Melba Phillips

Melba Newell Phillips (born February 1, 1907 in Hazleton , Indiana , † November 8, 2004 in Petersburg , Indiana) was an American physicist.

life and work

Phillips studied physics at Battle Creek College in Michigan ( Masters degree in 1928) and at the University of California, Berkeley , where she was one of Robert Oppenheimer's first PhD students in 1933 . In 1935 she and her teacher discovered the "Oppenheimer-Phillips process" in the scattering of deuterons , a stripping reaction in today's terminology .

She then worked as a post-doc at Bryn Mawr College and the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1937/8 at Connecticut College for Woman in her first university teaching position. From 1938 she was in New York at Brooklyn College and from 1944 also at the Radiation Laboratory of Columbia University . During the Second World War she also taught at the University of Minnesota for some time . During the McCarthy era , she lost her positions at Brooklyn College and Columbia University when she refused to testify before any of the McCarthy committees (McCarran's) in 1952 (Brooklyn College publicly apologized for the dismissal in 1987).

After that she was unemployed for several years and wrote two textbooks during that time: Principles of Physical Science with Bonner and the famous textbook Classical Electricity and Magnetism with Wolfgang Panofsky . In 1957 she hired Edward Condon (who himself was classified as a "safety risk" on the McCarthy committees) at Washington University in St. Louis to lead the Academic Year Institute Program (for teacher training). From 1962 she was at the University of Chicago , where she retired in 1972 . She was then visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook until 1975 and at Peking University in 1980 .

Phillips was a leader in physics education in the United States. In 1966/7 she was the first woman president of the American Association of Physics Teachers . The organization also awarded her the Oersted Medal in 1974 and the first Melba Newell Phillips Award in 1981, which is presented in her honor. At the University of Chicago, she also introduced science courses for students who did not specialize in science.

Phillips was also politically active and was one of the founding members of the Federation of American Scientists in 1945 .

In 2003 she received the Joseph Burton Forum Award from the American Physical Society . In 1981 she received the Karl Taylor Compton Award from the American Institute of Physics .

Fonts

• with Wolfgang Panofsky: Classical Electricity and Magnetism . Addison-Wesley, first 1955, 2nd edition, Dover, 2005, ISBN 0-486-43924-0 .
• with Francis Bonner: Principles of Physical Science . Addison-Wesley, 1957.
• Classical Electrodynamics , in Siegfried Flügge (editor), Handbuch der Physik, Volume IV, Springer Verlag 1962.

Web links

• Obituary at the University of Chicago