Tunnel because there was already a good subway line to the airport, and they hated the Artery more. Worse, building a new Tunnel would destroy the neighborhoods of East Boston when it emerged from under the water. Tip O’Neill, the great congressman from North Cambridge and then Speaker of the House, would never agree to anything that harmed his constituents.

That’s when Reynolds re-appeared in the story. He called Salvucci from a pay phone by South Station and told him “You have to come down here.” They met and Reynolds showed him a Tunnel route that would come up on the airport itself, and not take a single East Boston property. It would be longer, and have to go under the South Station railroad tracks and under a waterway called Fort Point Channel, but it could be done.

The only way to resolve the conflict between the opponents of the Artery and the proponents of the Tunnel was to do both. It would cost an enormous amount, but Tip O’Neill would handle that part. They eventually named the new Artery for him! 

Here’s what the Central Artery and Tunnel (CAT) Project (its official name) ended up being:

The buried Artery goes just about where the elevated Artery used to run, right through the heart of downtown, and the Tunnel swings way around to avoid Eastie. 

This was all non-obvious. Depress this enormous highway while keeping it open? Double the cost by building a harbor tunnel too? Madness! Yet both had to be done, and the only way to get enough support was to do them both. Fortunately, Mike Dukakis was elected governor in 1974, and be brought in Salvucci as head of the Dept of Transportation. There he was, only 34, and about to start the most momentous reworking of this ancient city that it had ever seen. Yet how could it be done? That’s for next time.

Obscure Creators of the World #2: Robert Dennard

Many people have heard of Moore’s Law, that the number of transistors that can be put on a chip doubles every two years. Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, noticed this in 1965, and it’s held true pretty much ever since. It has led to the fantastic improvement in the performance and cost of semiconductors, and has changed the world. I actually got to hear Moore give the keynote speech at a conference a few years ago, and he got a standing ovation! I have never seen that at any other technical talk.

Yet unless you’re in the chip game, you have almost certainly not heard of Robert Dennard. He’s the one who laid out just to accomplish that doubling, how to maintain that incredible rate of growth without having the chips melt. In a paper in 1974, Design of Ion-implanted MOSFET’s with very small physical dimensions, he and five other authors from IBM proposed what has since been called Dennard Scaling. After Moore’s paper itself, this is probably the most important paper ever published about chips.

The above figure is taken from his paper. It shows how to go from a transistor with a gate length of 5 um down to one with a gate length of 1 um, a scaling of 5. The gate length is the distance from one terminal of the transistor to the other, and the smaller it is, the less time it takes to switch. Yet at the same time that the gate length is shrunk, the oxide that separates the gate terminal from the silicon must also be thinned or else the channel will not turn on. The density of doping in the two side terminals must also be increased, or else the junctions will overlap and again the transistor won’t work. In addition to all that, the voltage on the gate must be reduced or else the transistor will draw too much power. All of these constituted Dennard’s scaling rules, and they worked for the next 40 years.

Yet this wasn’t Dennard’s only big contribution. In 1967, when he was 35, he filed a patent (US3387286A) on the one-transistor-one-capacitor memory cell, a circuit that has since become known as Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM. You’re using some right now as you’re reading this. It’s the answer to one of the primary problems in computers – how to store the data that the machine deals with in a way that is fast and cheap:

It consists of an array of tiny little capacitors, each of which can store a charge that can represent a one or a zero. One end of the capacitor is tied to a transistor, which can connect it to a “bit line” to be read or written. The gate control of the transistor is tied to a “word line” which turns it on, and enables a whole column of bits to be accessed at once. The transistors and capacitors can be arrayed as dense arrays called mats, and a lot of mats can be fitted on a chip. Current chips can fit 300 million bits onto one mm² of silicon. That could hold about 40 novels on a dot the size of this: o.

The brilliant insight here was that the charges don’t have to be permanently stored. They tend to leak away over time, but the circuitry can refresh it every so often by doing a read and then a write back of the same data. That’s why this is called dynamic RAM. There’s another method called static RAM (SRAM) which does not need refreshing, but is nowhere near as dense. Here he is with one of the early DRAM chips, and with unfortunate 70s hair and tie:

Dennard with DRAM chip

DRAM is one of the five core circuits of all of semiconductors. The others are the 6-transistor SRAM, the CMOS static combinatorial gate, the differential sense amp, and the NAND flash memory cell. They account for practically all of the transistors ever made, even now.

