About Charles T. Munger Jr.
Scientific Career
CHARLES T MUNGER JR. is an experimental physicist with a Ph.D. in atomic physics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated in 1987.
His career has ranged from high-energy particle physics to the use of atomic systems to test fundamental symmetry principles. Working with two colleagues, he developed the first successful technique for constructing atoms made entirely of anti-matter.
He worked on accelerator physics experiments at three different national accelerators: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Bevalac; on the Mark II experiment at the Stanford Linear Collider at SLAC; and at the Antiproton Accumulator at Fermilab.
He has also authored papers on atomic theory, including how to calculate the structure in few-electron, highly charged ions, and how to calculate the evolution of a Cesium atom in time-varying electric and magnetic fields.
His work in recent years has centered on using the latter theory to develop and build an experiment to detect the electric dipole moment of the electron, using a modified Cesium atomic clock, as a probe of CP-violation that might occur outside the Standard Model of particle physics.
Reform Career
Education
Between 2003 and 2007, Charles served on the Curriculum Development and Materials Commission for the California State Board of Education.
His service included chairing the Mathematics Subject Matter Committee and the Science Subject Matter Committee, which oversaw the public process for adopting math and science standards and all texts in those subjects for California’s public school students in grades from kindergarten to 9th grade. He was the commission liaison to the Education and Environment Initiative, working to ensure the accuracy of the science taught in the state’s first curriculum in environmental education. He personally checked the accuracy of thousands of test questions for California’s assessments in science, and reviewed thousands of pages of instructional materials, all to accomplish California’s goal of enabling the highest achievement by each student.
Political
Charles was the lead supporter of Proposition 11, which in 2008 took the decennial drawing of districts for the state Assembly and Senate away from the state legislature and transferred it to the new and independent Citizens Redistricting Commission and an open, public process. He was also the co-author, proponent, lead supporter and campaign supervisor for Proposition 20, which in 2010 passed with 61.3% of the vote and ensured that the Commission would also draw California’s 53 Congressional districts. He supported the passage of these reforms and the defeat in 2010 of Proposition 27, an initiative that would have abolished the Commission before it had even started work. In 2011 he filed an amicus brief with the California Supreme Court opposing the California Republican Party, his own party, in its interpretation of the provisions of that reform, and his view prevailed. In 2015, he organized an amicus brief and was successful in the defense of congressional redistricting reform in a case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2010 Charles abandoned his own effort to reform California’s system of political primaries to join with former Assembly member Steve Peace, State Senator Abel Maldonado, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to help pass, by a voter registration drive among independent voters, California Proposition 14 that established California’s nonpartisan ``top-two’’ primary. As chairman of Hold Politicians Accountable from 2014 to 2020, Charles oversaw the legal defense of all challenges in California both to redistricting reform and to the state’s “top two” primary system. In 2016 Charles was co-proponent with former State Senator Sam Blakeslee, and lead supporter, of the California Legislature Transparency Act, which in 2016 passed with 64.5% of the vote as California Proposition 54. This measure requires bills to be posted on the Internet in their final form for 72 hours before they could pass out of either house of the state Legislature, and requires all public proceedings of the state Legislature to be audiovisual recorded and posted on the Internet within 24 hours. In 2019 he published through the Schwarzenegger Institute at USC a series of three peer-reviewed papers analyzing in detail how the ``top two'' affected election outcomes in the California elections of 2012-2016.
More recently he has authored a series of papers analyzing the use of election methods other than plurality, including ranked-choice ballots under Condorcet methods and Instant Runoff, and also analyzing Approval, Range, and Star voting, reaching the conclusion that ranked-choice ballots under Condorcet methods alone offer any significant gain in the degree to which single candidates, intended to actually represent the voters who elected, them actually do. As part of this work, he has made his own contributions to election theory, notably (a) a system that allows the election outcome from the Ranked Pairs method to be checked using just paper and pencil; (b) an improvement in the computer coding of Ranked Pairs that allows it to run in an average time that scales as 𝑁𝑁2_not 𝑁𝑁3_, where 𝑁𝑁 _is the number of candidates; and (c) a proof that a particular Condorcet election method, the Benham method, offers strictly fewer opportunities for voters to gain advantage by dissembling on their ballots than does Instant Runoff.
His analyses of the top-two primary and of other election methods presently total well in excess of 350,000 words---more than Jane Austen’s novels Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion combined, but alas without her style.
Charles is active in Republican politics, and served as chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Party from 2012 to 2015. He also served from 2013 to 2019 as chairman of the Initiatives Committee of the California Republican Party, which recommends to party delegates positions the state party should take on statewide ballot initiatives. As Chairman of the political action committees Spirit of Democracy California and Spirit of Democracy America he has been pleased to have directed independent political campaigns to support able and distinguished candidates to state and federal office in California
Awards, and other service
Charles was awarded the National Civic Leadership Award from Common Cause in 2012, and the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 2016, for his successful efforts to end the gerrymandering of California’s legislative districts. Charles is a member of the Board of Directors of the Lincoln Club of Northern California, and was a member of the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 2013 to 2017.
Personal Life
Charles and his wife, Mandy Lowell, reside in Palo Alto, California. They have three children. He enjoys art museums, folk music, and writing English poetry in the form of Japanese tanka. He is 66 years of age.