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

By DENNIS OVERBYE
April 26, 2005 NY TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/science/26morrison.html?pagewanted=print&posit\
ion=

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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