John King

jgking@mit.edu

Inevitably a talk about teaching involves talking about things that are hard to evaluate and describe—it’s all very personal, and I apologize for me appearing so much in what follows.

I can’t remember whether I first heard of Phil Morrison.

Around 1952 I was taking a graduate course in nuclear physics and besides the text there were recommended readings from notes of Fermi’s course and some other mimeographed notes by Bethe and one Morrison. But around the same time I also heard Morrison on the radio testifying to a senate committee about security—the McCarthy era. I don’t remember detail, but the clarity and sharpness of his response was memorable and impressed me as much as the same qualities in his writing.

Years pass, and I’m in occasionally in Zacharias’ office with 10 others listening to plans for a new high school physics course, the work of the Physical Sciences Study Committee. Most of the group goes along with Zach’s plan which is outlined as, say, 20 items filling the chalk board on the wall opposite the desk A visitor from Cornell does not hesitate to adjust course, adding and subtracting from what’s written, something no one else dares do. I learn that this is Phil Morrison.

In 1964 he comes to MIT. The continuous creation view of how the universe evolves is still around; I had heard about it from Bondi at a colloquium in 1952, and I imagined that instead of matter appearing in space (I think he said at a rate of one hydrogen atom per volume of the Empire state building per year) it would be generated within nuclei as hydrogen in the ground state, so matter makes matter. I thought about the ramifications and after a while went, with some trepidation, to see Phil for advice about the idea and the experiment. He was great: skeptical but encouraging, suggesting that a low cost crazy experiment is well worth the effort. No continuously created hydrogen was found; you would have heard about it. (See Cohen and King, Nature 1969).

Around 1973 MIT somehow decides that it should have physics for poets for some fraction of our freshmen, and somehow I find that I’m to help Phil as co-lecturer. He does most of the lecturing in a style that is both elegant and intellectually demanding of the audience, far different from the usual formula deriving and applying way. I contribute mostly through demonstrations proposed by one or the other of us, with those that Phil thinks up notably simple and memorable. I’ll show you one, because whoever thought of it, it amused us enough to repeat it several times in my lab in our pre and post lecture sessions.

Two nails are stuck through transversally at opposite ends of a kosher dill pickle about 4 inches long. The nails are connected to the 120 volt 60 hertz line. Presently there is a sizzling sound and the pickle lights up with a pale green light. We make theories of how it works, imagine measuring fluctuations in the current, etc. but enough. You could ask what’s the point? Phenomena are worthy. The class is amused and the atmosphere brightens.

Sometime before noon on 10 September 2005 I do this demo in Kresge auditorium. [I think Phil would have approved. There was applause.]

During my years of dealing with undergraduate labs I had realized how little connection they had with lectures, problems, recitations, tests, in other words, the remainder of the course. So in 1988 I tried out a summer course in introductory physics in which about half the students effort was devoted to experiments that they themselves in partnerships of two assembled from simple materials; soldering, screwing, wrenching, bending, adjusting as needed. Now it happened that Phil and Phylis had finished their work on the superb Ring of Truth TV series in which I had had a tiny role, and Phylis, with her great energy and looking for work, asks if she can help in my lab. Of course—and she makes the new course, E&M with take home experiments, work and become a regular MIT offering. I lecture and presently she asks: could Phil join? Wonderful, I say, and besides the immense benefit we get from his wisdom and insight there is a concrete result, a couple of years later, a book: ZAP, a hands-on introduction to E&M.

This book is important, but it lacks homework problems and references for further reading. But students working from it will read about phenomena and their understanding, construct apparatus that demonstrates, and measure and analyze; all in ways that bring the material to life as no text and computer-based lab does. A major project I have in mind is to make these additions and see about launching this marvelous late Morrison opus.

Finally, most important to me was the periodic visit to 11 Bowdoin Street, to talk about everything. How I miss these two wonderful people!

Henry Linschitz

linschitz@brandeis.edu

Michael Ambrosino

MJAmbrosino@aol.com

Photo courtesy of Heather G. Williams, copyright 2005.  Posted with permission.

In that wonderous organized clutter that was the Morrison living room, a small proscenium arch sat in the bookcase. When you opened the velvet stage curtain, it revealed a tiny black-and-white TV.

