Victor D. Chase

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Detecting Defects

When something you’ve purchased is defective, you usually send it back for a replacement, or throw it out and buy a new one. If you happen to be in the explosives business, however, the opposite holds true, for when it comes to creating explosions, defects are a good thing. In fact, detonation cannot take place without them.

But, as with virtually everything else in life, moderation is the key to desirable defects. Too many defects make an explosive material unstable, and therefore unsafe, while if there are too few, it won’t detonate at all. But with just the right number of defects, the material will explode precisely when it is supposed to, and under just the right circumstances.

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Selected Works

Books

Shattered Nerves: How Science Is Solving Modern Medicine's Most Perplexing Problem
My book is as much about the people involved in this dynamic new field as it is about the science. In it I tell the stories of the researchers and of the patients on whom this technology is being tested, some of whom have become an intrinsic part of the teams creating these devices.

Computer Articles

Modeling An Earth-Shaking Event
“Earthquakes don’t kill people,” seismologist Arthur Rodgers says. “Buildings do.”

A Chilling Tale Of Nuclear Weaponry
Freezing and maintaining the reliability of the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile would appear to be diametrically opposed concepts. Think of one and the notion of shivering in the cold comes to mind. The other conjures images of an inferno....DEIXIS 2004-2005 (a DOE publication)

Made to Order: IBM Makes Sense Out of Unstructured Data
Researchers are developing systems to bring a rapidly growing and seemingly uncontrollable mass of information, into an orderly, usable state of being. IBM’s Think Research, 2002

Detecting Defects
When something you’ve purchased is defective, you usually send it back for a replacement, or throw it out and buy a new one. If you happen to be in the explosives business, however, the opposite holds true...DEIXIS 2004-2005 (a DOE publication)

Housing Lasers
Developing laser fusion may be the ultimate solution to the energy problem, and computational science is helping us get there. Deixis, 2002-2003 (published for the DOE).

Environmental Articles

Model Mixes Ice, Heat, Water And Salt To View The Ocean's Future
Within the next several decades, ice over the Arctic will completely disappear during the summer. That’s just one of the clear and dramatic predictions to come from models developed by the Climate Ocean and Sea Ice Modeling (COSIM) program at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Waiter There’s a Dye in My Soup
Food dye may prove to be the ultimate safe pesticide. Environmental Health Perspectives (a publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences), Volume 104, Number 2, February 1996.

Links To Other Works

Virus Beater: A new computer virus immunization system mimics the human immune system. IBM’s Think Research, Number 1, 2000.

TransNote Transformation: IBM's Personal Computing Division developed a machine that integrates computers and paper in previously unimaginable harmony. IBM’s Think Research, 2001.

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