Acceptance of the Mineralogical Society of America Roebling Medal for 2005

Abstract

Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen: Thank you very much for this great honor of receiving the Roebling Medal. This is also a humbling moment because I know the Medal actually belongs to the large high-pressure mineralogy community, including my many friends and mentors in the audience. I happened to be with the right people at the right time in the right place. The last time I counted, the total number of coauthors on all my publications reached 394. Adding the people who have helped but have not coauthored with me, the total must be over 1000. The field is very active and covers a diversity of applications as demonstrated by the dynamic scientific program, yesterday and today, organized by Bill Bassett, Yingwei Fei, Rus Hemley, and Anne Hofmeister. The field was not always this exciting, nor the future this clear when I started four decades ago. In fact I had serious doubts when I was an undergraduate student in the Geology Department of National Taiwan University. The on-going practice for senior thesis projects was to assign each student a 1:25,000 quadrangle for independent geological mapping. The mapping for the whole island was almost complete, and our Class of 1963 reached Hengchun Peninsula, the southern tip of Taiwan; a step further, and I would have to be an oceanographer. Although I understood that geology is more than mapping, I was still concerned about the future, and came to the U.S.A. where at least the area of land was considerably bigger. In 1964, I went to the University of Rochester, New York, and very fortunately, became the first Ph.D. student of two young assistant professors, Bill Bassett and Taro Takahashi, who had started a diamond-anvil cell (DAC) program to explore the Earth’s deep interior. The depth added a vast new dimension from …