Herb Lin

October 22, 2005

herb_lin@nilgroup.com

Remarks delivered at the IDDS 25 th Anniversary of the Nuclear Freeze

Randy Forsberg asked me to talk a bit about Phil as a mentor to me. Part of being a mentor is being a role model, and I’ve been reasonably successful in emulating Phil in at least one way—I’ve tried very hard to avoid wearing ties. He had a legitimate medical reason for not wearing them—the neck constriction would sometimes make him faint. And I wished I had a similar medical excuse on the occasion on which I was ejected from the floor of the House of Representatives in 1989 for having a loosened tie around my neck. Phil’s legitimate medical excuse for not wearing ties was yet another way in which his superiority over us mere mortals was manifested.

Seriously…. mentoring is mostly about teaching someone how to think—and Phil taught me how to think about all kinds of things -- physics, science education, magic and the paranormal, arms control and defense policy… and I hear many echoes from many conversations with him.

Let me share with you two sidebar conversations that I think illustrate his breadth.

•  Phil was highly skeptical of the paranormal, but he once pointed out to me that psychics and fortune tellers are not frauds. They are not scientific, but not everything important in life is science. They provide a kind of folk therapy, and for many people they serve the same purposes as psychiatrists and counselors do for others.

•  Phil was also a practical joker. To tweak Jerrold Zacharias, Phil went to Zach’s bookshelf and in front of Zach, picked out a book, ripped out a page, and tore it into little bits. Zach looked on in horror, but Phil had previously researched the bookshelf, and had torn the page from a book of random numbers—Zach readily concurred that the book was just as useful afterwards the event as it was before.

But given the audience here, it’s the Phil of arms control and disarmament that I most want to talk about.

As you know, Phil wrote and spoke prolifically about disarmament and the dangers of nuclear war. Opponents often tried to attack his credibility, and I want to tell two stories about that.

In the 1950s, the government – in the form of the Atomic Energy Commission – tried to undercut Phil by saying that there was classified information that would contradict him. Phil said that he *did* have access to classified information. After retrieving all of Phil’s classified documents, the AEC maintained that he didn’t. But Phil continued to send them new documents related to nuclear weapons – documents that he had recently written – for classification review, as he was required to do under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Phil could continue to assert that he DID have access to classified information—information that he had created. They then asked him to stop doing it. To which he responded with a letter that said “You mean that if I have an idea that relates to the nuclear weapons security of the United States , I should NOT bring it to the attention of the government?” They responded promptly with a complete turnaround. Phil told me that some years later, he met the AEC lawyer who had processed his letter, who said that his letter had turned the AEC bureaucracy upside down for several days.

The second story is that military men sometimes asserted that as military men, they knew more about warfare than he did. Speaking of conventional warfare, they might have an argument – though that might be debatable. But in nuclear matters, he’d say something to the effect that “I’ve fought more nuclear wars than they have, and I’ve seen first hand what nuclear weapons can do to people and property. Can any of them say that?” That kind of credibility is utterly precious, and we will miss that.

Phil also understood the importance of scale, and was constantly surprising in his ways of demonstrating it. Here are two photographs of mushroom clouds. The one on the left is the Trinity explosion. The one on the right looks kind of similar. But it’s not. The one on the right is Mike, a 10 MT explosion in the South Pacific- the first US H-bomb explosion. Trinity’s mushroom cloud was 30,000 feet high. Mike’s mushroom cloud was 4X as high – 135,000 feet. But they look about the same because the photographer (and me, courtesy of Photoshop) have chosen image sizes that might conveniently fit on an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper in a manuscript as an illustration. There is NO SENSE in which these images represent the same explosive phenomenon.

Another demonstration I’ve used in the past was Phil-inspired. I take out of my pocket a firecracker, and set it off. And then I assert that what you’ve just seen is just like a 2000 lb bomb going off. And then I tell you that you have to believe that in order to believe that nuclear war is just like conventional war, because the ratio of explosive energy between those two is about a million – the same as the ratio of a thermonuclear device to a conventional blockbuster bomb.

Phil understood in a deep and profound way that it was imperative to keep nuclear war separate from conventional war. He noted that in the past, policy makers at the highest levels were people who shared that intuitive sense. As he said, we *could* have used nukes in Vietnam , in Afghanistan , in Korea , in the Persian Gulf , in dozens of places where we have been active militarily in the last 50 years. But we didn’t, despite the fact that there were always low-level functionaries who believed otherwise. We could have used them everywhere. We didn’t use them anywhere.

