Johannes Marinus (‘Jo’) Stevels (1913-2000): 78 glass
He is my father. He has deeply influenced my research work (he was a researcher all of his life) and the12 years I spent at Delft University (he was a part time professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven for 17 years). Pa was born in Nederlandsch-Indie (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia). As a boy he returned to the Netherlands, where he had to grow up in an orphanage. Instead of being put into a vocational school, as was the norm, his intelligence brought him to middle school, high school and finally to University. He had this ‘scientific modesty’ which many researchers in the Netherlands in the forties, fifties and sixties had. Research was intended to serve the Truth -engineering pragmatism is to be tolerated at best. When I got my PhD, cum laude, and became a researcher at Philips Research he was delighted. When I left that department to work in the Philips factories he considered this a regression in academic level. Subsequently becoming a businessman was even more doubtful. Working in the field of environment was clearly the worst thing you could do. He perceived it with suspicion, and thought that it could be a way to introduce socialism within companies through the back-door. Moreover, his strong opinion was that environment is not a science or a discipline but rather an awkward mix of ‘quasi-sciences’. When I became a professor in Delft he did not congratulate me; in the real scientific world there is no room for applause. Instead he said, “The most important thing you have to do now is to take care of your students, do not listen to the Dean, do not listen to all these university managers that are around today - they only create confusion. The university exists because there are the students and not vice versa. Pa often had very pronounced opinions, in this case I agreed. This was not enough. Until the last moment of his life he wanted to check whether my care for the students was done in the way, and at the intensity, that he had wanted. I passed most of my exams but sometimes things went wrong. In the end the only thing to do in such a case was to admit your defeat and go to the local pub to enjoy mussels and beer. Sometimes I could sidestep questioning about my university activities, we discussed glass, the science of glass compositions (his field) and glass properties versus manufacturability -with ‘78’ glass as the pronounced example of this dilemma. Glass compositions had kept him busy all of his professional life - glass production was much less of a concern for him.
国际会议
The 4th International Conference on Waste Management and Technology(第四届固体废物管理与技术国际会议)
北京
英文
578
2009-11-28（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）