Nicholas Christofilos

Nicholas Constantine Christofilos (Greek: Νικόλαος Χριστοφίλου; December 16, 1916 – September 24, 1972) was a Greek physicist. The Christofilos effect, a type of electromagnetic shielding, is named after him.

Career

Christofilos was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Greece. He attended the National Technical University of Athens at age 18, and graduated with a degree in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering in 1938. He remained in Greece during World War II, working for an Athens elevator maintenance company during the Nazi occupation. He later founded his own elevator company. During all of this, he maintained an amateur interest in accelerator physics and high-energy particle physics, and studied German and American texts on the subjects extensively.

In 1946 he independently developed ideas for a synchrotron and in 1949 he conceived the strong-focusing principle. Rather than publishing in a journal he submitted a patent application in the US[1] and Greece. His discovery went unnoticed for several years, and strong focusing was rediscovered by Ernest Courant et al. in 1952[2] (who acknowledged his priority one year later),[3] and applied to accelerators at BNL, Cornell and CERN.

Christofilos was offered a position at Brookhaven in 1953. In 1956 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to continue his work on the Astron, a proposed fusion reactor under the Sherwood Project. At LLNL, Christofilos worked on a number of military projects. He became a member of JASON and was the principal behind Operation Argus, a series of high-altitude nuclear detonations intended to create a radiation belt in the upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere as a defence against Soviet ICBMs.

In 1958 Christofilos proposed Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves as a way to communicate with submerged submarines, and subsequently invented the ground dipole, the only antenna that has proven practical for use at ELF frequencies. His ideas were implemented by the U.S. Navy in Project Seafarer, which constructed huge ELF transmitter facilities in Michigan and Wisconsin consisting of 56 miles (90 km) of electric transmission line. These were used from 1985 to 2004 for worldwide communication with U.S. nuclear submarines.

In 1963 he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal.

Herbert York described Christofilos as follows:[4]

Nick was a remarkable idea man. The ideas were usually not good[5], but they were really remarkable in that they were the kind of ideas that nobody else had. Nick really was a genius in a very important sense -- he often invented things that required two new ideas simultaneously, which is something that normally, hardly anyone ever does.
gollark: Implement BASIC for arbitrary reasons?
gollark: And happen to get lucky, and through sheer coincidence stumble on the exact same discovery.
gollark: Wow, my keyboard even automatically capitalises FAIRLY.
gollark: > but no one can ever know what the discovery actually isYes, this is FAIRLY apiaristic.
gollark: > Trolling aside, look into it<@712080830008262696> ???

References

Footnotes
  1. US patent 2736799, Nicholas Christofilos, "Focussing System for Ions and Electrons", issued 1956-02-28, filed 1950-03-10.
  2. Courant, E. D.; Livingston, M. S.; Snyder, H. S. (1952). "The Strong-Focusing Synchrotron—A New High Energy Accelerator". Physical Review. 88 (5): 1190–1196. Bibcode:1952PhRv...88.1190C. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.88.1190. hdl:2027/mdp.39015086454124.
  3. Courant, E. D.; Livingston, M. S.; Snyder, H. S.; Blewett, J. (1953). "Origin of the "Strong-Focusing" Principle". Physical Review. 91: 202–203. Bibcode:1953PhRv...91..202C. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.91.202.2.
  4. The Advanced Research Projects Agency, 1958-1974, Barber Associates, December 1975, page IV-23.
  5. Barber Associates, loc. cit. "One of Christofilos' 'not good' ideas was to build a large aircraft runway across the entire U.S., coast to cost, so that the Soviets could never catch most of the SAC aircraft on the ground at the same time."

Sources
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