But in an administration where there seems to be at the very highest levels a lack of any kind of understanding or willingness to try to anticipate the consequences of various actions, current efforts to develop bunker-buster nukes take on a much more ominous cast, and the de facto presumption of the firewall between nuclear and conventional war may not be one that we can count on in the future.

On the other hand, I want to close with a note of optimism. Phil often spoke of Von Neumann’s disease – the phenomenon by which the number of nuclear weapons increased but the land area of the world remained constant—a fact first noted by John Von Neumann that would ultimately result in catastrophe.

When he – and many of us – started working in this area, Von Neumann’s disease was in full bloom, and indeed was rather virulent – the curves were all trending upwards, and continued up for a long time. But both Phil and Phylis lived to see the curves turn start to turn downwards.

Several years ago, I asked him what he thought of that state of affairs – and he said that he was more optimistic than he had ever been. It’s true that we have to worry about terrorism—biological terrorism, suicide bombings, airliners into skyscrapers, and even rogues with nuclear weapons—but we are no longer afflicted with Von Neumann’s disease, or at least the disease seems to be in remission now, and planetary survival – which was once threatened directly by the nuclear arms race– seems increasingly likely. We in the arms control and disarmament community have much more to do in the future, but let me leave you with this thought – partly thanks to Phil, we’ve been much more successful in our quest for disarmament than even Phil could have possibly imagined 25 years ago. *That* is something to celebrate.

Stefania Maurizi

October 5, 2005

stefy.ma@tiscali.it

Interview with Philip Morrison

Translated from Italian into English and originally published in the book “Una Bomba, Dieci Storie”, by Stefania Maurizi , publisher Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2004

John C. Newman

October 2, 2005

jcnewman@tiac.net

Jinx Watson

September 28, 2005

jinxwats@utk.edu

I am sorry to say that I will not be able to make this celebration. Phil was a great influence on my teaching life because of all that he shared with Phylis in her mentoring of so many, including me. I always appreciated Phil for reading my doctoral dissertation, even though it was far away from his science life -- it centered on essential questions of classroom teachers.

As a young bride and novice teacher in the late 60's, I wanted to return the favor of preparing a meal and entertaining "the Phils" at my house! So, what does one prepare after the last meal at 11 Bowdoin St - a flounder dipped in water-based paint that we'd printed onto rice paper and then, washed and eaten with gusto? Hmmmm, as Phil and Phylis sat on my Goodwill couch and read to each other their own book on gerbils, I made stuffed cabbages and fed these 'kings' my cabbages. Somehow, that always cracked me up!

Adeline Naiman

September 26, 2005

naiman@rcn.com

The week before the wonderful memorial service for Phil, my middle son, Alaric, brought over his closest friend from Harvard days, who was here from Seattle with his wife to bring their freshman son to college. The two men were reminiscing entertainingly about their own college experiences, whe Alaric said suddenly, "You know, I almost didn't gp to Harvard. I had early admission to MIT and Harvard and a week to decide, and I had no idea which to choose. Then Phil Morrison said to me, 'You're already a nerd. Go to Harvard and get some culture!' So I did."

I had never known that Phil had changed Alaric's life. I'm grateful.

Edward R. Wolpow

September 12, 2005

MTA.EWOLPOW@mahhosp.org

Walter Schneir

September 9, 2005

WSchneir@aol.com

My first contact with Philip Morrison was over 40 years ago when my wife and I were working on a book about the Rosenberg atom spy case. We had obtained copies of replica sketches drawn by
David Greenglass and introduced by the government at the trial. We desperately needed enlightenment. Ralph Lapp suggested we get
in touch with Phil at Cornell. This was 1963. The FBI was everywhere. Not many scientists were willing to speak with us. But Phil was generously helpful. He recommended newly declassified publications on Los Alamos for source material and later read a relevant chapter in our book and made important suggestions.  A few years later when a team of attorneys was trying to free a Rosenberg case defendant, Morton Sobell, after 16 years imprisonment, Phil was one of three former Los Alamos scientists who gave affidavits to the defense. He called the Greenglass sketch of an atom bomb a "caricature." In 1975 public television produced a 90-minute film titled "The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," for which we were consultants. Phil agreed to be interviewed.  Rereading his extemporaneous words today, they are amazing for their succinct clarity. At one point he said of the atom bomb: "There was no essential secret. There will be no defense. And the only answer is international peace." Disparaging the mass media myth of a single atom bomb secret that could be written on a piece of paper, he said: "It's an industry, not a recipe."

