My Wishing Rock: Another GREATI had the honor to meet: Emeritus Professor Philip Morrison

A work in progress, started today, March 3rd.

Yesterday, when I was clearing away science material from a recent science workshop, I came across a a set of wire circles, a gift long ago from Philip Morrison, long time friend of David Hawkins and Los Alamos Manhattan Project Y colleague.

Philip, along with David, had strong views on the education process, particularly the lack of 'hands - on' science activity in elementary schools. He was incredibly sharp, fast-talking (unlike David who had a soft, reflective quality to his voice), renaissance kind of guy, (he knew a lot, he said, because he was bed bound as a child, and, "John Paull, what do you do when you lie on your back for months, you read all the time.") and I think, although I'm not sure and need to find out, that he had some connection with ESS (probably offered appropriate classroom investigative science ideas) when David was the Director. I'll do some research on this.

I first met Philip in 1967, and was fortunate over the following years to spend some time with him and his wife, Phyllis. Philip came on a field trip I arranged in the summer of 1995 to Caribou and, when we were sitting amidst the rocks and long grass, introduced me to the mathemetical world of Fibonacci, inspiring me to write a book for children, Nature Takes Shape (1979).

Philip was kind enough to read the original manuscript of my book and suggest a few significant changes/editions.

** Here's an extract from my book, Through My Eyes, that describes that field trip, held the first week when The Mountain View Center opened in Boulder:

Just after breakfast on Wednesday morning, David asked if I’d lead a field trip to the mountains. My heart missed 476 beats! Me? Lead a field trip? Anxiously, I asked who wanted to go – and was touched but nervous when

Phil Morrison, world renowned physicist and mathematician, his wife, Phyllis Morrison, artist and mathematician, David, his wife, Frances, Stan Ulam, world-renowned mathematician, Dan Anishansley, biologist, Hassler Whitney, world renowned mathematician, and Stewart Mason, renowned educator, put up their hands.

Yikes!

I packed a few magnifying glasses, some small containers, pocketed my amber, gathered the group, and off we went to the mountains beyond Boulder.

I was the first out of the car. Sensing I had to show everyone I knew a thing or two, my eyes quickly roamed the ground. I squeezed my amber then crossed my fingers, hoping I’d either find something I knew a lot about - or at least, something that would feed the curiosity of the great minds that were strolling behind me.

Lady Luck (my wishing rock worked again) was on my side - yet again, a diminutive pill-bug came to my rescue, the same, very delightful, fascinating creature I’d learned so much about when teaching at Blaby Stokes. Everyone gathered around to see what I was ooohing and aaahing about. They stared at the little multi-legged isopod wriggling in the palm of my hand and asked great questions. Their curiosity was insatiable. They wanted to know everything, absolutely everything, about the pill-bug.And, of course, I was asked questions that I had no idea how to answer, other than, "Dunno. Good question, though."

I was amazed at everyone’s child-like curiosity. Seeing the creature wasn’t enough. They wanted to know why it did this, why it did that, and why it did the other, and soon everyone was on hands and knees looking for pill-bugs.

Stewart Mason was thrilled when he found three beautiful pill-bugs, lurking underneath some dead leaves.

I handed out the magnifying glasses and the containers. You’d have thought I’d given everyone a hundred dollar bill. I had handed out the right resources at just the right time. What a great teaching point, I thought.

Sitting under the glaring summer sun, watching and listening to such intellectual giants getting excited about a small wriggly creature, was an amazing experience for someone as young and as green as I was. ‘Green’, of course, both in the environmental and experiential sense of the word.

Learning something new was such good fun. And it was even more fun when you could share the fun with someone.

When questions were answered to everyone’s satisfaction, the little creatures were returned, with gratitude, care and tenderness, to their habitat.

As we ate our sandwiches and continued the conversation about what I knew about the life of the pill-bug, David sat next to Philip and Phyllis. They were soon deep in conversation, a conversation that caught my attention when I heard David say,

” Zero, such an interesting number..........isn’t it?”

Because I didn’t have a clue as to what he might be talking about, my curiosity got the better of me. What’s so special about 0? I sidled over and joined the group, thinking, 'Is this what great minds talk about?'

“The story of zero,” said David, smiling at me, “is an ancient one.”

“ Think about it – mathematics began with counting sheep and cows, and to note the passing of time. No one needed a zero. Zero first came into use in the Babylonian system of numbering. Inscriptions on a clay tablet, like an abacus. Around 300 BC, the Babylonians had a blank on their tablet.”
“ It meant nothing, no value, zero.”

“See?” said David. “Add any number to itself and it changes. 2 and 2 equals four. But, zero add zero is, well, zero. Zero add 2 is 2.”

As I was thinking, for the first time in my life, about zero, Philip, eyes darting everywhere, looked at the ground and picked up an empty snail shell.

“Yep, zero is a fascinating concept. But, look at this, John. This shell…….has a right-handed spiral, you know. Some shells are left-handed, like this one.” "Fibonacci."

'Fibo...what? I asked myself? Wassat?