Dennard is still around at age 91. He joined IBM in 1958 at age 26 after getting a PhD from CMU, and spent his entire career there. He holds about 80 US patents, with the latest (US9666267B2) filed in 2016. It describes a way to adjust a transistor threshold voltage by means of a buried device, an interesting and important technique. His first was in 1959, at age 23, and his peak patent creativity was from 2010-2013 when he was age 78 to 81. He had a patent dry spell from 1980 to 2000, when he was probably in management. He also worked on word-line and bit-line redundancy, and on eliminating latchup, a serious problem in early CMOS chips. He has won every award imaginable in the field, as one might expect. Here he is dancing with his wife Jane at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo after winning the Kyoto Prize in 2013:

Jane and Robert Dennard in Tokyo in 2013. Award speech here

Now there’s a life! He still loves to dance and to play in local musical groups.

So where did all this talent come from? Part of it was from the support of IBM, which has been a semiconductor leader from the beginning. They didn’t invent integrated circuits, but have made huge contributions to the field. They still do, even though they can’t afford their own fabs any more.

Yet Dennard’s own background must have helped. He grew up in a poor family of farmers in East Texas in the Depression-era 1930s. He went to a one-room schoolhouse for grades 1 to 3. He was the youngest of four children, and his three older sisters went off to work during WW II. They left their libraries, so he grew up reading H. G. Wells and Mark Twain. He was too small for sports in high school, but he had musical talent and joined the school band playing French horn. When it came time for college, all his parents could afford was the local junior college, but then Southern Methodist University offered him a band scholarship. That exposed him to the wider world, and he took off from there.

In 2014 he talked about his own process:

I often wake up in the middle of the night with a solution to a problem that I have been working on previously. Many inventors have described similar experiences to me, including getting out of bed to make notes or drawings before going back to sleep. Others have described significant inventions made while driving, which apparently leaves a lot of the mind free, at least before cell phones. My invention of the DRAM memory cell came early one evening after I came home stimulated and challenged from listening to a talk about a competing research project. The basic idea came in a moment, but there were a couple of months of perfecting it before the final simplification to a single transistor came in another flash of inspiration. At a National Inventors Hall of Fame event, while I was talking with four other inductees, I discovered that all five of us were raised in rural areas or small towns, and most started their education in one-room schoolhouses. We all were left on our own a lot with plenty of free time to develop our ideas about life. Now that may not be the key to our subsequent successes, but it surely is a counter argument to many of the things that are considered necessary for the younger generation today. I developed a very slow thinking process in my early days, and I believe that is why I am able to bring great concentration to a problem and engage my whole brain in finding a creative solution.

You might think that a tough childhood in a remote area would leave a person uncurious and ignorant, but not if they have a stable family and good access to books. The lack of distraction gave him unusual powers of concentration. Then he got into a field with massive opportunities for people who could think deeply about the subject, and away he went. Semiconductors have been so worked over in the last 70 years that those opportunities are probably no longer there, but the world is full of new challenges for young people with the same ability to focus. Find an institution that supports intense work, and dig in!

The Invention of Lawn Inflatables

So it’s getting dark, it’s getting cold, and it’s getting wet. It’s a dreary time of year, so it’s just the right time to put something cheerfully garish out on your lawn:

On Brantwood Ave, Arlington

Sandworm from Beetlejuice, carnivorous flytrap Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors, and Frances

These are ideal lawn decorations! They’re big and bright, and yet pack down into small boxes for storage. They set up in minutes and come in a thousand different styles from tame to wild. They move – the dragon’s wings flap and the sandworm’s tongue rotates. They can have simple lights, or flashers, or even projectors inside for patterns.

