William Tiller in the Stanford Report
William Tiller passed away in February of 2022 at age 92 and I recently discovered his obituary in the Stanford Report, the online news source for Stanford University. It’s a very nice article, which I will reproduce in its entirety so that you can compare it to his sad Wikipedia page. Back in 2019 I set out to edit his Wikipedia page and decided to edit the page on subtle energy first. You can read my edited page, although it’s buried pretty deep in the history now. As you will see if you peruse the edit, all I did was try to neutralize the bias in the original page, by adding a quote from Dr. Tiller and a few references. Specifically, I addressed the quote from Brian Dunning which is still dominant on the page.
It is not the scientific concept of energy that is being referred to in the context of spirituality and alternative medicine. As Brian Dunning writes:
That’s all that energy is: a measurement of work capability. But in popular culture, ‘energy’ has somehow become a noun. “Energy” is often spoken of as if it is a thing unto itself, like a region of glowing power, that can be contained and used. Here’s a good test. When you hear the word “energy” used, substitute the phrase “measurable work capability”. Does the usage still make sense? Remember, energy itself is not the thing being measured: energy is the measurement of work performed or of potential… Thus, this New Age concept of the body having an “energy field” is fatally doomed. There is no such thing as an energy field; they are two unrelated concepts.
Brian Dunning is not a physicist or even a scientist for that matter. He is a convicted felon, convicted of defrauding eBay out of millions of dollars. He now runs a successful “skeptics” podcast, which is where the above quote comes from. The above quote contradicts Wikipedia’s own page on fields (physics), and the fact that all biological organisms generate bio-fields is not even contested! The Guerilla Skeptics terrorize anyone who tries to edit certain pages, Dr. Tiller’s included. After I tried to edit the subtle energy page, since I quoted Dr. Tiller, the Guerilla Skeptics added a note to his page revealing that James Randi, a professional magician who also has no scientific credential, had awarded Dr. Tiller the “pigusas award” in 1979. Here’s the article on Dr. Tiller:
William Tiller, materials engineer, expert in materials solidification, has died.
William A. Tiller, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering and world-renowned specialist in the solidification of various materials, died Feb. 7 in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 92.
Tiller was best known for his theoretical and experimental research into the physics of solidification for many materials, including water, metals, semiconductors, oxides, and polymers. He investigated the relationships between the crystallization process and the resulting material structures and their physical properties. He exploited this knowledge to generate new processes for applications ranging from ingot casting and material purification to single crystal growth that was critical to the then-nascent semiconductor industry, among other technical problems of his time.
Tiller first gained recognition in the field with a 1953 paper he co-authored with a fellow graduate student and two advisors at the University of Toronto on the way certain impurities get distributed as materials crystallize from liquid to solid, causing instabilities in the resulting material. In it, Tiller and his collaborators for the first time described the principle of “constitutional supercooling” mathematically. The process had been described qualitatively prior to the paper, but never in such concrete terms. The authors’ approach is still used today in textbooks on materials crystallization.
That work and his subsequent nine years at Westinghouse Research Laboratory earned Tiller a certain academic reputation such that in 1964 when he joined Stanford University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering he was the first faculty member to be appointed as — rather than promoted to — full professor. In Tiller’s first year on the faculty, his Air Force Office of Scientific Research contract alone was $600,000 per year, the largest in the department by a considerable margin. In today’s dollars, such a contact would exceed $5 million.
In 1972, Tiller published another influential paper on stress corrosion cracking. The paper was noted for introducing the concept that, under strain, a surface with wavy undulations will cause atoms to diffuse from the valleys to the peaks, increasing peak heights and producing greater irregularities. It became known as the Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld (ATG) mechanism and laid the foundation for a new theoretical work in semiconductor films, including quantum nanostructures and quantum dots. Decades later, the paper inspired a retrospective titled “The Asaro-Tiller-Grinfeld instability revisited.”
“Bill Tiller was the smartest person I have ever known, and not just in the field of crystallization. He was knowledgeable about most subjects. As a teacher he was also outstanding, showing infinite patience to have students understand. I personally owe him a lot as he made me the success I became,” remembered Lem Tarshis, Tiller’s first doctoral student at Stanford.
William Arthur Tiller was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Sept. 18, 1929. He grew up in Toronto, graduating high school in 1948. He then studied engineering physics at the University of Toronto, earning his BS, MS, and PhD in 1952, 1953, and 1955, respectively. It was during his time as a graduate student that he began his work on solidification science. After receiving his doctorate, Tiller spent nine years at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory in Pittsburgh, where he built and led a world-class research group. According to his daughter, one of Tiller’s prouder personal accomplishments was serving on Wernher von Braun’s science team at NASA leading the materials engineering efforts and developing materials for the Apollo nosecones and landers.
At Stanford over the next almost-three decades, Tiller authored numerous frequently cited journal publications and two textbooks, The Science of Crystallization: Macroscopic Phenomena and Defect Generation and The Science of Crystallization: Microscopic Interfacial Phenomena, both published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. He was department chair from 1966 to 1971. In 1970, Tiller garnered a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford University. He retired in 1992 having guided more than 50 graduate students to their PhDs and published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Tiller is survived by his daughter, Andrea Tiller, ’79, of San Francisco. He was predeceased by his wife, Jean, in 2021 and son, Jeffrey, in 2000.
On Medium: Conflicts of Interest and the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia
And then Wikipedia has the audacity to ask me for money!?!
