Philip Morrison was born in Somerville, New Jersey, November 7, 1915, the only son of Moses Morrison and Tillie Rosenbloom.[1] He had a younger sister, Gail.[2] The family moved to Pittsburgh when he was two. He contracted polio when he was four, and as a result wore a caliper on one leg,[3][4] and spent his last years in a wheelchair.[1][5] Because of his polio, Morrison did not commence school until the third grade.
In 1938, Morrison married Emily Kramer, a girl he had known in high school,[8] and a fellow Carnegie Tech graduate.[2] They divorced in 1961. In 1965 he married Phylis Hagen.[9][10][11][12][13][14] They remained together until Phylis died in 2002.[8]
With the work in Chicago winding down in mid-1944, Morrison moved to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico as a group leader. His first task was to help determine how much plutonium a bomb would require. He calculated that 6 kilograms (13 lb) would be sufficient. He then worked with George Kistiakowsky on the explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon.[17]
Morrison transported the core of the Trinity test gadget to the test site in the back seat of a Dodge sedan.[17] He was an eyewitness to the test on July 16, 1945, and wrote a report on it.[18] A month later, as leader of Project Alberta's pit crew, he helped load the atomic bombs on board the aircraft that participated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, Morrison and Robert Serber traveled to Hiroshima as part of the Manhattan Project's mission to assess the damage.[17]
Activism
Morrison returned to Los Alamos, where he remained until 1946. He turned down an offer from Ernest O. Lawrence to return to Berkeley, and instead accepted an invitation from Hans Bethe to join him at the physics faculty at Cornell University.[19]
Morrison had joined the Communist Party while he was at Berkeley. The House Un-American Activities Committee devoted four pages of a 1951 report to his activities, and in 1953, he was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Theodore Paul Wright, the Acting President of Cornell, was put under great pressure from board members and alumni to fire Morrison, but Bethe remained supportive, and Robert R. Wilson declared that Morrison had "demonstrated his patriotism by the distinguished role he played in the wartime development of the atomic bomb."[20]
Deane Malott, who became president of Cornell in 1951,[22] was much less sympathetic, and instructed Morrison to curtail all activities beyond his academic field.[21] Morrison agreed to do so in 1954.[20] Nonetheless, he was one of the few ex-communists to remain employed and academically active throughout the 1950s.[23][24]
In 1999, writer Jeremy Stone alleged that Morrison had been the Soviet spy Perseus, a charge that Morrison strongly and credibly rebutted.[25] Stone accepted his rebuttal.[26]
Academic work
Pulse of gamma rays from the Vela pulsar as constructed from photons detected by Fermi's Large Area Telescope
Morrison co-wrote a paper with Leonard I. Schiff in 1940 in which they calculated the gamma rays emitted by the process of K-electron capture.[27] Initially at Cornell after the war, Morrison continued working in nuclear physics, collaborating with Bethe on a textbook, Elementary Nuclear Theory (1952), one of the early treatments of the relatively new field.[28]
Following his political stances, Morrison's attention began drifting towards the stars. In 1954, he published a paper with Bruno Rossi and Stanislaw Olbert in which they explored Enrico Fermi's theory of how cosmic rays travel through the galaxy.[29] Morrison followed this up with a review of theories of the origins of cosmic rays in 1957.[30] A 1958 paper in Nuovo Cimento is considered to mark the birth of gamma ray astronomy.[31][23]
In collaboration with Giuseppe Cocconi, Morrison published a paper in 1959 proposing the potential of microwaves in the search for interstellar communications, a component of the modern SETI program.[32] This was one of the first proposals for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence. He conceded that "The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but
if we never search, the chance of success is zero."[28]
Morrison remained at Cornell until 1964, when he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He remained there for the remainder of his career,[33] becoming institute professor in 1976, and Institute Professor Emeritus in 1986.[34] In 1963, working in collaboration with a student of his, James Felten, Morrison had investigated the effect of inverse Compton scattering, an important source of cosmic x-rays and gamma rays.[35] At MIT, Morrison teamed up with Bruno Rossi's x-ray group there, and also with Riccardo Giacconi's group at nearby American Science and Engineering. Morrison became deeply involved in the exploration of the cosmos through its x-ray and gamma ray emissions. In a 1960 paper, he noted the similarities between pulsars and quasars. He returned to this in 1976, applying his model to the radio galaxyCygnus A.[36]
Morrison was known for his numerous books and television programs. He produced 68 popular science articles between 1949 and 1976, ten in issues of Scientific American.[36] He provided the narration and script for Powers of Ten in 1977.[33][37] With his wife, Phylis, they turned the same material into a coffee table book in 1982.[33][38] He also appeared as himself in the science documentary film Target...Earth? in 1980. In 1987, PBS aired his six part miniseries, The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know, which he also hosted.[39] In addition, he was a columnist and reviewer of books on science for Scientific American starting in 1965.[40]
In later life he was a critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative.[41][42] He authored or co-authored a number of books critical of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, including Winding Down: The Price of Defense (1979), The Nuclear Almanac (1984), Reason Enough to Hope (1998) Beyond the Looking Glass (1993).[43]
Morrison died in his sleep of a respiratory failure at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 22, 2005. He was survived by his stepson Bert Singer.[1][20]
Bethe, Hans A.; Morrison, Philip (1952). Elementary Nuclear Theory. New York: Wiley.
Charles Babbage (with Emily Morrison) (1956)
My Father’s Watch (with Donald Holcomb (Prentice Hall, 1974)
Morrison, Philip; Morrison, Phylis (1982). Powers of Ten: a book about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero. Redding, Connecticut: Scientific American Library. Bibcode:1982ptba.book.....M.
The Ring of Truth (with Phylis Morrison) (Random House, 1987)
Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True (A Faraday dictum) (American Institute of Physics, 1994)
Winding Down: The Price of Defense (Times Books, 1979)
The Nuclear Almanac (Addison Wesley, 1984)
Philip Morrison's Long Look at the Literature: His Reviews of a Hundred Memorable Science Books (ISBN0-7167-2107-4 Freeman, 1990)
^Goodwin, Irwin (July 1999). "New Book Unmasks Scientist X as Spy, But Facts of Case Tell a Different Story". Physics Today. 52 (7): 39–40. Bibcode:1999PhT....52g..39G. doi:10.1063/1.882748.
^Morrison, Philip; Morrison, Phylis (1994) [1982]. Powers of Ten: A Book About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding another Zero. Scientific American Library. ISBN978-0-7167-6008-5.
^Shuch, H. Paul (April 25, 2005). "Remembering Philip Morrison". The SETI League. Archived from the original on February 22, 2014. Retrieved February 8, 2014.
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