In the past few years I have reached out to Phil several times for help while working on a political memoir. Once again I was reminded of his generosity, his eloquence, and his wisdom.   Describing the feel of the plutonium core of the first A-bomb which he delivered to the test site at Alamogordo, he chose an unforgettable metaphor.  "When one took the core in hand, he told
me, "it felt slightly warm to the touch, like a small cat...." Discussing the difficulty of writing history from documentary sources, he said: "Life is not paper, we writers must concede." In our final correspondence last year, he was as incisive and
thoughtful as ever.

Living at a time when one often dispairs, how fortunate I have been to have known such a civilized man.

Ann Peck

September 9, 2005

annpeck@comcast.net

The way that Phil moved through the world was provocatively instructive. As a producer for the Ring of Truth , I had a chance to experience it close up.

For “Clues,” a program about inference, we passed through Customs in Gibraltar. Phil was very enthusiastic about having his passport stamped in this unlikely outpost. Unfortunately, the clerk chose only a few of our passports to endorse and Phil’s was not among them. When I offered to run back and request what would have been a very small favor, Phil demurred: “If it didn’t happen in the natural course of things, it’s not going to happen.”

When the Challenger blew up on January 28, 1986, we were glad to have Phil there to keep us company. As concerned as he was – and as mesmerized by the television screen – he explained to us that an accident had been inevitable, that it was part of the bigger picture, and that to have expected to avoid accidents would have been unscientific.

The most resonant Ring echo in my own life is one that Phil and Phylis gave me together. One day I asked for a definition of a phenomenon we’d been discussing. The response to my query: “Here’s one, and there’s one, and there’s another one. We don’t believe in definitions.”

I’m still figuring out what one of Phil Morrison might be. He was kind and stubborn and iconoclastic and modest. He had a great smile and a wonderful curiosity. And he let us each present ourselves in our own terms, beyond definition or formula, in the same way that he himself encountered life.

Franco Pacini

September 8, 2005

pacini@arcetri.astro.it

Though I am unable to come to Cambridge and participate in Phil's Memorial, I am happy that my son Tommaso and his wife Lynda will be there.

I met Phil and Phylis in the late sixties in Italy , during a scientific conference. Over the years we had frequent contacts and became friends. Our family had the good fortune of sharing many happy hours with the Phil’s talking about science, scientific education for children, social issues, war and peace... We always enjoyed, when visiting Cambridge , the incredible pile of books in their house!

I received many stimulating inputs from our conversations. Our children were also fascinated: my younger son, Giorgio, still remembers a long conversation about predatory birds. My oldest one, Giulia, used to say that Phil was the most interesting person in America . I am sorry that I will no more be able to tell my friends or students that, when in Cambridge , they must visit these extraordinary persons.

The richness of Phil’s life was without doubt also due to the historical context: Berkeley in the late 1930’s, the Spanish war, the war against nazi-fascism, the fight against nuclear weapons, the Mc Carthy era.... I wish he had written his autobiography: it would have been a great testimonial to the events of the last century. Whenever I encouraged him to do so, he always replied with a childish smile, “Nobody would be interested”. I hope that, someday, someone will at least write his biography.

Recently a book was published in Italy called “Ten interviews about the Bomb”, by Stefania Maurizi. One of the interviews was entitled “Phil Morrison, a decent man”. We all agree.

We will remember and miss forever the enthusiasm, the intelligence and the lively, smiling eyes of Phil and Phylis.

Kate Bowditch

September 9, 2005

Phil was loved by my late husband Max Braverman and by me. I felt his intelligence and humility were a rare combination. Phil had the ability to make one feel brilliant and witty when in his company, when, in fact, it was his own wit and brilliance that filled the room. Max visited him in about 2002, and took some wonderful photos of him at his dinner table. I include them, as you may be making a photo montage of his life [click here to see]. Feel free to use them. I will not be able to attend the memorial, but will always remember this rare man.

Chris Heinz
BS Physics '72
cheinz@alum.mit.edu

July 8, 2005

Beedy Parker

July 1, 2005

beedyparker@gwi.net

I was living in Cambridgeport, in 1967, with two small children, and two apartments to rent, and I wanted to work in a museum. Phylis, who was developing new exhibits at the Children's Museum in Jamaica Plain, wanted a helper, and she interviewed me by trotting me off for an ice cream cone on Central St. (JP), after which she hired me, a completely inexperienced person, adopted my children (who had guinea pigs of their own), to be "guinea pigs" for the new exhibits. And she sent me some boarders in the bargain (Mary Eisenberg, for one, straight out of college).

