Morrison, Philip 1915–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born November 7, 1915, in Somerville, NJ; died April 22, 2005, in Cambridge, MA. Physicist, educator, and author. Morrison was a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and nuclear physicist for the Manhattan Project who later spoke against the nuclear arms race and became a popular science writer. During his childhood, two events profoundly influenced the course his life would take. The first was his contraction of polio, which left him crippled at the age of three, and the second was a radio set given to him as a gift by his father that stirred his interest in science and communications. Morrison graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1936 and earned his Ph.D. in 1940 from the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching physics at San Francisco State College (now University) in 1941, he joined the University of Illinois faculty. While there he was recruited to work on the nuclear bomb in the United States' race to beat the Germans in developing nuclear weaponry. Morrison worked under Enrico Fermi in Chicago before moving to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here he worked on developing the core of the bomb and witnessed the first successful test in 1945. After the war, Morrison was part of a team that traveled to Japan to report on the destruction that resulted from the Hiroshima explosion. It was this experience that solidified his belief that nuclear war should be prevented at all costs. Unfortunately, Morrison's earlier sympathies with communism made him the subject of intense federal scrutiny and investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trying to focus on his new job as a professor of physics at Cornell University, he had difficulty gaining funding for his projects because of the ensuing negative publicity. Many of his colleagues turned on him, even though accusations that he spied for the Russians proved unjustified. He eventually left Cornell to become a professor at MIT in 1965, where he retired as professor emeritus of physics in 1986. In addition to his anti-nuclear passions after World War II, Morrison's other consuming interest was interstellar communications. This passion resulted from his childhood as a ham radio operator and was further developed in the late 1950s, when he and a colleague experimented with gamma and radio rays. They discovered that these waves could travel vast distances through space. Morrison surmised that it would be possible to send communications out into space and that Earth could receive such waves from alien civilizations. This led to his role in helping establish the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project in 1992. He also was active in researching other applications for radio astronomy. Morrison gained popularity among general readers by writings about these subjects, beginning with 1979's The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Other books written, co-written, or edited by him include The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know (1987), which was based on a PBS television series he narrated; Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True (1995); and The Essentials of Biology of the Universe and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (2000). Morrison remained a popular author later in life although megative publicity about his alleged spying, such as Jeremy Stone's 1999 memoir accusing Morrison of being an agent known as "Perseus," continued to surface. He contributed regularly to magazines, appeared on radio and television, and continued to advocate for scientific exploration for many years.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, April 27, 2005, section 3, p. 12.

Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2005, p. B10.

New York Times, April 26, 2005, p. A21; April 28, 2005, p. A2.

Times (London, England), April 29, 2005, p. 74.