What’s surprising is that they were invented quite recently, in the early 2000s. The initial versions were made of plastic and inflated with a hair dryer, and those flopped, literally. The earliest successful one I could find was an eight-foot snowman from 2001:

Credit GemmyInflatablesfan98, Gemmy 2001 8ft Ghost Inflatable Review

This was an early testing of the market. It shows all the key features: a built-in fan on legs, internal lights, and a nylon body with loose seams. The seams and the nylon are critical – they let the air out of every part of the structure, which keeps it fully inflated. They may have been inspired by the dancing inflatable advertising figures called Tube Men that you see by car lots. Those were invented in LA a few years earlier.

A key part of the design was getting a reliable fan that would work outdoors in any weather, and that took a while to get right. The fan on this one was really loud. They tuned it up over the next several years with better graphic designs, and had a big hit in 2004 when they made an inflatable snow globe with styrofoam snowflakes flying around inside. They trademarked the term Airblown Inflatables, and were off. You now see them everywhere around Halloween and Christmas, and there are a dozen fan clubs on Facebook. There are fanatic collectors who have thousands of them, since one of the bugs in human cognition is obsessing about gathering stuff.

So who invented all this? The main maker is Gemmy Industries of Coppel Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Non-Gemmy versions appear to be private labels done by them for the likes of Home Depot and Walmart. It’s privately held and pretty secretive. It was founded in the 1984 by one Dan Flaherty to make ballpoint pens and then novelty items like plush dolls. He has some design patents on things like picture holders in aquariums and water guns. Their first big hit was Big Mouth Billy Bass in 1999, a rubber fish on a plaque that would sing “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and “Take Me to the River” while mouthing along and wagging its tail. They sold millions of those, and I actually got a singing lobster version.

Figure in original Inflatables patent

Their earliest US patent on inflatables is US6,644,843, “Inflatable figure assembly”, filed in Jan 2002 and granted in Nov 2003. It only expired last year, so that’s why no one else can make these, at least not yet. The inventor was Tsai Chen-Chang of Taiwan. He only had one other similar patent, and it was assigned to Gemmy at about the same time. There’s also a Tsai Chen-Chang who patented a lot of circuits for driving LCD displays, but that’s a very different skill set and he doesn’t appear to live in the same town, so it’s probably someone else.

Gemmy has lots of other patents by Taiwanese people, so the technical development appears to be done there. The actual manufacturing is in China, since it needs a lot of cutting and sewing. These are fun products, but have to be cheap to succeed. The graphic design is done in Texas, and often uses licensed images from the likes of Disney. Linked-in shows 126 people currently employed at Gemmy, with a mix of designers, marketeers, and product distribution specialists. That’s not that big for a firm that puts out millions of items a year in hundreds of styles.

So this is an interesting global collaboration: US media design and marketing, Taiwanese technical talent, and Chinese manufacturing. It took some high-tech in the form of neodymium permanent-magnet motors for the fans, which only came out in the 90s. It also took a lot of political maneuvering to open up China in the late 90s, and those conditions may not last. Yet while they do we can brighten up these darkening nights!

Where is Nobel-Winning Science Done?

The 2023 Nobels were recently announced, marking 123 years of the most prestigious science prizes in the world. This is now a big enough dataset to do some statistics on. So let’s ask – what are the countries, institutions, and regions that win the science Nobels? That’s Physiology and Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics. The other three Nobel prizes are not nearly so well-regarded. In the span from 1901 to 2023 there have been 646 science prizes awarded to 642 people, with 4 people winning twice (Marie Curie, John Bardeen, K. Barry Sharpless and Frederick Sanger). Let’s first look at the coarsest division:

Countries Where Nobel Work Was Done

We can distinguish between where laureates are born, and where they did the work that wins them the prize. Laureates come from a wide range of the world – 51 countries in total, including ones as small as New Zealand and Slovenia. There are fewer places, though, where this level of work can be done – only 29 countries total. The top 10 account for >80% of the winners in each year:

Click to embiggen

The US (in blue) got huge after World War II in the 1940s and 50s, when refugees from all over the world came to the country. About 30% of US winners were not born there. The federal government also started putting serious money into Big Science in the 50s. Vannevar Bush had gone to Congress and said “You see this Bomb thing? There’s a lot more where that came from,” and he was right. The US was biggest in the 1990s, which was probably the peak of its world influence. The USSR had fallen, and the disgraceful Iraq War and Wall St Recession had yet to happen. About half of the total laureates did their work in the US, which isn’t too surprising given how big its population and resources are relative to the others.