In 1971, television in the Morrison household was kept in its place, discreet . . out of the way . . hidden.

The year before, at the BBC, I’d seen Phil cropping up in various science programs in the “Horizon” series. Producers seem to use him to make sense of it all. He’d appear at the beginning, several times in the middle, and he’d wrap it up at the end. He had that knack of putting it all in perspective while not talking down to you.

And here I was, a year later, about to ask him to be the first advisor as we attempted to create the television series that became NOVA.

We all have our own mental pictures of Phil. Mine is of him in his first motorized wheel chair, appropriately enough sitting in a seat designed by his good friend, Charles Eames, looking up from his ever-present notebook; beaming . . positive . . helpful.  He said yes!

That is, yes, if I never invited him to a committee meeting. Phil had a thing about time, about wasting time… and to him, committee meetings were a good waste of time.

Phil cared passionately about NOVA.

He understood that NOVA would not be a “Science Series”, but that it would “show how the world worked” using the tools of journalism and the processes of science to tell good stories.

He liked that idea. He wanted that audience to experience evidence and see for themselves how things happened.

He wanted people to understand because an educated society needed to know, but also because it was just grand to find out.

He understood that “the finding out” was the fun part. He appreciated the journey of discovery for itself.

He, himself, never stopped discovering.

On the set of “ Space Bridge to Moscow ” a live NOVA satellite interconnection, Phil sat in his seat in the WGBH studio watching a TV monitor that fed a live picture of him back from Moscow . With that little smile we all knew so well, he waved.

After a bit, the TV image of Phil waved back.

He waved again, and he and all of us watched as he measured the time it took for the “speed of light” TV satellite transmission from Boston to Moscow return back to Boston .

He had a few minutes so why not do a little experiment.

He came to appreciate the medium of television, and after a bit he wanted to make his own signature series, “The Ring Of Truth”.

The six program titles say a lot about Phil: “Looking”, “Change”, “Mapping”, “Clues”, “Atoms”, and “Doubt”.

Our first proposal for that series was rejected. So, we thought about getting away to think. We went off to the Yucatan.

One day, at Chichen Itza , we left Phil sitting at the bottom of a massive temple structure, and when we came back several hours later, he had hoisted himself to the top using only the strength left in his arms. Of course, he wasn’t just sitting there, he was flying a kite . . . in the form of a peace dove!

Can you imagine a production office full of atoms made of toothpicks and gumdrops and a ceiling full of pushpins showing a reflection of the sun’s progress over the course of our production year!

Can you imagine what it was like when he came up with better TV ideas than you did?

Most of you know the story of Eratosthenes, the deep well in the city that is now Aswan and the deep well in Alexandria, the difference in sun angles, the distance between the two cities and hence the measurement of the circumfrence of the Earth. In TV terms, that gets about a minute and a half of animation and can be fairly dry.

Phil found his version of the Nile . It was US Route #183, running straight south for 370 miles from Basset, Nebraska to Coldwater , Kansas .

On a sparkling clear night, a plumb bob and a sightline to the star Antares were scribed on the side of a Ryder Rental Van.

Phil and Phylis drove that van straight south to Coldwater and scribed Antares again. The angle between the two lines was now evident on the big yellow side of the van.

That angle, that portion of a full arc, and the odometer reading gave us the data for a pretty fair measurement of the Earth’s circumfrence, and an illustration far more understandable and far better “reality TV”.

He wanted you to know.

He wanted you to see the evidence yourself, to do the calculations with him and to enjoy the process as well as the result.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

We are here today because Philip Morrison mattered.

For the rest of our lives, whenever we open a book or look at the moon, or question some claim of science or government authority, we will remember how fortunate we were, that we were all Phil Morrison’s students!

John King

jgking@mit.edu

Photo courtesy of Heather G. Williams, copyright 2005.  Posted with permission.

Karen Worth

kworth@edc.org

Photo courtesy of Heather G. Williams, copyright 2005.  Posted with permission.

