Alumni Profile - Carver Mead

ALUMNI PROFILE Carver Mead ENGenious met with Caltech alumnus Carver Mead (BS '56, MS '57, PhD '60) to learn more about his passions and how his Caltech education shaped him. For the past 50 years, Carver Mead has focused his research and teaching on the physics and technology of electron de-vices. He is a prolific inventor and is extremely creative. He also loves to teach, encouraging his students to create clean designs and contribute more than their share. ENGenious: You seem to reinvent yourself every few years. How do you do it? son, they will often say very revealing things because they're not just among specialists. So you hear people say things that you won't find in any of the papers because papers are Mead: Well, you have to! That's the only way to keep going, written for a very narrow audience of people that think ex- at least for me. In my case, it's about a 13-year cycle. I get actly alike. You don't ever see the out-of-the-box stuff there. to where I feel like I'm not doing anything new anymore. That's why our seminars at Caltech are particularly good. I'm grinding away at the same stuff. I start getting depressed You get insights that you just wouldn't get from a standard and end up mucking around for a year or two. Usually I plod technical paper. from one thing to another until something grabs me. When I get into a new endeavor, I get lots of new ideas and a lot of them are wrong, of course. I explore a lot of avenues, many ENGenious: What types of things grab you? of which other people have done. But some, they haven't, and I don't know the difference in the beginning so I muck Mead: Oh, there have been lots of them. In the beginning, around and I try to get my own idea about how things are. it was the tunneling stuff. When I was a graduate student, I It turns out it's extremely rare that I get all the same ideas as got fascinated by Leo Osaki, the guy who did the tunnel di- everybody else. I don't start ode in the '50s. I just fell in by reading what everybody Caltech seminars are unique because love with that whole thing did-I go to seminars. I and, even though I was do- find that the fields have the speakers are instructed to make ing my thesis on something gotten so fragmented today else, when 1 finished 1 just that you can get a little bit them accessible to a broader audience. had to work on it. When here and a little bit there. I For that reason, they will often say I got on the faculty in the go to the astronomy semi- late '50s, I had this little lab nars, the physics seminars, very revealing things because they're and started doing exeri- the biology seminars, the geology seminars, and the not just among specialists. ments. In the beginning, it was just what everybody planetary science ones be- else was doing. Gradually I cause different people have different takes on things. They figured out some different ways of looking at it, and I ended think about things in different ways. Also every once in a up doing a bunch of stuff that people hadn't done. That was while, somebody will say something that clicks. Caltech just a wonderful period—it was my first real independent seminars are very unique because the speakers are instructed research, and it was really neat. So there have been a bunch to make them accessible to a broader audience. For that rea-of things like that. 42 ENGenious NO.7 2010 ALUMNI PROFILE I tend to hang out in my mind with the people who have done really clear thinking in the area that I'm trying to push ahead. With my present work, the person I hang out with a fair bit is Einstein... ENGenious: What are you working on right now? then he went off on another path. I read his work before he went off on the path that everybody else uses now, and I can Mead: Right now I'm working on reconceptualization of see what he was thinking. So those tend to be the people electrodynamics and gravitation. A lot of that's been done, who inspire me. but the way people are doing it is very murky and compli-cated. I believe there's a simpler way of doing it, and I'm gradually getting results. They seem to be holding together ENGenious: You have a passion for teaching. What were some of your first teaching experiences? and that's very exciting. Mead: It was the mid-fifties and Caltech had just hired ENGenious: What keeps you up at night? Dave Middlebrook from Stanford Dave had this wonderful British way about him, and he taught the gradu- Mead: Well, what usually happens ate course in transistor electronics, is that I'll be working on something which of course I loved, so I took and I get really tired. I'll have din- it in my first year of grad school. In ner, relax, and go to sleep. Then in my second-year, Dave decided he'd the middle of the night, usually be- take a leave of absence to write his tween one and three in the morn- new book, so, as a second year grad ing, I'll have this period when I'm student, I got to teach the course. Carver Mead with group of students awake and very creative. I'm told Talk about being thrown into the there's something that happens in deep end of the pool! I had been a your brain at those hours. I don't purport to know anything teaching assistant as an undergrad, and I was pretty good about that, but that's when I get the new ways of thinking. at it, but teaching an entire course was quite an interesting Then I get up in the morning and start working on the experience. I started the first week trying to teach it the way problem. Middlebrook did. A lot of the students were from Europe and had had an additional year of education beyond what ENGenious: Who inspires you? we had in our bachelor's degree, so they were already better at a lot of the things than I was. The first weekend I went Mead: I tend to hang out in my mind with the people who have done really clear thinking in the area that I'm trying to push ahead. With my present work, the person I hang out with a fair bit is Einstein because he started on this path and for a walk in the mountains and thought, "I'm never going to make it." I walked and walked and thought, "I can't pretend to be a little miniature Dave Middlebrook. If I'm going to succeed at teaching this