Germany (in gray) dominated up until 1940, when they were distracted by other matters. The UK (in orange) has chugged along nicely throughout. France (in yellow) did well until the 1910s, when WW I wrecked the country. Japan (light blue) has done well recently. Switzerland probably gets the most per capita.

Now let’s look more closely at where this work was done:

Institutions Where Laureates Worked

Wikipedia has entries on all laureates, and in a nicely standardized format that lists all the institutions they have been associated with. When those pages are scraped, the top 20 institutions are these:

Number People	Institution	City
66	U Cambridge	Cambridge UK
44	UC Berkeley	Bay Area
42	U Chicago	Chicago
41	Columbia U	New York
35	Stanford U	Bay Area
31	Harvard U	Boston
28	Caltech	Los Angeles
25	MIT	Boston
23	MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology	Cambridge UK
22	Princeton U	Princeton
20	Rockefeller U	New York
20	Cornell U	Ithaca
20	U Oxford	Oxford
19	Yale U	New Haven
15	Bell Labs	Princeton
15	University College London	London
15	ETH Zürich	Zurich
15	U Berlin	Berlin
13	U Edinburgh	Edinburgh
13	U Manchester	Manchester

Cambridge rules! And is far ahead of its rival Oxford. In both of those I grouped all of their colleges together although they’re listed separately. I did break up the University of California into its separate schools since they’re quite different and spread out. UC as a whole has 102 people, which is more Nobels than any country besides the US.

It’s interesting that the top two, Cambridge and Berkeley, are both public universities. Then there are 11 private schools, and the publics appear again with University College London. The first non-school is the MRC Laboratory at #9, which was involved in the revolution of molecular genetics in the 1950s and 60s, including the discovery of the DNA double helix. The first corporate operation is Bell Labs, and its heyday is sadly long past. The next corporate entries are IBM and BASF.

In terms of other competitions, Harvard is also far ahead of its rival Yale, and ahead of that trade school down the river, MIT. Of the eight Ivy League schools, six make the list, missing only Brown and Dartmouth. All of the Ivy-Plus schools – MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Caltech, Northwestern, Duke, Rice, and WashU – also figure. The other big state schools are Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Texas A&M.

Now let’s look at where this work is done geographically:

Cities

The Institution list can also be broken down by region, usually in terms of what the nearest major city is. The exception is the Bay Area, whose major city is San Francisco, but spreads widely beyond that. The institutions there are still close enough for synergy, which is what matters. The top 10 here are:

Laureates who worked there	City	Top 3 Institutions	Number Other
108	Bay Area	USB 44; Stanford 35; UCSF 10	27
90	New York	Columbia 41; Rockefeller 20, Cold Spring Lab 5	24
89	Cambridge UK	U Cambridge 66; MRC Laboratory 23	0
80	Boston	Harvard 31; MIT 25; Harvard Med 5	19
61	London	U College 15; Imperial College 11; U London 6	29
52	Chicago	U Chicago 42; Northwestern 4; Argonne 2	4
52	Los Angeles	Caltech 28; UCLA 8, USC 6	14
51	Washington DC	Howard Hughes Med Inst 12; Johns Hopkins 8; Johns Hopkins Med 7	24
50	Princeton	Princeton U 22; Bell Labs 15; Institute for Advanced Study 10	3
33	Berlin	U Berlin 15; Kaiser Wilhelm Inst 3; Max Planck Med 2	13

This is not surprising overall. The top three countries for Nobels – the US, UK and Germany – are also the sites of the leading research regions. It’s a bit surprising to see that the major financial centers of New York and London are up there, but those are the heart cities of their nations. Yet it’s nice to see that small cities like Cambridge and Princeton are well represented. Most think that this kind of advanced work is best done away from the bustle of political and commercial life, and their presence is evidence of that.

