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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Philip Morrison | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Morrison | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:17:16.347245+00:00 | kb-cron |
== 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. After surveying the destruction left by the use of the atom bomb in Hiroshima, Morrison became a champion of nuclear nonproliferation. He wrote for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and helped found the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. He testified before Congress on the need for civilian control of nuclear energy, and participated in the Civil Rights Congress in New York and the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in 1949. That year, Life magazine included his image in a gallery of "America's 50 most eminent dupes and fellow travellers". 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." Deane Malott, who became president of Cornell in 1951, was much less sympathetic, and instructed Morrison to curtail all activities beyond his academic field. Morrison agreed to do so in 1954. He was one of the few ex-communists to remain employed and academically active throughout the 1950s. In 1999, writer Jeremy Stone alleged that Morrison had been the Soviet spy Perseus, a charge that Morrison strongly and credibly rebutted. Stone accepted his rebuttal.
== Academic work ==
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. 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. In 1954, Morrison 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. Morrison followed this up with a review of theories of the origins of cosmic rays in 1957. A 1958 paper in Nuovo Cimento is considered to mark the birth of gamma ray astronomy. 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. 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." 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, becoming institute professor in 1976, and Institute Professor Emeritus in 1986. 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. 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 galaxy Cygnus A.
== Media work ==
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. He provided the narration and script for Powers of Ten in 1977. With his wife, Phylis, they turned the same material into a coffee table book in 1982. 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. In addition, he was a columnist and reviewer of books on science for Scientific American starting in 1965. In later life he was a critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative. 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).
== Recognition == Morrison was a fellow of the American Physical Society, and chairman of the Federation of American Scientists from 1973 to 1976. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the International Astronomical Union, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Over his lifetime, Morrison received numerous honors and awards. He delivered the 1968 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on Gulliver's Laws: The Physics of Large and Small, and the 1982 Jansky Lectureship before the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was awarded the Presidential Award and Pregel Prize of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Babson Prize of the Gravity Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Westinghouse Science Writing Award, the American Association of Physics Teachers' Oersted Medal, the Dickinson College Priestly Medallion, Minnesota Museum of Science Public Science Medal, the American Institute of Physics' Andrew Gemant Award, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Klumpke-Roberts Award, the John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. and, with his wife Phylis, the Walker Prize by the Boston Museum of Science.