Robert H. Kargon

Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman's Model for Regional Advantage

This paper explores the origins of the Silicon Valley model for regional economic development, and attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Frederick Terman, Stanfords provost, first envisioned its unique partnership of academia and industry, and trained the first generation of students who effected it. He patiently cultivated an aggressively entrepreneurial culture in what he called “the newly emerging community of technical scholars.” Beginning in the 1960s, business groups elsewhere set out to build their own versions of Silicon Valley, some enlisting the assistance of Terman and his proteges. After discussing the emergence of the Stanford-Silicon Valley effort, the paper examines in detail the New Jersey Institute of Science and Technology, an effort led by Bell Laboratories; the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest and the SMU Foundaton for Science and Engineering in Dallas, Texas; and the Korea Advanced Insitute of Science and Technology, Termans last and arguably most successful attempt. The paper discusses the reasons for the difficulties in creating new versions, and suggests explanations for the apparent success of the Korean experiment.

Knowledge for Use: Science, Higher Learning, and America's New Industrial Heartland, 1880-1915

In the United States of America, the years from 1880 to 1915 were a period of rapid urbanization, combined in some areas with intense industrialization. This paper explores the creation in cities of the new industrial heartland of new institutions of higher learning. The case studies chosen illustrate varying responses to local needs for scientific and technical expertise, and illuminate how new concepts of higher education in the United States helped to shape the emergent connection between science and industry.

Exporting MIT: Science, technology, and nation-building in India and Iran

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) emerged from World War II with an impressive, worldwide reputation in basic and applied science and engineering. After redefining its own engineering education in the 1950s, MIT responded to the challenge of U.S. policy makers and foundation officials and its own sense of mission in engineering research, teaching, and practice by assisting in establishing new technical institutions of higher education around the world. This paper focuses on MIT’s participation in the creation of such institutions in India and in Iran. Three case studies explore the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, and the Aryamehr University of Technology. The aim of establishing an international system of expertise with MIT at its apex reveals both the strengths and the limitations of the “export” effort.

Electronics and the geography of innovation in post‐war America

This study looks at three important centres of post‐war American electronics research and manufacturing ‐ the Princeton corridor in New Jersey, Dallas, Texas, and Silicon Valley ‐ as a way of understanding shifting patterns of regional competitiveness. We consider each of these technoregions not as models but rather as ecologies of mutually dependent institutions, corporate, academic, and governmental. We were especially intrigued by the attempts of the New Jersey and Dallas regions to learn from and emulate what each perceived to be the lessons of Silicon Valley. In both cases, corporate consortia hired Frederick Terman, the Stanford University electrical engineer and provost acknowledged as “the father of Silicon Valley”, to teach them the secrets of high technology development We examine these efforts and their subsequent failure, which we attribute to some fundamental misinterpretations of the Silicon Valley experience. We conclude with some reflections on a new pattern of regional development, a clus...

Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, and the Acceptance of Epicurean Atomism in England

W ,HEN in 1649 Pierre Gassendi published his Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma, he epitomized the revival of interest in the Epicurean atomic and moral theories. This work of Gassendi, together with certain earlier essays, became a focus of controversy throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century; in order to become acceptable as a natural philosophy, the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius first had to be purged of its atheism. Gassendi himself took the first steps in this direction. Whereas the ancient atomic hypothesis posited the inherency of motion in matter, thus removing God as a necessary efficient agent, Gassendi maintained that God was required to impress motion upon the atoms. As the source of motion, God was restored to the atomic philosophy. Gassendis atomic philosophy, explaining all physical phenomena as the result of the motion of small atoms in the void, was eagerly received by Englishmen who were similarly attacking the foundations of the Aristotelian world view. As early as 1644 John Pell, the mathematician, Charles Cavendish, and Thomas Hobbes were reading and commending manuscript versions of Gassendis book.1 Among the early disciples of Gassendi was the physician Walter Charleton.2 To Charleton was to go the credit of publishing the first presentation of the revived Epicurean atomism in England.3 Thomas Mayo, in his interesting Epicurus in England,4 correctly portrays

Expert testimony in historical perspective.

The ethical problems surrounding expert testimony depend directly on the historically specific relationship between science and scientists, on the one hand, and society on the other. In the seventeenth century, when modern experimental science was beginning to emerge, it drew upon legal experience to bolster its methodological arguments. In the eighteenth century, after the successes of Sir Isaac Newton, science gained in authority, and even in law courts the epistemological authority of science went unchallenged. In the nineteenth century, the more empirical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, entered the courts, and juries found the testimony of experimental chemists and physicists useful for their decisions. In the twentieth century, experimental psychology entered the courts. Pushed by Hugo Munsterburg, who saw in legal recognition a way of advancing psychology as a scientific profession, experimental psychology in the courtroom raised ethical problems at the beginning of the century that are still matters of controversy.

The Evolution of Matter: Nuclear Physics, Cosmic Rays, and Robert Millikan’s Research Program

When Robert A. Millikan was discharged from the Army after World War I he faced a difficult, but sweet, career problem. Before the war, he had completed a series of investigations that many believed at the time would bring him the Nobel Prize. He had just been demoblized from a post that brought him into contact with the leading scientists and scientific entrepreneurs of America. Few prior research commitments weighed upon him. He returned to Chicago and was wooed by the astrophysicist George Ellery Hale to become president of a vigorous educational enterprise in Pasadena, California, soon to be named the California Institute of Technology.1It became obvious that his new series of investigations would have to be on signigicant problems, for they would have to mirror his newly elevated status in the profession.

Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections

A founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the first chairman of our Board of Sponsors and a member until his death. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was a frequent Bulletin contributor. We are pleased to have received permission from the Harvard University Press to publish excerpts from the book, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, edited by Alice Smith and Charles Weiner.As the editors write. “These early letters—spontaneous, articulate, often troubled—revealed a relatively unknown Oppenheimer and explained much about the public figure who emerged after 1945.” The first three chapters cover Oppenheimers years at Harvard and in Europe until 1929. The excerpts that follow are taken from Chapter 4 and describe his teaching and research years at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. Oppenheimer writes to his younger brother Frank and to his scientific colleagues about “learning, playing, making friends, doing physics, winning recognition… ...