Philip Morrison
Biographic Data
| ID | 3864552 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip Morrison |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip |
| FAMILY NAME | Morrison |
| SIGNATURE | MORRISON P |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1956 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Beyond Atoms and the Void
N CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, beginning a few centuries before the coming of the present era, there was a prominent school of philosophical thought-we would call it metaphysical today, I think-of great power. It has always been held by scientists as a prescient insight into what science would finally become. Its most famous compact exposition is in the fragments of the Greek philosopher Democritus, and we also have the much more extended poem from the R…
Nationalism, science, and individual responsibility
Open or Closed?
The World of Science: Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Almost three years ago, Richard Feynman, perhaps the most original of contemporary theoretical physicists, so entitled, in his usual raffish vein, an after-dinner talk to the American Physical Society. He then made a curious and ingratiating personal offer: a thousand dollars to the maker of the first working electric motor brought to him which, without its lead-in wires, would occupy no more than a cube one sixty-fourth of an inch on edge. Stop …
The World of Science: The Immensity of Space: a Note on the Interpenetration of Theory and Experiment
The dimensions of the universe plainly need impose no terror on the reflecting mind, and yet it is wrong to ignore them in the construction of any view of reality. Even in the preoccupied and commercially minded newspapers of the day, new and contested results in cosmography appear as matters worth large front-page headlines. In this note I should like to set out the history of our knowledge of what Pascal called the "immensity of space," of the …
The World of Science: The Chalk and Its Boulders
We are glad to welcome Professor Morrison's column back to the pages of MR. He spent a year, from the summer of 1959 to the summer of 1960, attending conferences, lecturing and sightseeing in Europe and Asia. The following impressions and reflections he thought particularly appropriate to share with MR readers. —The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to …
The Innovation Industry
Economists, both orthodox and Marxian, have traditionally viewed the rise of novelty in the forces of production as one social consequence of the economic nature of society, to be regarded as a diffuse but general condition of economic life, and not as the deliberate product of a particular industry. It is hard to doubt that this causal relationship still holds. Perhaps in Veblen, with his concern for the "state of the industrial arts," one can f…
The World of Science: Automation
Review of Automation: What It Is, How It Works, Who Can Use It by Karl Dreher.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The World of Science: Kepler and Eniwetok
In November of 1952, the first great million-ton explosion of a hydrogen bomb took place at Eniwetok atoll. The astonished sailors of the test party were too filled with the extraordinary sight of the vanishing reef and the feel of that distant hot glow to keep mum: the newspapers for weeks carried rumors of the test in spite of the security officers of the AEC. Now most tests of such weapons are mere engineering routines, product developments, o…
The World of Science: The Sputniki
Sputnik z'eml'i—fellow-traveler of the earth: there is a new meaning to the words, a new sense transcending the wry political overtones of the anglicized phrase. Twice now, probably from the low steppe east of Stalingrad and the great Volga bend, Soviet rocketeers have launched an artifact into the very heavens. The date of October 4th, 1957, and then of November 3rd, will remain in history.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review web…
The World of Science: Science and Economic Development: A Review
Review of Science and Economic Development: New Patterns of Living by Richard L. Meier.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The World Of Science: Spider Webs, Drugs, and the Nature of Man
That humans were but one of a great chain of beings, stretching from the lowliest animalcule to the glorious invisible order of the angels, was an idea extended from Aristotle, not foreign even to the philosopher Locke. The material kernel of this notion became the content of Darwin's assault upon the confines of the Victorian mind. Nowadays the kinship of human and animal nature is commonplace, marked daily in medical practice by the purposeful …
World of Science: You Still Don't Know What Electricity Is, Anyway
There is a wry recollection which every physicist shares. Some conversation on the problems or the successes of physics is terminated by the banal phrase of the title above. That an elementary but contemporary account of the physicist's concept of electricity would be useful was suggested by an explicit question of one of the editors of Monthly Review. He put the question without the complacency of the usual conversationalist, but he made it clea…
The Place of Science in Modem Civilization
Review of The Place of Science in Modem Civilization and Other Essays by Thorstein Veblen.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The World of Science: Two Notes on the Meaning of Fusion
This month I propose to sketch two distinct, but related, topics. Each refers to a consequence of the fusion reaction, the enormous energy source of the hydrogen bomb. They are both to be taken, not as a catalogue of more or less important dicta of the experts, but as small essays on the nature of modern scientific evidence, efforts to display the reasonable, if sometimes subtle and unfamiliar, chain of logic and experience which lies behind the …
The World of Science: Towards the Synthesis of Life
This is the first of an indefinite series of pieces on topics drawn from the natural sciences. Since they will have one author, and will be diverse in topic if unified in viewpoint, they will add up to a kind of "science column" for Monthly Review. It is my intention to make them long enough to convey the nature of the arguments and accurate enough to be reliable, but they will be neither monographs nor archival documents.This article can also be…