I was sent on inspired scavenger hunts and given mythic tasks, filling in the needed bits of the Size Exhibit, Weights, the short lived, but to me wonderful, Map Exhibit, in the tall space of the converted carriage house that became a jewel case of niches of learning. I was sent off to Edgerton's lab at MIT, to pick up strobe discs, and to the MCZ for a big ragged model fly, which I repaired for the wall above the Giant Desktop (where children could climb on the giant telephone). And then Phylis went off on a trip and said "Keep track of what happens in the exhibits, and tell me about it." I was enchanted, and nervous, and challenged. This was typical of Phylis's teaching style, a magical combination of enticement, careful presentation, imaginative tasks, focused feedback, and gentle pushing of the learner, off into space, to do for themselves. She paid attention to what was brought back too, however peculiar.

My first encounter with Phil was the warm fall day when he had climbed, gnomelike and limping, up to the third floor of the old Museum and poked his beautiful smiling face round the door of our attic workroom, to enquire if Phylis might come to lunch with him. Their evident affection made me feel lonely, but Phylis reassured me that I would find someone, which shortly happened in the form of a kind man who had, coincidentally, also experienced Phil (in Cyril Stanley Smith's class at MIT on "The History of Materials" where Smith and Phil, a casual guest, carried on in fine flowing form).

Later that fall I was invited one evening, with a motley assortment of students and associates, to a packed little symposium at Phil and Phylis's. Phil explored his idea (as he struggled with the reality of the war we were in) that we could create a "moral equivalent of war" by having dangerous, challenging work for young men, specifically harvesting krill in the Antarctic, to add protein for the food supply. (I was dubious but impressed by his nerve). Another Phil conjecture that I remember involved why that narrow horizontal line of flies was gradually moving up the side of the house, one sunny summer afternoon in the backyard.

Phil and Phylis's Cambridge row house, where they lived as we all might, in small rooms, with a small garden out the back, with a small car parked in front under shady greenery, was tiny by today's monster living standards. In it, Phylis kept her treasures to show visiting children and others, found objects that showed a natural pattern, human artifacts that carried rhythm and cultural history, in pieces of weaving, a string of beads, a tiny puppet theater, a doll, her latest creations, and she cooked her careful clever meals to share. Phil would listen and throw in tantalizing remarks when appropriate, that would send one's mind racing off on a new path of enquiry, to be pursued as time went on. Phylis was the sybil, the guide, the enchantress, Phil, in the background, the wizard. Below, on the first floor, was an Aladdin's cave of review books for the Scientific American, books that we could write our names in, if we fancied them, and which might arrive in a tantalizing brown paper package the following Halloween.

It was my understanding that Phil and Phylis met at ESI, where they were both contributing to a burst of innovative children's science teaching, the happy outcome of the national scare, after the launch of Sputnik, that we were "falling behind the Russians" in science education, (and our science education was indeed dismal, and is again so). Creative science teachers and scholars were drawn together, and delightful and profound teaching materials came out of this crucible. Phylis had previously co-authored a book "Crystals and Crystal Growing" in the Science Study Series ("Order in Nature"), while teaching at the Far Brook School in New Jersey . Phil was a polymath, of the 19th century variety, whose mind could venture intrepidly, anywhere, with optimism and good cheer. The universe was his oyster, to be delved into, relished. Phylis was an artist of symmetry and presentation, penetrating the patterns of nature and laying them out for all to see. They both believed that any subject could be given to any enquiring mind, by hook or by crook. Together they explored the teaching of time and space, of relative size and structure, of the connectedness, in recurring patterns and causality of everything around us, living and "non-living". They knew that reality is not boxed into "subjects" and "disciplines", but rather flows freely through the universe.

Phylis and Phil had extraordinary generosity with knowledge, as teachers, as people. They shared what they loved. We rejoice in their lives and we miss them very much.

Ammiel D. Schwartz,MD, FACOG. Cornell '49

June 19, 2005

ammiel@suscom.net

I was privileged to take Phillip Morrison's course in Nuclear Physics at Cornell in the Spring of 1949, it may have been Fall '48.

Our text was Pollard and Davidson's Applied Nuclear Physics. (This text in an earlier edition had mentioned the possibility of obtaining large amounts of energy by fission of large atoms, but that statement had been expunged in the newer texts.)