Overall

As one would expect, Nobel-caliber work is done in the leading economic and cultural nations of the world: the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan. China is not contributing much yet, but will. There are seven Chinese-born laureates, although only one did their work there. Some small countries like Switzerland punch well above their weight. The same goes for leading institutions – the big ones are generally the old and famous ones like Cambridge and Harvard. Yet newer ones like Chicago and Caltech do well. The cities are also old and famous, but tiny Princeton sneaks in. Even the smaller countries and places can matter if they focus.

Tech Crime Seems On the Rise

In the 2000s I was the CTO of a startup that quickly ran into trouble. Our CEO wildly over-promised in order to keep funding flowing, and he then got fired by the board. They appointed a new CEO, and he and I then went around to visit investors. One said “What we have here is a case of the F-word. I don’t mean that F-word. I mean the serious F-word, Fraud.” That was not a happy meeting! The company did actually run for another seven years, and the parts were good enough to be sold for another 15, but that was a low point.

I was reminded of this by a stream of recent reports on tech hype-frauds:

Lordstown Motors finally declared bankruptcy in June ’23 after failing to build electric pickup trucks. Their CEO, Steve Burns, was fired two years ago for claiming huge pre-orders that had no real money behind them. They got a lot of support from GM, including one of their closed plants, but couldn’t get the trucks working. They tried to sell themselves to Foxconn, which is desperate to improve US-China relations, but they couldn’t get them working either. They had gone public in 2020, albeit with a SPAC instead of a real IPO. Burns made $60M from that.

Lordstown demo truck fire Jan 2021, credit Farmington Hills Fire Dept, The Drive

The CEO of Nikola, Trevor Milton, went even further – he released a video of a truck powered by hydrogen fuel cells driving along a desert road:

A sharp-eyed investor found where the road was and discovered that it was actually coasting down a slight grade. They had tilted the camera. The truck had no engine. He was convicted of securities fraud in 2022. The company still exists, but their battery-powered versions have all been recalled and many have caught fire.

Jess Carpoff of DC Solar had a great idea in 2007 – put solar panels and batteries on a trailer and use them in place of diesel generators for movie location shoots. They would be clean and quiet enough to not interfere with the microphones. The panels folded up while on the highway, and tilted to catch maximum sun:

Movie studios loved this. Better still, you could buy them with 30% down and claim the whole 30% as a renewable tax credit. DC Solar would borrow the remaining 70% from you and pay it back to you in installments from income gained from leases. You put up no net money and got good lease income! Even Berkshire Hathaway bought in. Unfortunately, Carpoff was a garage mechanic with a troubled legal background, and had no idea how to make these work. No one was actually leasing them, and they built only a small fraction of what they claimed. It was a straight pyramid scheme, where the initial 30% down payment paid the lease outflow on everything thereafter. Carphoff bought himself mansions and collections of snazzy cars before the feds closed in. He went through a billion dollars, all covered by Uncle Sam’s tax credits. He was sentenced in 2022 and is serving 30 years. This all comes from a nice article in the May ’23 Atlantic: The Billion Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffet and the US Treasury.

These are just the explicitly criminal cases. I would also call Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” a criminal promotion of dysfunctional software for the sake of stock promotion, and that has actually killed people. Those cases are in the courts right now. Outside of automotive tech, there’s the entire cryptocurrency sector, which creates literally nothing, and burns about 50 terawatt-hours per year to boot. That would power Massachusetts.

So what’s going on? It sure looks like too much money is chasing too few ideas. Now that it costs very little to actually make or grow anything, all the excess that people pay for has to go somewhere. The world is flooded with investments looking for returns. Much of it is Chinese and petro-state money looking for safety away from their unstable homes. A lot of it used to be Russian money doing the same, but those guys are falling out of windows these days.

When there’s this much money sloshing around, the unscrupulous are inevitably going to take advantage. In the grand scheme of things, though, the few billion lost in the above isn’t that big a deal. The risk is that the scamsters tarnish all new ventures. Self-driving cars, for instance, actually are getting better, but Tesla is doing its best to ruin the whole concept. The highly unstable venture capital market can easily turn against good concepts if enough fraudsters come in. My company was almost done in by that attitude, and many others actually have been.