Words Spoken at the Memorial Celebration in honor of Philip Morrison

I knew Phil for many years as friend and colleague of my father, Viki Weisskopf. We probably first met in Los Alamos but I have no memories of Phil from that time. The memories really start with an occasional visit when Phil was at Cornell and then, of course, more frequent ones after he came to MIT in 1964. But he became more than a family friend to me soon after.

I had the wonderful good fortune of being guided into teaching and education of young children after college. With my interest and degree in science, science education became, and still is, a particular focus of my work with children and it’s about Phil and science education that I want to say a few words. Phil and Phylis, became wonderful mentors to me as they were to so many people who have worked in science education in this country and around the world.

It was in Ghana that I had my first science education experience with Phil in 1965 when we were working on a project called the African Primary Science Program (APSP). I have a particular image of a number of us sitting outside a school building where a large tire swing on a sort of bamboo tripod (or was it a lever?) had been erected as well as some other playground equipment. Phil and Phylis too were talking about all the science children could explore as they circled and spun on this simple structure.

I am now at the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) here in Newton . There is a long and wonderful story about Phil and this organization, but for that there is no time. I will say just a few words. For those of you who do not know EDC, it is a non-profit research and development organization founded by a group of university scholars and researchers in 1958 in response to the emergence of the Russian Space Program , Sputnik, and the Cold War and concerns that our educational system was woefully lacking in math and science teaching and learning. Phil was one of that group – one of the fathers of EDC and certainly a guiding spirit then and for many years after.

The project that started it all was a curriculum development project to radically change how physics was taught at the high school level. It was called the Physical Science Study Committee or PSSC and was led by Jerrold Zacharias another champion of pre-college science education. It began in the mid-50’s and Phil was a major player. Many other projects followed PSSC at EDC including the African Primary Science Program. None was more important to my mind than ESS, the Elementary Science Study, which began in 1960 as one of several NSF funded projects to develop inquiry oriented materials based science curricula for elementary schools. In a talk in 1971, reminiscing about the early years of ESS, Phil said, “… so it was natural that elementary science should appear to us as the place to go to try to prepare that instinctive concern, what Dewey called the ‘sub-soil’ of the mind for what we saw as science in the modern world .” (1) Phil chaired the Steering Committee at its inception. He was a moving force for many years providing inspired leadership to the work.

These projects, ESS in particular, I would argue, have deeply influenced the nature of science teaching and learning and also underscored the importance of having scientists and educators working together. Phil’s contributions to this work from ESS until his death have been and are extraordinarily important to those of us who worked close to him and others who felt his influence at a distance. When I returned to EDC in the mid-80’s to work on a new NSF grant and new materials, Phil was one of a few people whom I described as being on my shoulder – a conscience and mentor – keeping me true to the basic ideas of science, children’s interests and curiosity, and those early materials, as I struggled to meet the realities of schools. He’s not here with us anymore but he’s still on my shoulder.

In thinking about today, I went back and read some of what Phil wrote over the years about learning science. I was deeply moved by the elegance and eloquence of those words, as important, rich, and inspirational today as they were decades ago. And as I thought about how to share a small part of Phil’s work about science and children, I decided that the best way was to share with you some of his words. They are a glimpse into all of the wisdom that Phil has given to the field of science education. Especially now when education in general and certainly science education is in trouble, Phil’s wise words need constant repeating.

Before I share a few, let me say that I speak here of schools and science in schools. Phil also contributed richly to science centers and museums, working with many in this country and in other countries to help make informal science settings as active and joyful as he wished schools would be.

As the ESS project began, Phil wrote about the science that was to be the focus of these materials. In The Curricular Triangle and its Style in 1968 Phil wrote,

“Science is not itself the world; it is one reaction to the world. It is on this view of science, and on the view of man which underlies it, that we chose to rest the structure of our growing curriculum. (2) And he goes on to say, “The topography of our elementary school science is not that of a great museum, with distinct ranks of exhibit halls; rather it is like a tree with branches great and small, dividing and reuniting – if sometimes with a small jump at the end.” (3)

And in a piece about the process of developing the ESS materials for the elementary school, Phil wrote