The very first homework assignment by this diminutive, crippled, sqeaky-voiced young man with the marvellous sense of humor was to estimate the number of grains of sand on the Eastern Seacoast, no other information given.

After a long night of estimating the average width of beach and its depth and legnth to get volume and then the average size of sand grain and packing fraction we all showed up next class with something around the twentieth power of ten.

He then rewarded our toil with the simple statement that there are more molecules of gas in a mole - Avogadro's Law!

What a way to impress us with the order of magnitude with which we were dealing.

Judith Marcellini

May 31, 2005

jwhitemar@earthlink.net

Many years go—early 70s--- I had just started working at the Smithsonian in Washington on the Discovery Room project. Phylis was the major consultant and she came down to get us started. My boss Caryl Marsh had arranged an informal, but elegant picnic lunch in the courtyard of an art museum to introduce a potential benefactress (society-woman type) to the project.  Caryl had prepared luscious, goopy sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil for us to eat.  They were so goopy that it worked best to eat them still partially enclosed in the foil to catch the drips. After a couple of delicious mouthfuls the "benefactress" let out a "yeek."  A yellow-jacket had settled on the foil of her sandwich to suck up the drips.  The lady seemed quite frightened of the insect.

"Ah" said Phylis calmly, "be calm, wait just a minute."  And then she reached into her purse, pulled out an Agfa loup, plopped it over the insect, ripped off the foil on which the insect was standing, and stuck it firmly to the loup.  Then she handed the loup with insect display inside to the "benefactress." "Here, have a look," said Phylis.  "Isn't it marvelous."  The benefactress was captivated---hooked by the mini-museum exhibit that Phylis had just created

-------

That was just one of many wonderful moments—and projects--- I shared with Phylis. And over the years I had many occasions to describe her to other people. But I never found a satisfactory word to describe our relationship. Sometimes I called her “my very good friend.” That was true, but she was more. I also referred to her as “my teacher. ” But this word did not completely satisfy me. It seemed too staid---lacked sparkle, wasn’t strong enough. The word “mentor” seemed too formal. Sometimes I even referred to Phylis as “my other mother.” There was some truth in that statement, too, although it was not genetically accurate. (And I was unsure of my real mother’s reaction.)

Then, the other day--while swimming laps-- it finally hit me what Phylis was—the description I was searching for:: FAIRY GODMOTHER. Not the bibbity-bobbity-boo Walt Disney kind. No Phylis was like the authentic fairy godmothers I read about as a kid. Serious, but light hearted, a keeper of high standards, but kindly. But most important she had a kind of magic: an ability to understand the secret wishes of a godchild and then present experiences that would nourish that godchild’s potential----to help that person become her best self.

Now, Phylis had many, many godchildren besides me---a myriad of them—many of you here today. You have been touched by her fairy dust. And you became better people from knowing her.

Now it is time to put the gifts she gave us to work and to share her thoughtfulness with others…… We can make the world a better place---a place of brave and loving people.

Bella C Chiu

May 10, 2005

BellaCChiu@aol.com

I introduced myself as one of  his very early students from Cornell University. Anyone who has been a professor would say to him/herself, "Oh-oh.."

Anyway, my ex-husband was also a student of his. I think that was one reason he was willing to keep me employed until he wanted to retire himself. Also, I had refreshed my studies at Boston College, so he knew I was trying to do really well.

The first paper we published was called, "Are There Two Types of Quasars?" It was an interesting astrophysics problem, but I can't help thinking it may refer to the fact that men and women are both bright but maybe in different ways.

This correspondence with people have often turned up. Solar eclipses, people often think, refers to cases of wives overshadowing the husband. But I have tried to explain that in my research on solar eclipses causing the stronger-than-usual El Nino or La Nina event, the tides are mainly caused by the moon, but it is enhanced by the sun when it is in line with the moon.

I  knew since Cornell days that Phil was one of the main scientists who invented and built the nuclear bomb. My parents were also important people but not much connected with this. They did know people like E. Reischauer, who pleaded with President Roosevelt not to bomb the ancient capital of Kyoto. (I learned this from my mother.)

It was a shock to me too, when Phil suddenly passed away. It was a few weeks after Hans Bethe left us.