“Oppenheimer” and the Limits of Scientific Influence

One of the favorite tropes of SF is the mad scientist. He (always he) represents the disruptive power of modern science to old beliefs, and of modern technology to old ways of life. He becomes crazed with this power, and wreaks havoc with the terror of his discoveries. The very first SF novel, “Frankenstein”, is about him, and Jules Verne cemented the meme with the noble and tragic Captain Nemo. Half of SF movies play on this, whether it’s Dr Morbius in “Forbidden Planet” (1956) with the planet-sized engines of the Krell, or Tyrell in “Bladerunner” (1982) with his army of rebellious androids, or Tony Stark in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015) with run-amok AI.

Yet the great recent movie “Oppenheimer” shows how ridiculous this is. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the most famous and influential scientist in the world in the late 1940s. He led the team that created the fission bomb, and so cut short the greatest war in human history. He himself was the very picture of a magus: vastly erudite, tall, skeletal, and with piercing, electric-blue eyes. He dominated every room he was in, and women took notice. His direct scientific contributions were minor, but he knew and had the respect of the greatest scientists of the age: Einstein, Bohr, Bethe, Rabi, Fermi, Lawrence, Szilard and von Neumann.

Yet the core story of the movie is how he came to ruin when he crossed the actual masters of the country. He knew that the nuclear arms race would be madness, but couldn’t prevent it. He argued for international control of nuclear weapons, and for not taking the vastly expensive and dangerous step towards fusion bombs, and they simply ignored him. When he kept protesting, they made a point of humiliating him. It was slyly done, through innuendo about his leftist connections and his adulterous affairs, and through a bureaucratic procedure that was turned into a kangaroo court, but everyone knew what had happened. In crude countries, they kill or imprison their opponents, but in more skilled ones, they de-honor them.

You don’t get to choose what’s done with your work – that’s for the people who pay for it. To be brutal about it, Oppenheimer was an employee. When the Army carted the Bombs away, they didn’t even tell the Los Alamos people what was going to be done with them. Their job was done. In the longer run, their expertise was displaced by that of people like Teller and von Neumann, people who hated communism as fiercely as the Establishment did and so were considered reliable.

You don’t choose the use. Your choice is whether to take part or not. The most sympathetic character in the movie, I. I. Rabi, chose not to join the Manhattan Project, even though he had as much reason to hate the Nazis as Oppenheimer. Instead he worked on radar, which really did shorten the War and has been immensely useful since then. Don’t think that you’ll get to fix things later as Oppenheimer did – work on what’s going to be positive for everyone. You won’t be called an American Prometheus, but you’ll avoid a world of hurt.

Space Has Become Cheap

I was talking with a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute recently, and he mentioned a new project he had to track penguins. From space. With his own personal satellite. These days you can put up a cubesat, a block about 10 cm on a side and weighing no more than 2 kg, for about $100,000. You can buy standard packages with power, communications, and orientation, and have it go up with a pile of others as spare payload on an unrelated launch, a “rideshare”. They launch them from the ISS too. If they have a good educational or scientific purpose, NASA will do it for you. They tend to be in low orbits, so they burn up after a year or two, and so don’t contribute to space junk. This guy noted that penguins are way too small to see individually, but you could track the smear of feces they left on ice floes, so long as you could get enough photons in the right band as the satellite zipped by. So for the price of an expensive car, you could have your own instruments in orbit!

Last month MIT had its annual Technology Day, a set of lectures by faculty to alumni during Reunion Weekend. This year the theme was what the school was doing in outer space. Video here: Research From Above and Beyond: MIT in Space. The first speaker, Prof. Keri Cahoy, talked about she’s doing with nano-satellites:

TROPICS cubesat for measuring ocean temperatures for hurricanes

This is a set of four satellites in low orbit. They launched in May 2023 on two Rocket Lab Electrons in New Zealand. They can measure the temperatures of the ocean and atmosphere at much higher resolutions than existing weather satellites, and do it every hour instead of once a day. That provides a lot more data about hurricanes, something we really, really care about.