course, I have to teach it the way 43 ALUMNI PROFILE Carver Mead in front of a computer chip from the '80s I understand it, not the way he understands it." So the next Monday, I went in and I taught things the way I understood them, and the students gradually stopped harassing me and started listening. A few weeks later, we had a good relation-ship, and they felt they were learning something. By the end of the course, they were actually saying good things as they picked up their exams. That was an important learning experience for me. I'm never going to succeed trying to be somebody else, I just have to do it my own way. When you think about it, we've come light years from then. The transistors in those days were used in hearing aids and that's about it. It was a really, really long way from there to here. ENGenious: This year we are celebrating the centennial of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. Where do you think we are headed? Mead: Everybody asks me that—if we knew that, it wouldn't be the future! There are some things about the future you can predict because the question is well formed. Like Gordon Moore's question to me of "How small can transistors get?" I was working on electron tunneling, which is something that happens when things get very small, and Gordon asked me, "Does tunneling affect how small you can make a transistor?" I said, "It certainly will," and he said, "Well, how small is that?" Then I thought, "Oops, now I've got to put my money where my mouth is," so I went away and worked on it with a student. There had been enough other work done in the field that we knew the physics. We could work out approximately where you'd start to have problems, and it turned out to be a much smaller transistor than anybody thought. We were able to predict something that has actually held up for 30 years. That's because the question was well formed: This is a transistor. How small can I make it? Therefore, if I can make it that small, I can put a zillion of them on a piece of silicon this size, etc., etc. It was an important observation that led to the industry going on this path of making things smaller. Everybody points to that as a prediction of the future but it really was an observation about physical limits. But from it you could infer that, if people got their act together, it wouldn't be physics that limited them. 44 ENGenious NO.7 2010 ALUMNI PROFILE ENGenious: What limits us? ENGenious: What role is Caltech playing in this trans-formation? Mead: Politics does for sure-but that isn't something I know anything about. The exciting ones are where we are Mead: Caltech exposes students to the way of thinking limited because we haven't thought the thought yet. Just and designing that is essential for this transformation. Dick take a homespun example with the telephone. It used to be Feynman said, "The real glory of science is that we can find that when you called a phone, you called a place. Now, when a way of thinking such that the law is evident." So instead of you call a phone, you call a person. People don't even think grinding away through piles of garbage, it's clear because you about it now. But, in fact, it's a completely different thought found the right way of thinking about it. With engineering, and a very recent one. It's much more effective because, typ- we call it a clean design. The Apple iPhone is an example of ically, most of us don't want to call a place-we want to call a clean design. It works the way you want it to. Tektronics a person. This is an example used to make oscilloscopes of where the availability of There are some things about the where it was as if the in- the technology makes you struction manual was on think differently about the future you can predict because the front panel. If people world and your life. Another design good instruments, example is the Web. It has the question is well formed. it is obvious how to use completely transformed the them. That's the equivalent world economically, intel- Like Gordon Moore's question in engineering of the thing lectually, and in terms of international relations. It will, to me of "How small can Feynman said about sci-ence. Caltech has enough as time goes on, have a far of this, which the students larger effect than any politi- transistors get?" get exposed to. The good cal moves anybody makes. I ones will realize that that's know many of the people that did the early experiments on the way they want to work, and they will go off and do the Web. The integrated circuit work enabled some of it remarkable things. One of our former students, Dave Gil- also. But none of us predicted the impact it would have on lespie (BS'86, MS '88), did the human interface work on the the entire fabric of human culture. It's been marvelous! It is, touch pads that are used in a lot of mobile devices. He's the by far, the biggest contribution to international peace and best human interface person I ever knew, even when he was a prosperity that has ever been, and it's really our only hope student here. He made enormous contributions to the work for peace among nations and for a constructive world. It we were doing, and he's still at it. He's the guru of Synaptics causes you to have a whole different global viewpoint. and just continues to come up with these wonderful things. We at Caltech have contributed more than our share to ENGenious: Will technology continue to transform the the world. As we're looking to the future, which should be world? our aspiration, we want to give more than our share of those natural, beautiful, clear, clean, glorious contributions. ENe Mead: Yes. Will it transform it in a positive way? Abso-lutely. It's the one force we have that is more powerful than Carver Mead is Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of human greed and control mania. Will it continue to evolve Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus and will the next 100 years be even more positive than the Visit: http://www.cns.caltech.edu/people/faculty/mead.html last? Yes. How exactly? Part of it will be an obvious evolution of what we have now. But the most exciting part will come out of left field, and we will say, Wow! 45