Elizabeth Cavicchi

May 8, 2005

cavicchi@cs.tufts.edu 

Breakfasts at 11 Bowdoin Street

Breakfast often came twice for me: first in my Woburn kitchen with Alva, and later on arriving by bicycle to the Morrison’s Bowdoin Street home. Bringing the day’s flowers from my garden, and carrying the day’s newspapers upstairs, I joined Phylis’ preparations. Onto a table-height cart went blue and white patterned dishes, handled glasses, Yvonne’s special half-cup, silverware, bread, toaster and tongs, cake butter, jam, and sliced melon. The task of coffee-making, started by a noisy grinder and ending in a blue spouted thermos, was typically reserved for Phil. Sometimes the kitchen’s chemistry detained us with wonder – droplets of yellow oil floating in the soak water of last-night’s skillet, or water drops condensed on glass from boiling water’s steam.

Leavings of projects were cleared off the round worktable only temporarily: clear boxes of metallic-iridescent beads; wire cutters, blue capacitors, wire strips; manuscripts annotated with colored markers and day-glo post-its; mail needing responses; Phylis’ knitting. The table’s toys and assorted gizmos stayed on: wind-up frogs, rainbow pinwheel, magnifier loupe, colored pens, pattern punch, minicar. Imaginative play was close at hand as we took accustomed seats, with Phil in the armchair against the window. The thermos doubled as a named beaked bird; a newspaper photo revealed its dot screen under magnification; Phylis made the tongs grab for bread like a snake.

Breakfast, newspapers, and conversation intermingled as play deepened to cautionary concern, reflective insight, keen observation. Would some new policy damage prospects for banning nuclear weapons and tests? Between the lines of each report, Phil perceived nuance and direction, letting him forecast what seemed likely next, along with what could be, by persistent faithful action. For in any day’s events, no matter how dreary or devastating, Phil also saw multitudes of possibilities for goodness and hope. Might the tragedy of war provoke a democratic people to refuse its pursuit with their children’s bodies executed in their name? Phil continually affirmed the unplumbed potential of ordinary people’s passion for living in peace.

For Phil, even the entire New York Times took little time to read. Soon newspapers gave way to other things, more toast, the chasing of squirrels beyond the window, ants on the fresh-picked flowers, or sunlight flickering into the room.

Yvonne Pappenheim, nextdoor neighbor and perennial assistant for the Scientific American book office, passed over to Phil her stack of the past day’s arrivals. Almost hourly deliveries brought science books of every kind to Phil’s doorstep: from treatises dense with mathematical notation to children’s picturebooks, from ground-breaking research studies to popularizations about energy and aliens. Skimming each on the spot, Phil made a first cut of those to be read more closely for possible review.

Yvonne’s curiosity, untarnished by either science erudition or worldly depravity, provoked the most disarming questions. How could a book’s author claim to actually know the insides of atoms, how to make buildings stand up, or where diseases come from? Why do some people harm others without trying to get along; why do governments let citizens suffer appalling conditions for living and working? While Phil treated each query with instructive explanation and detailed example, Yvonne persisted with her ideals and doubts.

My turn came too, for learning with Phil from every creative undertaking involving nature and art. Watercolor sketches of New England landscapes interleaved with xeroxed papers – recent or historical; scientific or scholarly – unraveling whatever questions we were then intent on, along with my latest writing or data from teaching and lab experimenting. For breakfast on Valentine’s Day 1995, I saved up a special surprise: not only my annual woodcut, but also the volume of Michael Faraday’s Diary where I’d just discovered the source of Phil’s favorite quote, “Nothing is too Wonderful to be True”. Phil lit up in pure delight, along with fascination for the mind of another exemplary scientist, so long ago. At such moments, Phil’s joy outshone the morning’s sun.

From incipient aspirations, to dazzling adventures with sparks, wires, magnets and batteries developed by my students and people in the past, to drafts adorned with ink drawings – all phases of my multivolume dissertation on exploratory teaching and learning emerged through endless exchanges across the round table with Phil and Phylis. For each response, Phil gave fully of care and thought; while he read quickly, his thinking paused into the long extension of all originality. Discounting the prevailing formulaic and controlling prescriptions for education, Phil sought after ways learners’ experiences engendered their own questioning and observing of physical things in the world. As my tentative hopes -- that this could be expressed in teaching physics -- frequently floundered under horrendous academic vicissitudes, Phil’s profound convictions restored buoyancy and light.

