Four faculty members to be featured in NOVA show on samurai swords

Four members of the Lehigh faculty will be featured when the PBS show NOVA airs a documentary titled “Secrets of the Samurai Sword” at 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 24.
The program, which was first aired last fall, will be shown locally by WLVT-TV, Channel 39, the Bethlehem affiliate of PBS.
The one-hour program takes a look at the one-thousand-year-old art and science of designing and fabricating the sword that was the favored weapon of Japan’s samurai warriors.
The program contains interviews with Mike Notis and Richard Vinci , professors of materials science and engineering; Alan Pense, provost emeritus and professor emeritus of materials science and engineering; and Kenneth Kraft, professor of religion studies.
Vinci, the director of Lehigh’s Nano- and Micro-Mechanical Behavior Laboratory, is interviewed about the fundamental mechanical properties of metals and the techniques that engineers use to achieve desired properties. Notis, who directs Lehigh’s Archaeometallurgy Laboratory, discusses the fabrication methods by the samurai warriors.
The documentary contains a panoramic shot of Lehigh’s campus.
--Kurt Pfitzer