Herbert H. Stevens, Jr., was an established engineer. Born in Gardner, Maine, in 1913, he attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where he received a bachelor of science degree in engineering in 1936; and later attended the New School for Social Research, where he received a master’s degree in liberal studies.

As a young engineer at the end of World War II, he was credited as a patented inventor. Herb Stevens also pursued studies in the arts, sciences, religion and philosophy throughout his life, eventually developing correspondences with Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein.

Upon retirement, he became a full-time student at UMass Dartmouth, where I met him. At UMassD he earned a master’s degree in physics at the age of 73. 

At 80, he completed a master’s degree in professional writing and was honored in 1993 as the oldest graduate to receive a master’s degree at the school. Robert Waxler, head of the English department and his graduate advisor, said, “He is one of the youngest and most vital students I’ve had.”

The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?

Peter Ware Higgs, a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the mass of subatomic particles, in the 1960s, proposed that broken symmetry in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. 

This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the “Higgs Boson,” the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics.

Leon Max Lederman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 had sarcastically coined the term “God particle”—The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?—in a book on the “Higgs Boson” in particle physics, although the nickname is strongly disliked by many physicists, including Higgs himself, who regard it as sensationalistic. The Higgs “Boson” is a particle that follows Bose/Einstein statistics. Bosons make up one of the two classes of particles, the other being fermions that follows Bose/Einstein statistics. In quantum statistics, Bose/Einstein statistics is one of two possible ways in which a collection of non-interacting indistinguishable particles may occupy a set of available discrete energy states at thermodynamic equilibrium. 

Life’s Irony

On 4 July 2012, fifteen years after Herbert Steven’s death, CERN announced the discovery of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.

Herb would have celebrated that moment and would have found solace that his belief was fulfilled, even if the connection to a higher intelligence would have been his next challenge.

Herb and I

I have always believed, that no matter what the subject matter is, if a question is framed with intelligence and civility, backed up by long-term study and reservoirs of knowledge, that it has a right to be explored at a university, especially if this institution offers courses in the humanities, social and hard sciences. If this cannot happen at a university, then where else can one address the most difficult of questions.

Also, I am an immediate supporter of the “underdog”, having faced lots of criticism, ethnic prejudice as a German living in the US, social as not fitting in, or political as not sharing US mainstream concerns.

In four essays, Gerstner provides a basic introduction to his design methodology and suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era. Gerstner’s innovation was to propose a rule set or system defined by the designer that would determine all aesthetic decisions for a given product: for example, a logo might also function as a layout grid system or inspire a font. Today the book is especially topical in the context of current developments in computational design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture and art, Designing Programmes inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.

A grid system is a rigid framework that is supposed to help graphic designers in the meaningful, logical, and consistent organization of information on a page. It is an established tool used by print and web designers to create well-structured, balanced designs. Rudimentary versions of grid systems have existed since medieval times, but a group of Swiss graphic designers, mostly inspired in ideas from typographical literature started building a more rigid and coherent system for page layout. The core of these ideas was first presented by Müller-Brockmann, who helped spread knowledge about the grids thorough the world. This volume provides guidelines and rules for the function and use for grid systems from 8 to 32 grid fields, which can be used for the most varied of projects, the three-dimensional grid being treated as well. Exact directions for using all of the grid systems possible are given to the user, showing examples of working correctly on a conceptual level.

I concentrated on the search for the smallest usable typographic unit separated by gutters when put into vertical and horizontal rows, which determined the proportions of all items within the typographic frame, shared between all items included in the composition, from gutters to variable text and image frames. The only difference in my system would have been my interests in organic proportion, finding the right interrelationship among page, image, and text, and the search for opportunities to allow other systems to enter, which would mean the destruction of the major system or the careful integration, in which each of the joining systems must yield some otherwise rigid controls.

Herb and I had lengthy conversations, each of us trying to explain our interests and approaches. He would go to many major conferences and present his concepts off campus to scientists, and I would prepare his presentation slides to back up his verbal presentation.

It was then that I received an invitation to join a group show for designers. We received instructions, an image of an “eye,” a word “word,” and a “grid.” From the moment I opened the envelope I disliked the assignment, actually so much—because there was no purpose—that I nearly refused to participate.

But then I asked Herb if he would allow me to use his research and combine it with mine, both of our searches for a smallest unit. He agreed, and suddenly, I found my bearing for the construction of the design. The design is before “Pagemaker,” “Quark Express,” or “InDesign”—at the school we were still working with “Compugraphic”—and all visual material was still hand-cut from “Ruby-lith” or pasted, as well as stripped together on the line-up tables, and printed in “split fountain” by Aldus Press in Malden Massachusetts,

What is interesting:
I claim never to have learned anything worthwhile form my design colleagues in the UMassD Design Department other than to despise their constant need for political intrigue. But I learned more than a lot from colleagues of other campus departments, from literature, music, philosophy, anthropology and psychology, who shared their knowledge freely, and in this way filled many holes in my education. But most of all, I learned from working with students. I have always appreciated their intelligence and their commitment. While exploring the subjects, destined to form the contents of the projects, students and I have together experienced profound revelations.