But all this was only Breakfast, and the day’s tasks and learning awaited each of us. Soon Phil moved to his study by the back window and Phylis took over the computer for mail and elaborate font design. Albertina Garcia began the housecleaning. Yvonne.and I descended the stairs, she to reorganize the incoming books, I to read at my window seat or go off to libraries, classrooms and labs. Another breakfast would bring us together with new stories, struggles, and wonders to share.

Herb Lin

May 6, 2005

herb_lin@nilgroup.com

The last time I spoke to Phil face to face was in the afternoon of April 1, 2005. I had come up to MIT to give a talk, and I had some free time, so I called the Morrison household. Someone (Pamela?) put Phil on the line, and I asked if he were up for a visitor. He said sure, but I wasn’t sure if he recognized who I was.

When I arrived about an hour later, he was asleep in his chair at the dining table. Pam woke him, saying he had a visitor. He was a bit groggy as he awoke, and I was more convinced that he didn’t remember me. As the grogginess faded, he became more animated, and he launched into a discourse about exoplanets and how it was possible today to make extraordinarily precise measurements of exoplanet velocities and how many there were and what journals I should look at to learn about them. And he looked into my face, and I saw a look of recognition.

I stayed about 40 minutes, and as I left, I told him I had been worried that he didn’t recall who I was. He laughed, and said he’d never forget me.

Walking away from the house, I was incredulous about the conversation. It was clear his health was in decline—it was sometimes even hard for him to breathe—and on previous occasions in the last several months he had been forgetful about parts of a conversation just moments ago. But the lucidity and insight of the conversation about exoplanets was amazing, and I thought that even in the twilight of his years, I had been graced – once again – by the presence of the most remarkable intellect I have ever known.

Kosta Tsipis

tsipis@mit.edu

(Also available at http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj05morrison )

“If one is no Plato how can he write about Socrates” was my first thought when Mark Straus asked me to write about Phil Morrison the intellectually protean, omniscient polymath MIT Institute Professor who died at home last week a few months before completing his ninth decade of life. He remained to the end a moral reference point to generations of peace advocates, opponents of nuclear weapons, and younger physicists alike. Only he, who carried himself the plutonium pit for the test bomb from Los Alamos to Alamogordo, assembled the Nagasaki bomb on Tinian island, flew over the devastated city three days later, and then was the first scientist to grasp first-hand the uniformly leveling effect of a nuclear explosion on human habitat, had the undisputable moral stature to fight for “no third bomb”, a cause he pursued with passion the rest of his life.

Shortly after the end of the war, the last day of August 1945, Morrison became one of the founding members of the Association of Los Alamos Scientists (ALAS) that advocated international control of atomic energy. (Incidentally, with the accent on the first A, ALAS means salt in Greek, but when accented on the second A the word becomes the commonplace plaintive exclamation, a word play that did not escape Morrison!)

A short time later, in December of that year, Morrison wrote the draft of the aims of the newly established Federation of American Scientists (FAS) : “…to safeguard the spirit of free inquiry ….without which science cannot flourish”, and then served as its first President until 1949. During these years Morrison was an active “insider” testifying repeatedly before the US Senate on legislation to insure civilian control of atomic energy.

In 1946 he joined the Physics Department at Cornell University where he received tenure in 1948. There he remained until 1964 when he came to MIT. Early in the 1950’s Morrison experienced a period of turbulence at Cornell caused by his passionate advocacy for Peace, a decidedly un-American activity according to the anticommunist storm troopers of the McCarthy era, who had yielded the cause of Peace to the Soviet Union and branded peace advocates as traitors. By 1954 Morrison had curtailed his public political activities and became “a political outsider, more academic and more dissident” in his own words. His advocacy for arms control and his opposition to the US military hypertrophy nurtured by the Cold War, found expression in books that he published with colleagues: “The Price of Defense”, “The Nuclear Almanac”, and most recently “Reason Enough to Hope”. He remained a convincing critic of resolving international conflict by combat.

Much more widely known and enjoyed were Morrison’s efforts to make science more accessible and appreciated by a broader interested public: His six-part PBS series “The ring of Truth”, the long-legged “Powers of Ten” that covered 25 orders of magnitude of size from the proton to the galaxies, and the less known “Nothing is too Wonderful Not to Be True”. They all managed to resolve the tension between truth and clarity, a permanent dilemma for those that attempt to explain natural phenomena to lay audiences.