“…rather, we propose a philosophy of “enlightened opportunism.’ Opportunism in the sense that, given the context of the child’s interest, the child’s age, the cost per scholar per year, the level of the machinery that surrounds him at home, from the TV set to the water faucet, given all these things, at what point do we see physical, biological, or other systems which attract attention and which can lead to growth and understanding and motivation for inquiry? This is the way in which the groups looked for soft places, the cracks. They looked for the interesting animal. They looked for the delight of the moving hand forming a shadow on the wall. They looked for the bright marble falling through the tube of liquid and catching the eye. This is the way one begins…..” (4)

In a wonderful article in 1966 called Tensions of Purpose , Phil suggests one of these tensions, is

“…the tension between the right and the left hands, between the reasoned, analytic, logical, unadorned, and clear, and the intuitive, aesthetic, playful, charming, and imaginative. It is to be hoped that we can devise materials which will allow the left hand into school science.” (5)

And here is one last one, again from The Curricular Triangle and Its Style .

"What the textbook can summarize in a page of results -- life is cellular, cells have water and carbon, cells divide to multiply -- our methods with the child's own work, with his own hands, with his own microscope and labored arithmetic may take six weeks of classroom effort..."

   "We are not disturbed by slowness, for what goes slow can run deep. And school hours are not all of life. To stroll into reality, the detail of it and the context, to unravel and uncover, is a better thing than to sprint past, reading the billboards of science."(6)

We, in science education have lost a wonderful thinker, champion, and spokesman for the science that our children should have to enjoy. But these words and many others remain for us to use. They are as important and relevant today as they have been at any time since he wrote them.

1. A a speech given in 1971 and quoted in The Elementary Science Study- A History , (1973). Elementary Science Study, Education Development Center ; Newton , MA , p.7.

2. The Curricular Triangle and Its Style, (1970). Elementary Science Study, Education Development Center ; Newton , MA , p.99.

3. Ibid, p.102

4. The Elementary Science Study- A History , (1973). Elementary Science Study, Education Development Center ; Newton , MA , p 170

5. Tensions of Purpose , (1966). ESI Quarterly Report, Educational Services Incorporated, Spring/Summer 1966; Newton , MA .

6. The Curricular Triangle and Its Style, (1970). Elementary Science Study, Education Development Center ; Newton , MA , p112.

Owen Gingerich

ginger@cfa.harvard.edu

Photo courtesy of Heather G. Williams, copyright 2005.  Posted with permission.

The Unforgettable Philip Morrison

Many decades ago, when I was a young man on the Kansas prairies, I eagerly perused copies of the Reader’s Digest. One of their features was a series entitled “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met.” Of late I’ve thought about this, and for me, Phil Morrison was definitely the most unforgettable character I’ve ever met.

It would have been fun to have asked Phil who was the most unforgettable character he had ever met. It might have been J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of his professors at Berkeley and then the leader at Los Alamos . Or it could have been Charles Eames, the creative designer with whom he worked on several films.

Probably it wouldn’t have been Einstein, but Phil recounted to me how as an undergraduate at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh , he had heard Einstein lecture. As a youngster Phil had had polio, which kept him out of school a few years. To keep him occupied, his father bought him a crystal radio set, and Phil developed a considerable interest in radio, getting his broadcasting license when he was 12. So at Carnegie Tech he became involved with the radio amateurs, who had a room in the loft of the auditorium. Thus, when Einstein came to give the Gibbs Lecture in 1934, Phil had a bird’s eye view from high among the flies above Einstein’s podium.

I’m not sure precisely when I first met Phil, but it was soon after he came from Cornell to Cambridge in 1964, and it was in connection with physics education for young people, a topic always close to his heart. Gradually my wife Miriam and I got to know Phil and Phylis very well, as we lived not far from them in Cambridge . Let me offer two small vignettes. I vividly remember a Christmas afternoon when they dropped in, and very soon Phil was down on the floor with our boys, helping them put their new train set together. And then another occasion, when the Phils came by on the Fourth of July to see the homemade fireworks that our sons had created. Phil grew nostalgic and told us how he had had some experience with fireworks, at the White Sands proving ground in 1945. He described the soldiers assembling the dynamite for the huge calibration explosion that preceded the Trinity test. The enlisted men were casually throwing the boxes of dynamite off the trucks, which made Phil very nervous. “It’s all right,” declared the officer in charge. “Here, I’ll show you,” and he proceeded to have the men build a wall of dynamite boxes so he could machine gun them. Phil remarked that he did not stay to witness the show!