Her other project is testing a new way to communicate with satellites by using direct laser links:

On the ground this uses a standard 28 cm Celestron telescope, a nice size for amateur astronomers. It zooms in on the satellite, which does tiny adjustments of the beam to correct for distortion of the atmosphere. It doesn’t need big radio antennas or big solar panels to drive them, or a license for the crowded radio bands. Next year they’ll have the satellites talking to each other so there can be a continuous connection to one ground station. The link only provides 10 Mb/s, but if the satellite itself can do some analysis, the data rate can be reduced and the whole thing made vastly cheaper. This is also the idea behind Internet-of-Things chips, which can sense things about the world and network together to get the info somewhere. Those cost $1 and these $100,000, but that’s still vastly cheaper than existing satellites with laser links. This was built by students! It went up to the ISS as cargo, and the astronauts there tossed it into orbit with the big robot arm.

The other speakers were not doing nano-satellites, but also doing cheap stuff in space:

Prof Jeff Hoffman – Flew five times on the Shuttle, and helped fix Hubble. He wants to make liquid oxygen on Mars for use as rocket fuel, because there’s no way to send enough there to get back. It’s also needed for breathing! He got a package, MOXIE, on the Perseverance rover to try it out. It works! But it only makes 12 grams per hour and needs a lot of solar power. They really need a nuclear reactor up there. Even an Apollo-level program wouldn’t be able to put humans on Mars, so much, much cheaper approaches have to be found.

Prof Taylor Perron – Has been studying the geography of Titan, which is the only other body in the Solar System that has something like Earth’s atmosphere. It’s mainly covered with nitrogen at -180 C, with lakes and rivers of methane and ethane. He used data from the Cassini mission to Saturn to find hills, valley, and rivers. One looks like it has the volume of the Mississippi! Basic geometry gives you the same shapes even with wildly different chemistry.

Prof Erin Kara – played an eerie sound which is the audio version of light pulses refracted around a black hole. X-rays get generated close to the hole and get wildly red-shifted as they come up out of the intense gravity well. They then get refracted from gas flowing around the hole, which gives us a density distribution of what’s going into it.

One message from these talks is that even super-expensive projects like Perseverance and Cassini can have cheap rideshares. They generate so much data that researchers are kept busy for years! Even if you’re not putting up your own hardware, there is so much happening in space these days that everyone can take part.

Hawaii – Land of Peril

The family and I are vacationing in Hawaii, and it really is as spectacular as everyone says. There are extraordinary things to see everywhere, but they’re very aware of how bumbling tourists can be. As one of our tour guides said “I used to believe that there was no such thing as a stupid question until people started asking me things like ‘Does the sea go all the way around the island?’ ‘Yes, ma’am it does.’ ‘Is that the same moon we see in California?’ ‘Yes sir, it is.'” So everywhere you go, they’re careful to warn you about what might happen. E.g. before entering a lava tube you see:

Sign before the Thurston Lave Tube near Kilauea, Big Island

The tube floor was covered in puddles, and the girl behind me was worried about getting her shoes muddy. I wanted to tell her “You’re standing in a tunnel that was filled with molten rock just a few hundred years ago. Chill!” But that was unkind. Even slow and unfit people deserve to see amazing things like this.

By the volcano itself, they’re just as worried:

At Kilauea Overlook, Big Island

Good advice!

Out on the beach, the locals are just as worried:

We did actually see enormous plumes being thrown up by the surf. Our guide had a pro tip – if there are pine needles on the rock by the cliff it’s probably OK, but if not, it’s because the waves took them off. That’s not the only risk:

Yet not all the signs were of imminent doom:

Stay 10 feet away from sea turtles. How big is 10 feet actually? The size of a VW Beetle and its constant companion, a surfboard. That’s a pretty good scale!

The only positive sign, one in green not red, was a good general rule:

Finally, one of the stick people was not getting drowned or crushed!

I wonder if the designers of all of these signs were thinking of Hawaiian petroglyphs:

Credit; David Stillman, Olowalu, Maui

Icon figures are good for all sorts of images! Whether they’re of people dancing, or people having very bad days. In a place as beautiful as Hawaii, it’s easy to get so distracted that you lose common sense.