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The World of Science: Two Notes on the Meaning of Fusion
This month I propose to sketch two distinct, but related, topics. Each refers to a consequence of the fusion reaction, the enormous energy source of the hydrogen bomb. They are both to be taken, not as a catalogue of more or less important dicta of the experts, but as small essays on the nature of modern scientific evidence, efforts to display the reasonable, if sometimes subtle and unfamiliar, chain of logic and experience which lies behind the …
The World of Science: Towards the Synthesis of Life
This is the first of an indefinite series of pieces on topics drawn from the natural sciences. Since they will have one author, and will be diverse in topic if unified in viewpoint, they will add up to a kind of "science column" for Monthly Review. It is my intention to make them long enough to convey the nature of the arguments and accurate enough to be reliable, but they will be neither monographs nor archival documents.This article can also be…
The World of Science: Science and Economic Development: A Review
Review of Science and Economic Development: New Patterns of Living by Richard L. Meier.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The World Of Science: Spider Webs, Drugs, and the Nature of Man
That humans were but one of a great chain of beings, stretching from the lowliest animalcule to the glorious invisible order of the angels, was an idea extended from Aristotle, not foreign even to the philosopher Locke. The material kernel of this notion became the content of Darwin's assault upon the confines of the Victorian mind. Nowadays the kinship of human and animal nature is commonplace, marked daily in medical practice by the purposeful …
World of Science: You Still Don't Know What Electricity Is, Anyway
There is a wry recollection which every physicist shares. Some conversation on the problems or the successes of physics is terminated by the banal phrase of the title above. That an elementary but contemporary account of the physicist's concept of electricity would be useful was suggested by an explicit question of one of the editors of Monthly Review. He put the question without the complacency of the usual conversationalist, but he made it clea…
The Place of Science in Modem Civilization
Review of The Place of Science in Modem Civilization and Other Essays by Thorstein Veblen.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The World of Science: Automation
Review of Automation: What It Is, How It Works, Who Can Use It by Karl Dreher.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The World of Science: Kepler and Eniwetok
In November of 1952, the first great million-ton explosion of a hydrogen bomb took place at Eniwetok atoll. The astonished sailors of the test party were too filled with the extraordinary sight of the vanishing reef and the feel of that distant hot glow to keep mum: the newspapers for weeks carried rumors of the test in spite of the security officers of the AEC. Now most tests of such weapons are mere engineering routines, product developments, o…
The World of Science: The Sputniki
Sputnik z'eml'i—fellow-traveler of the earth: there is a new meaning to the words, a new sense transcending the wry political overtones of the anglicized phrase. Twice now, probably from the low steppe east of Stalingrad and the great Volga bend, Soviet rocketeers have launched an artifact into the very heavens. The date of October 4th, 1957, and then of November 3rd, will remain in history.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review web…
The Innovation Industry
Economists, both orthodox and Marxian, have traditionally viewed the rise of novelty in the forces of production as one social consequence of the economic nature of society, to be regarded as a diffuse but general condition of economic life, and not as the deliberate product of a particular industry. It is hard to doubt that this causal relationship still holds. Perhaps in Veblen, with his concern for the "state of the industrial arts," one can f…
The World of Science: The Immensity of Space: a Note on the Interpenetration of Theory and Experiment
The dimensions of the universe plainly need impose no terror on the reflecting mind, and yet it is wrong to ignore them in the construction of any view of reality. Even in the preoccupied and commercially minded newspapers of the day, new and contested results in cosmography appear as matters worth large front-page headlines. In this note I should like to set out the history of our knowledge of what Pascal called the "immensity of space," of the …
The World of Science: The Chalk and Its Boulders
We are glad to welcome Professor Morrison's column back to the pages of MR. He spent a year, from the summer of 1959 to the summer of 1960, attending conferences, lecturing and sightseeing in Europe and Asia. The following impressions and reflections he thought particularly appropriate to share with MR readers. —The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to …
The World of Science: Plenty of Room at the Bottom
Almost three years ago, Richard Feynman, perhaps the most original of contemporary theoretical physicists, so entitled, in his usual raffish vein, an after-dinner talk to the American Physical Society. He then made a curious and ingratiating personal offer: a thousand dollars to the maker of the first working electric motor brought to him which, without its lead-in wires, would occupy no more than a cube one sixty-fourth of an inch on edge. Stop …
Open or Closed?
Nationalism, science, and individual responsibility
Beyond Atoms and the Void
N CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, beginning a few centuries before the coming of the present era, there was a prominent school of philosophical thought-we would call it metaphysical today, I think-of great power. It has always been held by scientists as a prescient insight into what science would finally become. Its most famous compact exposition is in the fragments of the Greek philosopher Democritus, and we also have the much more extended poem from the R…
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