Phil Morrison proved to be one of my most important mentors. I suspect he would be very surprised to hear me describe him that way, because he always treated me as a colleague. Of course, it was continually fascinating to learn things from him. On one of my last visits, he remarked that when the historians of science had had their international congress in Ithaca in 1962, he had shown them how to weigh neutrons. Obviously pleased that I looked somewhat puzzled, he went on to explain how he did it. He had made ice cubes out of heavy water, and demonstrated that they sank to the bottom in a beaker full of water. When I remarked that this must have been a rather expensive demonstration he quickly said, “No, I wrapped the ice cubes in plastic bags, and after it was all over I returned the heavy water to the lab.”

But in fact, I don’t mean that Phil was an information mentor. What really mattered was that he was a moral mentor. Unlike some of our famous friends, money was never an issue when he was invited to give a lecture, whether it was here or in India . What mattered was whether it was an interesting and useful thing to do. He never turned me down when I invited him to make a guest appearance in my class at Harvard. On numerous occasions he joined a panel of his peers from Los Alamos to address the questions, “Should we have made the atomic bomb? Should we have dropped it?” The remarkable thing was that he always had a fresh angle to that question, never quite the same way twice. I recall his saying how each day they tuned in on the short wave radio to see if London was still there. He always emphasized that those were very different times from anything our young students had experienced.

And then there was the matter of the books. Review books flooded in a dizzying rate, for the column that Phil conducted for several decades in Scientific American. He was a demon speed reader, and he perused dozens of books every month. He rarely if ever wrote a negative review. Space was too precious to waste on bad books. But there was a problem of book overload, and he and Phylis were very generous in giving them away. Many of us made regular pilgrimages to Bowdoin Street to pencil our names into books that intrigued us. But they made it a rule never to give books to local libraries. “That wouldn’t be fair to the publishers,” they declared, and they were very strict about that. But for impoverished schools in the south or abroad, the rule was waived, and there were frequent shipments of surplus books.

And the moral mentorship extended to computer software as well. They were happy to relate their experiences with ingenious new software, but there was never any possibility of getting a bootleg copy from them. That wouldn’t have been fair to the persons who had devised these clever programs.

If you ever wanted to know when or where Phil was born, where he was educated, or where he first taught, you couldn’t find him in Who’s Who in America . It was partly that he was devoid of personal puffery, and partly a matter of priorities. He was always busy reading, thinking, and writing, and filling out questionnaires was not his cup of tea.

But many of you will be gratified to know that he took time in recent years for a series of oral history interviews, which are being deposited at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics. Various interviewers took on different aspects of his colorful career. I queried him about his transition from Berkeley to Ithaca , about his pair of seminal early papers written at Cornell, his coming to MIT, his interaction with Charles Eames, his television series The Ring of Truth. “Don’t try television,” he warned me. “The producers wanted controversy, and I had to tell them that science isn’t like politics or literary criticism.”

Phil’s account of trying to get a job after he finished his degree at Berkeley was particularly poignant. He sent off dozens of applications, but a conservative department chairman who took offense at Phil’s leftist views learned from the department secretary where Lawrence and Oppenheimer were sending letters of recommendation on his behalf, and the chairman then sent his own poisonous recommendation. Eventually Phil got a position at the University of Illinois , where a former fellow graduate student was able to defuse the poison pen missive. He did not stay there long, however, because he was soon recruited for the Manhattan Project, and afterward Hans Bethe brought him to Cornell.

At Cornell he joined forces with Giuseppe Cocconi to write the now famous SETI paper, in which they proposed using the comparatively transparent radio region near the 21-cm hydrogen line for a search for extraterrestrial signals. With the reputation of being the father of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Phil continued to maintain his interest in this topic, and on several occasions for my class he defended the possibility of abundant alien civilizations in our galaxy, using the key words antiquity, ubiquity, and plenitude to underscore his argument.