Morrison’s mastery of the language has been legendary: An internationally famous Pakistani nuclear physicist and arms controller who studied at MIT confessed recently that “taking Professor Morrison’s course in classical mechanics in 1970 inspired me to switch from Electrical Engineering to Physics”. That same year a student (now a Physics professor at Cornell) burst into my office and exclaimed: “Professor Tsipis you must go listen to Professor Morrison teach classical mechanics, it is like poetry”. Anyone who can make classical mechanics inspirational to Sophomores belongs with Homer and Dante in his power of phraseology. Listen to Morrison describe the first nuclear explosion in Alamogordo : “…after the explosive lenses were initiated the chain reaction proceeded to its fateful maturity”.

The most widely appreciated literary contribution of Morrison were his book reviews for Scientific American, almost 1500 of them, several shared with his wife, children’s educator, Phylis. In 1965 Jerry Piel the publisher of Scientific American asked Morrison to become book reviewer for the journal. Morrison wondered if he could receive some sample books before he would accept. Promptly about two-dozen books arrived at Morrison’s cramped house in Cambridge . Early on a Sunday morning Morrison piled the books on a table placed on the sidewalk in front of his house and observed discretely the developing scene from an upstairs window. Within two hours passers-by had removed all the books. “Yes I will do the book reviews” he informed Piel as the threat of a book cataclysm receded convincingly.

Many colleagues have wondered why Morrison abandoned nuclear physics in favour of astrophysics and high-energy gamma-ray phenomena. There are possibly several contributing factors among them the resonance between the physical beauty of the Universe as we humans experience it and Morrison’s aesthetic proclivity, then his conviction that nuclear physics, and its readily foreshadowed sequel, high energy particle physics, would depend on Governments’ largesse to fund accelerators and ever more colossal equipment, a largesse that would feature bureaucratic strings attached, political, ideological, intellectual even. Outer Space suited his political temperament and aesthetic taste.

What inspired him to propose SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) was both a sense of humility that eschwed human uniqueness, his somatic conviction of the invariance of physical Law across the Universe, and an impish sense of adventure: to be the first to detect reason across the vastness of the Galaxy. But even without having achieved that feat Morrison remains an iconic presence for all who love science, crave peace, and admire the eloquent voice of reason and empathy of his spherically curious mind.

George E. Hein

Professor Emeritus

Lesley University

ghein@lesley.edu

Michael Spock

Research Fellow

University of Chicago

Scholar in Residence,

Chicago Historical Society

Letter sent to the New York Times and Boston Globe

Yesterday’s obituary tribute to Phillp Morrison recognized his outstanding contributions to physics, disarmament and public understanding of science but omitted one of his major interests. Philip Morrison and his second wife, Phylis Singer, were deeply involved in the post World War II effort to develop materials based, inquiry oriented science curricula. He was one of the guiding spirits the Elementary Science Study, a project of the Educational Development Center in Newton Massachusetts . A collection of his essays, “”Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True,” a volume in a series on Modern Masters of Physics published by the American Physical Society, includes several essays on children’s learning and on teaching science. At a symposium at MIT in honor of his 70 th birthday, the main speakers were not only Hans Bethe and Carl Sagan but also Lillian Weber, early childhood educator at City College and fierce champion of progressive education, acknowledging his interest in children’s education. Prof. Morrison was also involved in the development of modern science centers and children’s museums worldwide. He was a close friend of Frank Oppenheimer, the founder of The Exploratorium in San Francisco and was one of that museum’s most devoted supporters. His portrait hangs prominently in the Science Center in New Delhi , where he is recognized as the “father” of India ’s extensive network of science centers. The Children’s Museum in Boston also benefited from his and his wife’s involvement. He contributed significantly to maintaining and renewing progressive education theory and practice in the United States during the past half century.

Paul Horowitz

horowitz@physics.harvard.edu

A Morning with Philip Morrison: Exploring the Extraterrestial Mind

(adobe PDF, 1.5 mb download; 1991)

James Randi

randi@randi.org

I extend my sincere condolences on the loss of Phil Morrison to all those who valued, loved, and respected him. I am certainly in that large number.

His work will live on and continue to attract the admiration of perceptive students and any others who share his love of the wonders that surround us. His perception of the beauty of nature was unequalled, and he never tired of teaching others to examine those facets of the universe in which we live.

I am so fortunate and honored to have known him.

(Dana) Aaron Roberts

aaron.roberts@nasa.gov

AliTaalebi

taalebi@mit.edu

It is good to be successful in science. It is a responsibility to have a social conscience. But it is admirable to be a busy scientist, socially responsible, and to use your stature to do something about it. As a student and a member of the MIT community, I found Philip to be a great example.