Philip Morrison

Philip Morrison (1976)

Philip Morrison (born November 7, 1915 in Somerville , New Jersey , † April 22, 2005 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an institute professor , professor emeritus of physics and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a long time .

Life

He came into contact with physics as a radio amateur who had a license at the age of twelve. A polio restricted him since youth's freedom of movement, so that he needed a cane for support. He grew up in Pittsburgh , where he joined the Young Communist League and the CPUSA .

He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Bachelor 1936) and at the University of California, Berkeley , where he showed his great talent for physics during his studies. In 1940 he did his doctorate with Robert Oppenheimer . He then took on a teaching position at the University of Illinois . He did research work for Enrico Fermi . In 1941 he became a physics teacher (instructor) at San Francisco State College and 1941/42 instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign .

At the beginning of the war he became an employee of the so-called Manhattan Project , which developed the first atomic bomb . First at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago and from 1942 to 1946 in Los Alamos itself, where he became group leader. On July 12, 1945, he transported two boxes of plutonium from Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos through New Mexico to the Alamogordo test site . He was involved in the final stages of arming the bomb. He described the flash of the atomic bomb as follows: "It was like opening an oven and the sun came out like a sunrise".

Three weeks later he assembled the core of the “ Fat Man ” bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on the Pacific island of Tinian . Shortly afterwards, in Nagasaki, he saw the effects of the bomb with his own eyes. Like many others, he became an active opponent of nuclear armament and an advocate of nuclear arms control . As a member of the "Federation of Atomic Scientists" he published many articles and books on this.

During the McCarthy era , he was charged with his communist past. As recently as the 1990s, he was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1946 he went to Cornell University as an associate professor (later he was professor there), where he worked with Hans Bethe and was a colleague of Richard Feynman , and from 1965 as a professor at MIT, where he got the highest rank from 1976 Institute professor had. Then he turned more and more to astrophysics . Very early on, from 1959, he advocated researching radio signals from space. Later he got involved in the NASA project “ Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ” (SETI). From 1986 he was Professor Emeritus at MIT.

He is also otherwise known as a populizer of science in the USA and beyond, among other things with regular book reviews in Scientific American from 1965 and in radio and television broadcasts. In 1987 he presented the six-part series The Ring of Truth with his wife Phylis Morrison on NBC, which was also published as a book. His film Powers of Ten with Charles and Ray Eames is also well known . For his achievements in physics education he received the Oersted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers.

He was a fellow of the American Physical Society , member of the Federation of American Scientists (from 1947 to 1949 its president and 1972 to 1976 its chairman), the American Astronomical Society (on whose council he was from 1977 to 1979), the International Astronomical Union, the National Academy of Sciences (since 1971), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1961) and the American Philosophical Society and he received the Andrew Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics .

In 1980 he received the Presidential Award from the New York Academy of Sciences and her Pregel Prize.

Fonts

• with Kosta Tsipis , Jerome Wiesner "The future of american defense", Scientific American February 1994
• with others: Cosmic Rays, Springer 1961
• Editor with John Billingham, John Wolfe: The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, NASA 1977, 1979
• with Hans Bethe : Elementary nuclear theory, Wiley 1956, Dover 2006
• with Donald Holcomb: My fathers watch- aspects of the physical world, Prentice-Hall 1974
• Powers of ten: a book about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero (with Charles and Ray Eames), Freeman 1982
• Ring of truth- an inquiry into how we know and what we know, Random House 1987, 1989
• with Kosta Tsipis: Reason enough to hope- America and the world of the 21st century, MIT Press 1998
• Nothing is too wonderful to be true, Springer, 1995, 1997, ISBN 1-56396-363-9 (essays, some with an autobiographical background)
• Philip Morrisons long look at the literature - he reviews a 100 memorable science books, Freeman 1990 (from his Scientific American column)

Web links

• Obituary at MIT 2005
• Page in memory of Phylis and Phil Morrison
• Biography at the APS
• Biography at nuclearfiles.org

Individual evidence

1. ^ Giuseppe Cocconi , Morrison, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Nature, Vol. 184, 1959, pp. 844-846