Recently I wanted to reconstruct some details of his lecture, so Bert lent me the one of the little notebooks that invariably accompanied Phil on his lectures. I quickly found the notes, from April of 1995, but I was amazed at what else was in the notebook. There were not only sketches for various lectures, but many pages of detailed calculations and Feynman diagrams. The other seminal paper from the Cornell period, on the source of cosmic neutrinos, was replete with Feynman diagrams, but in the oral history interview Phil averred that these were the work of his co-author, Hon-yi Chiu. But it is plain to me that Phil understood them well enough to use them.

Those of us who knew Phil well saw the tip of the iceberg, but we didn’t always appreciate the foundation that lay below his erudition. He was an amazing man, and a wonderful friend, truly the most unforgettable character I have had the privilege to meet.

Emily Kramer Morrison

(no email address)

Letter read by Julie Hawkins

Lee Grodzins

lee@grodzins.com

Phillip Morrison, An Appreciation

Phillip Morrison, Chairman of the Advisory Board of Cornerstones of Science, died on April 22 at the age of 89 at his home in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Phil and his wife Phylis, who died in 2002, were instrumental in the founding of Cornerstones fives years ago. Their "joy of insight," so pervasively fundamental to their way of life, has been an inspiration to all our programs.

Phil was a renowned theoretical astrophysicist, internationally mown tram his books, films, and television specials. Of the many honors for his physics and his efforts for arms control, the one that 1 believe he appreciated most was that of Institute Professor at MIT, an award given to a select few who made the institute an intellectual playground. Here are a few anecdotes; the quotes are from memory.

Like so many readers of Scientific American, I marveled that every month, year after year for some 3S years, Phil, as Book Review Editor, wrote all the book reviews; at least one multi-page review, and five or more short reviews. For each December issue, Phil and Phylis reviewed a score of children's books. I estimated that Phil read and wrote the reviews of at least 1,500 books from every scientific discipline; millions of cogent words in clear, unmistakably Morrison, prose. And he seemed to remember it all.

I once observed to Phil that I did not recall a single panning review. His reply: "Why should I review a book I don't like?"

I asked Phylis about the modus operandi of putting together the December book reviews, which were so obviously written by Phil. Her reply: "I read the children and young adult books throughout the year and select those for review. Phil writes them because he is so fast that my writing the reviews would be a waste of time. "

I once asked Phil why he took on the enormous (and I assumed onerous) task of writing all the reviews. His reply: "I was reading all the books anyway." Given that the other parts of his career added up to more than one full-time job, that reply awed me but didn't explain much.

Phil liked to tell the story of how he came to accept being Book Review Editor of Scientific American, a job he did out of his small condo not far from Harvard Square. Before accepting the job he wondered what he would do with the hundreds of books he would receive. He decided on a trial that began with the receipt of a small mountain of books. Phil culled the dozen or so that he wanted to keep for reviewing and placed the rest on the sidewalk with a sign saying Free for the Taking. And then he sat by his upper window, took out a stop watch and timed how quickly the books disappeared. In just a few hours they were all gone, taken by a motley cross section of Cambridge denizens. Phil was happy and accepted the job.

Leo Sartori

leosartori@comcast.net

September 10, 2005

My memories of Phil go back half a century. I was a graduate student at MIT when a fellow student came into my office to tell me about a young visiting professor from Cornell who was giving three seminars: one on biophysics, one on nuclear physics, and one on astrophysics. Even then the breadth of his knowledge was impressive.

I was privileged to be Phil’s collaborator during the late 60’s and early 70’s. I had come to MIT to work at the Science Teaching Center which was set up by Jerrold Zacharias to revise the undergraduate physics curriculum. Phil was also involved in the work of the Center and that is how we met. I soon came under his spell and became an astrophysicist. We wrote several papers together—on supernovas, x-ray astronomy, and radio astronomy. Working with Phil was a unique experience. Our most interesting paper was a theory that explained the light curve of Type I supernovas. There was only one small problem with our explanation: it turned out to be wrong. But as Dennis Sciama once said of the steady-state universe, we thought the Creator had made a mistake on that one. Ours was a pretty theory and it should have been right. Later on we applied the same kinematic idea to explain the apparently faster-than-light motions observed in some quasars. That one was right.

