Up from the Elevator

Nicholas Constantine Christofilos is a rumpled, somewhat obstreperous lone wolf in the ordered ranks of modern physicists. He has no degrees in physics, little formal training. But time and again, he has brought forth ideas that have proved right.

Christofilos was born in Boston in 1916, the son of Greek immigrant parents who ran a small restaurant. When he was seven, they took him back to Greece. In the National Technical University at Athens, Christofilos took electrical engineering. After graduation in 1938, he went to work for an elevator-building company. When the Germans occupied Greece in 1941, they turned the plant into a truck repair shop and gave him an easy supervisory job. Christofilos seized the chance to read all the German books he could get on advanced atomic physics. After the war he returned to the elevator business, but kept on restlessly reading physics.

In 1948 the young elevator builder wrote a letter to the University of California suggesting a way to build a better high-energy accelerator. Even for a well-schooled and successful engineer, this would have been the height of presumption, but he got a polite and considered reply from California scientists. He was all wrong, they said, and they told him why. "They were right," he admits now. "My calculations were crude. There were things I didn't know."

But no rebuff has ever stopped Christofilos. He wrote a second letter in 1950, outlining what is now called the "strong focusing" principle for building big accelerators. The reply from California advised him to read a certain mathematical book and clear up some errors. Christofilos did so, polished his theory and brought it to New York in 1953. He went straight to the Public Library, where he found that the strong focusing principle had already been developed independently by Brookhaven National Laboratory. "So you see," he says irrepressibly, "on the first day I came back to my country I found that my theories were O.K."

Brookhaven scientists gave Nick Christofilos a job and appreciation, but he did not stay with them long. He had ideas about the biggest problem in applied physics--how to generate controlled fusion power--and Brookhaven had no such program. In 1956 he took his scheme for a fusion reactor to the University of California, which had become acquainted with his yeasty mind eight years before.

Christofilos now works on his fusion reactor, which he calls the Astron, at super-secret Livermore Laboratory in the green hills southeast of Berkeley. His idea of trapping electrons in the earth's magnetic field grew out of Astron, which is designed to trap ionized particles in a magnetic field in a laboratory rather than on a global scale. Nick's paper proposing Project Argus, written in late 1957, was not published except in classified form, and not all scientists agree that it was the first such proposal. Professor Fred Singer of the University of Maryland is said to have written an earlier paper but kept it secret on official request. Christofilos himself is not sure. Says he: "I knew Fred Singer was in the same area, but he had no security clearance, so I did not discuss Argus with him."

Christofilos heads a team of 12 to 15 scientists. He still has no degree in physics, and his Greek accent, Greek volubility and love of passionate argument keep him an outsider. (Asked for background on Christofilos, one top U. of C. scientist remarked frostily: "Well, my contacts have been with other members of the scientific fraternity, and Christofilos really isn't a member.") Christofilos takes his position in stride. For relaxation he drives his car (a 1957 Pontiac) or plays the piano loud. "For Nick," says a colleague, "all pieces are written fortissimo."

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