As Philip spoke, he fumbled in his pocket and brought out a left-handed seashell he’d found on a beach in Florida and just happened to have in his pocket.

He compared the snail shell spirals, showing me how one shell spiraled one way, and the other spiraled the other way.

I was fascinated.

Imagine – zero really does take some thinking about……..and, shells, there are left handed and right handed shells. Wow! Can I find a garden snail that's, what, right-handed? left-handed? Need to find out when I get back to my English garden. All those times I have cradled and admired snails, I had never once wondered about the shell, and whether it was left or right-handed.

Then I heard myself ask.....'Fibo....what" Didn't quite catch it, Philip."

Within a few minutes, I was introduced, by Phil and others in the group, to the work of the 13th century mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, to his study of mathematics and its occurrence in nature, and his Fibonacci numbers. And, then, the Golden Ratio..........brought up by David who was so excited to talk about the mathemetics of the world around us.

At that very instant, my view of the natural world changed, as it did when I found my precious amber all those years ago on the beach in Newlyn.

From that minute on, the world of nature became even more incredible and more fascinating. Wherever I looked, I could now see, not just beautiful rocks with quartz veins running through them, intricate flowers and colorful leaves, stunningly beautiful snails, but mathematical patterns everywhere. I was hooked. And to think, I never knew.

The numbers 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 and on and on, were all around me.

And they still are............

Later, I wrote a book for children, Nature Takes Shape, about the patterns that occur in nature.

*** Taken from Through My Eyes: On becoming a teacher......John Paull, 2012

About Philip:

Crippled when young with polio, his ailment did not prevent him getting almost everywhere he wanted to go.

One weekend he went exploring the very beautiful Canyon de Chelly with me and David. The path to Spider Rock was steep and rocky, but it did not deter Philip.

We explored some caves and I remember Philip pointing one of his walking sticks to a wall painting which showed a star exploding. 'That." he said, with excitement in his voice, "that dates when this place was inhabited........there was a stellar explosion, sometime in the 12 century, and I bet that was observed and painted then."

That was pure Philip.

So was the time we spent blowing soap bubbles.............with the challenge: can you blow a soap bubble in a soap bubble, John Paull?

From Wikipedia

Early life and education

Philip Morrison grew up in Pittsburgh and graduated from its public schools. He earned his B.S. in 1936 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and, in 1940, he earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

[edit]Manhattan Project

In 1942 he joined the Manhattan Project as group leader and physicist at the laboratories of the University of Chicago and Los Alamos. He was also an eyewitness to the Trinity test, and helped to transport its plutonium core to the test site.^[1] In 1999, writer Jeremy Stone alleged that Morrison had been the Soviet spy Perseus (spy), a charge that Morrison strongly and credibly rebutted.^[2]

[edit]Nuclear nonproliferation

After surveying the destruction left by the use of the atom bomb in Hiroshima, Morrison became a champion of nuclear nonproliferation. He helped found the Federation of American Scientists, wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and helped to found the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. He was also a vocal critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

[edit]Academic work

Morrison joined the physics faculty at Cornell University in 1946 and would move on to MIT in 1964. In 1959, Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi published a paper^[3] proposing the potential of microwaves in the search for interstellar communications, a component of the modern SETI program.

Media work

Morrison was also known for his numerous books and television programs, including the narration and script for Powers of Ten (1977). With his wife, Phylis, they turned the same material into a coffee table book in 1982. 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 reviewer of books on science for Scientific American starting in 1965. He also appeared in the science documentary film Target...Earth? (1980).

Professional societies

Awards

Morrison was a fellow of the American Physical Society and chairman of the Federation of American Scientistsfrom 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 theAmerican Philosophical Society.

Lectures

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific gave him the Klumpke-Roberts Award in 1992.

In 1968 he was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on Gulliver's Laws: The Physics of Large and Small.

I feel honored to have met him and his wife, Phyliss.

Hey, hey, look at this, from the NYT:

April 26, 2005

Philip Morrison, 89, Builder of First Atom Bomb, Dies

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Correction Appended
Dr. Philip Morrison, who helped assemble the first atomic bomb with his own hands, and then campaigned for the rest of his life against weapons that could deliver such devastation, died Friday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 89.

He died in his sleep, his family said.

In four decades as a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Morrison was known as a spellbinding speaker and an inspirational popularizer of science, the original teacher of "physics for poets." He was known to the public though his PBS series "The Ring of Truth," and for a long-running and prolific stint as the book reviewer for Scientific American.

Among his legacies is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which sprang from a short paper in Nature that he wrote in 1959 with his colleague, Dr. Giuseppe Cocconi, at Cornell.
Dr. Charles Weiner, a historian of science at M.I.T., said, "The world has lost one of the major voices of social conscience in science."

On Dr. Morrison's 60th birthday, in 1975, Victor Weisskopf, another M.I.T. professor, said, "Nobody else has better demonstrated, or rather embodied, what it means to the human soul to perceive or recognize a new scientific discovery or a new theoretical insight."

