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Staff BiographiesPhilip MorrisonOn July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain Wartime in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Manhattan Project physicist Philip Morrison witnessed the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb. Monitoring the blast from a position some ten miles from ground zero, Morrison wrote:
Moving Beyond Trinity's Success This task was serious work for this 30-year-old physicist, who was born in Somerville, New Jersey, in 1915. Morrison earned his PhD in theoretical physics in 1940 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer, who would become the wartime leader of Los Alamos. He then went on to teach at San Francisco State College and later at the University of Illinois. Joining the Chicago Physicists The Manhattan Project work at Los Alamos had become more and more urgent by the middle of 1944, and many scientists, including Morrison, transferred to Los Alamos to help with the research and development of the wartime atomic weapons. There he began to work in the G (Gadget) Division, which had overall responsibility for developing the implosion weapon, named "Fat Man." The other device, the uranium gun weapon, was named "Little Boy." Assembling the Trinity Device As noted in Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-45, "Morrison and Holloway were responsible for the final readiness of the implosion bomb, including the procurement, fabrication, and testing of all components from the inside of the high explosives to the outside of the initiator, which was at the center of the bomb." Meeting President Truman's Schedule With July 16 set as the definite testing date, it was Morrison and Holloway's job to insert the plutonium core into the high-explosive sphere of the Trinity device during the afternoon of the actual testing day. Once they began, their task took on a note of high drama when the plug of active material that they had to insert became stuck in the opening. As Morrison's colleague remembered:
Assembling the Nagasaki Weapon Dropping a Letter and a Bomb When the war came to an end after the two atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima on August 9 and 12, respectively, the United States sent a contingent of scientists into Japan to assess the damage caused by Little Boy and Fat Man. As part of this team, Morrison spent several weeks analyzing the ravages of war. Morrison returned home at the end of September, but before he left Los Alamos permanently in October 1946, he directed the work on the world's first fast plutonium reactor, which was given the codename Clementine by Morrison because of the reactor's location "in a cavern, in a canyon...." Revealing the Mysteries of Los Alamos Brode explained that a committee of Santa Fe citizens arranged a special gathering at the Museum of Anthropology, whose exhibits were replaced by a display of pictures of the atomic experiments and the two bombings. Enrico Fermi set up a demonstration and lecture, and Morrison stood on the stairs of the museum hallway, describing the damage of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings and expressing the hope that some program of international control of atomic weapons would result. Once the scientists revealed the unclassified details of the Manhattan Project and especially the mysteries of life in Los Alamos, their neighbors in the surrounding area began to plan parties and invite many of the scientists to talk to the guests about the secret wartime program. For scientists not used to the limelight, these events became a bit uncomfortable, though the Los Alamos experts did share their insights until they began to shun the spotlight and the snowy trips between Los Alamos and Santa Fe that winter. Turning to Cosmic and Astrophysics Adventures Perhaps Morrison's most significant contribution to astrophysics occurred in 1959 when he and fellow Cornell physicist Giuseppe Cocconi published the article "Searching for Interstellar Communications" in the September edition of Nature. In that paper, Morrison and Cocconi speculated about the possible existence of other life in the cosmos and suggested that the best way to detect any such life was through the use of radio waves. The two authors chose radio waves because these waves can be created with very little power and because they can travel vast distances. The publication of the Morrison and Cocconi paper led directly to the establishment of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, and eventually in 1984 to the founding of the SETI Institute in California, which, according to its purpose statement, "conducts scientific research and educational programs to explore, understand, and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe." SETI.org Focusing on Science Education Though the search for extraterrestrial life could occupy a lifetime, Morrison diversified from astrophysics and has dedicated a tremendous amount of time to science education, written over a dozen books including Powers of Ten, been a book reviewer for Scientific American, and a producer of the PBS series "The Ring of Truth." Like so many of his fellow Los Alamos scientists, Philip Morrison never retired from his efforts to increase the understanding of so many facets of science for so many people. |