Philip Morrison, 1915–2005
Philip Morrison, physicist and public educator of science, died on 22 April 2005 at the age of 89. He was, among other things, Professor Emeritus at MIT. I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now — I wanted to say something, because Morrison topped my short list of scientists who understood how science works, something that not terribly many working scientists think much about, let alone try to explain.
The notice linked above reminds me of Morrison's long association with Scientific American as their book reviewer, which I knew about but hadn't remembered. Most of what I knew about Morrison really came from two sources: a book and a television series.
The book, which he wrote with his wife and collaborator Phylis, was Powers of Ten. It was a fascinating and readily comprehensible presentation dealing with orders of magnitude: the relative sizes of things. They had a picture of people enjoying a picnic on a lawn, and imagined zooming in by factors of 10 until they could see atomic structures, and zooming out by factors of 10 until they were looking at things of galactic proportions. The concept thrilled me.
He influenced me most through his 1987, six-part series on PBS, "The Ring of Truth". There is also the companion book, written with Phylis: The Ring of Truth: How We Know What We Know. The topic, broadly, was Scientific Truth, what it meas to be "true" in science and how we come to recognize scientific truth. I thought it was brilliant, and he addressed questions that I was only starting to think about. Since then, these questions have taken an ever larger place in my own thinking and trying to understand the world.
It's a shame that many more people, people who have taken on so much political power in our country today, evidently didn't watch and absorb the message from that series; it may still be the best bulwark against the swelling tide of anti-scientific, anti-rational, and anti-intellectual fundamentalism that seems so widespread today.
My exposure was brief, but it was easy to recognize Philip Morrison as a model of my scientific ideal: a thirst for exploration, unshakable intellectual integrity, and a deeply held imperative to share what he discovered.