In 1945, Dr. Morrison was among the scientists of the Manhattan Project preparing to try to detonate the world's first nuclear explosion. A lieutenant of his former graduate school teacher, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the project, Dr. Morrison rode in the back seat of a car from Los Alamos - where the physicists were working - to the Trinity test site, in Alamogordo, N.M., with the bomb's plutonium core beside him in a special carrying case studded with rubber bumpers.

A little later, when he poked his head up from behind a sand dune in time to catch sight of the explosion, he was surprised not by its brightness but by its heat, he later recalled.

Shortly afterward Dr. Morrison was one of a handful of physicists sent to the island of Tinian to assemble the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. A month later, he was part of a team that toured the city.
Conventional bombing had destroyed other Japanese cities in a checkerboard pattern, leaving red rust intermingled with gray roofs and vegetation, he recalled in an interview in The New Yorker. "Then we circled Hiroshima, and there was just one enormous flat, rust-red scar, and no green or gray, because there were no roofs or vegetation left."

He said, "I was pretty sure then that nothing I was going to see later would give me as much of a jolt."

Philip Morrison was born in 1915 in Somerville, N.J. When he was 4 he was stricken with polio, which left him partly handicapped. He grew up in Pittsburgh and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) and then the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a Ph.D. in physics under Oppenheimer's tutelage.

After teaching briefly, Dr. Morrison was recruited for the bomb project and was put in charge of testing. His duties included dangerous experiments called "tickling the dragon's tail," in which scientists slipped pieces of a bomb closer and closer together to study what happened as it approached the moment when the assembly went "critical."

Although Dr. Morrison approved of building the bomb, fearing that the Germans would build one first, he was alarmed by the decision to drop it without warning.

His firsthand experience of the entire cycle of creation and apocalypse "stamped him for life," Dr. Kosta Tsipis, an M.I.T. physicist and arms control expert, said in an interview yesterday.

In 1946, Dr. Morrison left Los Alamos and joined another bomb project leader, Hans Bethe, at Cornell, where his research interests gradually shifted from nuclear physics to astrophysics and cosmic rays to cosmology.

He became a forceful advocate of international arms control, helping to found the Federation of American Scientists, writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, appearing at meetings and signing statements with the likes of Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson opposing militarism.

In his undergraduate years, he joined the Communist Party, and at Berkeley he was labeled a "troublemaker." In 1953, Dr. Morrison was called before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, where he testified that while he had indeed been a Communist long before, he was not one then and had not been since he was a young man.
Cornell quickly announced that he could keep his job. His boss, Dr. Robert R. Wilson, said, "He demonstrated his patriotism by the distinguished role he played in the wartime development of the atomic bomb."

Dr. Morrison never lost his fire. At M.I.T., where he moved in 1964, he was the author or co-author of several books and studies on arms control, often in collaboration with Dr. Tsipis. The most recent was "Reason to Hope," which discussed ways to overcome the problems of war and overpopulation.

Dr. Morrison's activities as a popularizer of science were of a piece with his work as an arms critic, said Dr. Weiner of M.I.T., who described his style as impassioned but not elitist. He began one important lecture at a symposium by walking in and dropping a big rock, a meteorite, on the stage with loud clunk. "This is my text," he started.

He helped write the script and narrated the 1977 film "Powers of Ten," also by Charles and Ray Eames, in which a camera zooms from a couple having a picnic in Chicago out to the limits of the cosmos and then back down through the woman's hand to the level of atoms and quarks. In 1992, he and his wife, Phyllis, with the Eameses, turned it into a book.

Dr. Morrison and his fast-talking raspy voice became familiar to millions of television viewers in 1987 when PBS aired his six-part series, "The Ring of Truth."
Dr. Morrison's first marriage, to Emily Morrison of Boston, ended in divorce. Phyllis, his second wife, died in 2002. He is survived by a stepson, Bert Singer, of Cambridge, and his wife, Angela Kimberk.

Dr. Morrison's interest in extraterrestrial intelligence arose from work on cosmic rays. While at Cornell, he concluded that these particles originated in cosmic cataclysms like exploding stars and even exploding galaxies.

Dr. Morrison wondered if a particular kind of cosmic ray, high-energy radiation known as gamma rays, could convey information across the universe. One day his colleague Dr. Cocconi suggested that such gamma rays would be a way for civilizations to communicate across the lonely gulfs between stars. The pair looked into it and decided that radio waves would be better still.

In a paper in Nature on Sept. 19, 1959, they suggested that radio astronomers could look for a signal. A year later, Dr. Frank Drake, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., began the first search. He struck out. Today, thousands of stars and millions of dollars later, SETI (or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which has endured political storms, has still not hit pay dirt, but the galaxy is vastly mysterious, and the words that Dr. Morrison and Dr. Cocconi used to end their paper are still apt.

After pointing out the profound effects of discovering such a signal, they wrote, "The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."

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My Wishing Rock

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Another GREATI had the honor to meet: Emeritus Professor Philip Morrison