Career
Following the end of the war and obtaining his PhD in physical chemistry from Carnegie Tech, Cowan returned to work for Los Alamos in 1950. Only weeks after his arrival, he directed the detection of radioactive fallout from samples collected near the Russian border indicating the Soviets were in possession of a nuclear bomb. He also participated for some years in the Bethe Panel, whose first chairman was Hans Bethe. One of his early participatory functions on the panel was to convince U.S. government officials that the radiochemistry of the samples proved that it was not the result of a peaceful nuclear reactor problem, but a Soviet bomb, which was dubbed "Joe-1" after Joseph Stalin.
In 1953, Cowan was a member of the group which founded the Santa Fe Opera. Another member of this group was Arthur Spiegel, of the Spiegel Catalog fortune. Art was later to help Cowan in his initial fund raising efforts to finance the Santa Fe Institute.
In 1982, Cowan accepted a seat on the White House Service Council. While serving in this capacity and facing problems involving interlinked aspects of science, policy, economics, environment and more, he realized that this demanded a broad range expertise above the current reductionist approach and fragmentation of the sciences. He believed that our educational culture was enforcing intellectual fragmentation through conservative university programs that depended on specialized grants and funded work. It seemed that cross-disciplinary team efforts were discouraged by membership in traditional, isolated science and social science disciplines. He knew that beginning in the 1980s numerical experiments through computer simulations were capable of providing the tools to think about very complex problems in a more holistic fashion. He began to imagine a new and independent type of institute that would combine the charter of a university while sharing some of Los Alamos' personnel and computer power. This could be a place where senior researchers would have a place to work on very speculative ideas. Where one could educate a man starting in science, but that could deal with the real messy world, which is not elegant, which science doesn't really deal with. In 1983, Cowan assembled a group of senior scientists interested in researching complex, adaptive systems. One year later, this assembly became the Santa Fe Institute. Initial funding was received by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, Citicorp and others.George was enthusiastic about complex systems, which he declared to be the next major thrust in science. The Santa Fe Institute fosters interdisciplinary research between physicists, mathematicians, economists, computer scientists, and others. Although most of his duties as president did not allow time for research, as Distinguished Fellow of the Institute, Cowan applied neuroscience principles to investigate relationships between children's brain physiological changes and behavioral development.
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