My wife and I became frequent visitors on Bowdoin Street and shared many pleasant moments with Phil and Phylis. When our daughter Anne was eight days old, her first outing was to a Chinese restaurant with the Morrisons. I remember it clearly. We put her on the lazy Susan in the middle of the table and passed her around together with the dumplings.

There was almost no subject on which Phil was not well informed. (Well, maybe he did not know much about football.) His wealth of knowledge was awe-inspiring (as well as a bit intimidating, I have to admit.) Phylis was the only one who could keep up with him. They made quite a couple.

One other topic that drew us together was our common interest in politics and in arms control. When I worked with Kurt Gottfried, Henry Kendall, and others in what later became the Union of Concerned Scientists, opposing the ABM and MIRVs, we got lots of helpful advice from Phil. We suffered together through the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and commiserated with one another over the failure to achieve significant progress in arms control. We even wrote an op-ed piece together. And I have to tell you that there was one occcasion in which Phil was totally wrong about something. Are you ready? During the summer of 2000, he assured me that there was absolutely no chance that George W. Bush would become president. That just shows that no one can be perfect.

Shortly after I returned to Massachusetts on my retirement in 1999, Kosta Tsipis and I offered to write Phil’s biography. Unfortunately he declined our offer. I don’t know why, but I’m sorry he did. Phylis liked the idea but she could not persuade him. It would have been an exciting project. He had a fascinating life, one whose record deserves to be preserved. I hope someone will still do it.

Elizabeth Cavicchi cavicchi@cs.tufts.edu

Being with Phil, the delight of nature was always close at hand.

There in ordinary things, where I had missed it so many times before

•  like how a waterdrop slung from a twig holds the whole sky’s brightness at its bottom swell,

and is banded about with miniscule houses and trees

- our surroundings imaged Upsidedown!

There too in Phil’s reading

of a physics undergraduate’s tiny handwriting or her later doctoral analyses,

whose seemingly obtuse meaning he’d reexpress as a startling and subtle insight

bearing on poignant human concerns and cosmic goings-on.

Having come to see all this beauty and depth with my teacher

  And learned to find it myself

  Now I miss him – in everything.

If you imagine a spring, tightly compressed, then unexpectedly released,

  Like a Super Jack-in-the-Box

That would be like Phil at Play-

  The sudden and longstanding joy of having yet another question to ask of the world

  Knowing that understanding is always emerging

 among places both creaky new and those frayed with wear.

Phil always said “when I look into the sky, any night could be the one when I’m the first to see a supernova! Watch, it could just be tonight!”

Let’s share Phil’s hope among students everywhere

Letting be theirs too the joy of keeping up the watch

  In nature’s wonders, both small and grand.

Herb Lin

herb_lin@nilgroup.com

Photo courtesy of Heather G. Williams, copyright 2005.  Posted with permission.

[At the memorial, i told the story about how my daughter Dalia had come home talking about batteries and bulbs in her science class.  I told her that she had met someone who had been very influential in putting batteries and bulbs into kids' science classes, and that she had a chance to thank him for that.  She wrote this note (which i thought she had deleted) and Phil responded.]

=================================================

January 19, 2005

Dear Phil,
I am learning about science, and my father (herb lin) told me you had helped make it so that you can use and touch batteries and bulbs in science. I would just like to thank you for all the work you did to help. I guess hard work really does pay off. It makes it a lot easier to use the materials, instead of read about them, that’s for sure. I learn visually. By playing/doing the work. I think it was thoughtful to help so children can use the things and see how to put the wires, bulbs, and batteries together. So once again, thank you.

Sincerely,
Dalia Berkowitz

=================================================
January 24, 2005

Dear Dalia,

You and I and your parents all agree that learning is easier, and comes into a student's use better when the circuit glows just when it should. It does not use only words in print or as spoken. It acts on its correctness when the circuit glows. In the world not only words matter but what happens even more. We could call them deeds and not words.

We enjoyed your note very much.

Thanks from Phil, Angela, Bert and Katrina (the delightful dog.)

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What I recall from many lectures that Phil gave to students was that he frequently introduced himself as a *student* of physics.

HL