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OCR for page 249
PHILIP McCORD MORSE
1 903-1 985
BY ROBERT HERMAN
PHILIP MCCORD MORSE, professor emeritus of physics at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founder
and pioneer of modern operations research, physicist and
renaissance scientist, community leader, and leader in pro-
fessional societies died on September 5, 1985, in Concord,
Massachusetts. As Phi} Morse wrote in his autobiography,
In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life, 1977, "They told me I
was born on August 6, 21903, at three in the morning; ~
don't remember. My seventy-year memory tape is a series
of vividly recollected scenes, separated by blanks later filled
in with conjecture and hearsay. The early scenes are dis-
connected flashes, glimpses of a now unfamiliar world, seen
through a stranger's eyes. It takes effort to remember how
different that world was, how many differences there are
between the Midwest of 1910 and the East Coast of the
1970s."
Morse's distinguished career in science and technology is
characterized by a remarkable breadth and diversity of interests.
In physics, it ranged from acoustics and quantum mechan-
ics to nuclear physics and methods of theoretical physics.
In operations research, which he pioneered, his career en-
compassed military operations research, vehicular traffic,
queues, and public systems. His fundamental contributions
in these diverse areas, together with his service to the pro-
249
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250
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
fessional community and society in general, created a most
outstanding career.
His early development years were spent in Cleveland,
Ohio. He was the son of a telephone engineer, the grand-
son of a civil engineer, and the great grandson of an architect
and builder. His great grandfather worked for the federal
government designing and building post offices and custom
houses all over the country and was also elected to the
Ohio legislature. While still in grade school, Morse read
voraciously, was attracted to chemistry, and learned to play
the violin. He indicated that while facts didn't interest
him very much he was excited by patterns, such as the
recurrent patterns in the Mendeleev table of the elements.
During high school he decided to become a chemist. Inter-
estingly, he never aspired to be a mathematician because,
he said, mathematics had been treated as a too} rather
than as a subject for intellectual exploration. Eric Bell's Men
of Mathematics had not yet been written when Morse made
that statement; he later speculated that if the book had
already appeared he might have become enmeshed in the
mysteries of prime numbers of Diophantine analysis and
his entire life might have been different. As for his
nonscholastic interests, when the radio craze hit Cleveland
in the early twenties, Morse operated his own radio supply
and repair shop.
After one year of undergraduate study, Morse took the
year 1922-23 off to operate his radio business when family
fortunes were at a low ebb. By the fall of 1923 when he
returned to college as a sophomore, he was considerably
more certain about what he wished to learn. Upon deciding
to pursue the physics program, his father's only comment
was, "That's fine, but what will you do for money?" It is
interesting to read in Morse's recollections that he didn't
share this concern for money and that he envisioned a
career teaching college physics. He commented at the time
that "Professors never got rich but then they never seemed
to starve."
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PHILIP McCORD MORSE
251
Morse received his B.S. in 1926 from what was then the
Case School of Applied Science. He pursued his graduate
studies at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in
physics in 1929. It was during his undergraduate days that
he became involved with the eminent American physicist
Dayton C. Miller, who was one of the earliest experts in
sound and musical acoustics, and whose large collection of
flutes is now in the Library of Congress. It was during this
period that Morse developed his lifelong interest in acoustics.
Physics and mathematics claimed much of his time as a
graduate student at Princeton. Three courses didn't sound
like much to him, but analytic dynamics, electron theory,
and mathematical physics generated a great work load. Unlike
the students of pure mathematics, Morse was interested in
analysis and higher algebra as the language of physics. The
late 1920s were exciting times thanks to the development
of the new quantum mechanics; in 1930 Dirac prophesied
accurately that quantum mechanics would explain all of
chemistry and most of physics.
Aside from his course work and research on molecular
physics with Ernst Stueckelberg, with whom he published
several papers, Morse developed a solution for a force that
was repulsive when two particles are close together, attrac-
tive when they are further apart, and under which they
vanish at greater distances. He realized that he had stumbled
upon a quantum mechanical representation of a vibrating
diatomic molecule. To this day, the particular force field,
expressed as a related potential field, is known as the Morse
Potential.
Edward Condon, upon his return from Europe, where
the new quantum theory had been developed, decided to
write an English text on the subject. When the writing
progressed too slowly, he invited Morse to collaborate. The
idea appealed to Morse as an opportunity to learn the rapidly
developing quantum mechanics not only by teaching it but
by structuring a monograph on it. Thus, Morse coauthored
one of the earliest texts on the new quantum theory.
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Among his other notable associations, he assisted in the
development of the theoretical understanding of the Davison-
Germer experiment during a summer at the AT&T Bell
Laboratories. His postdoctoral studies were conducted with
Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich and inclucled theoretical
research in electron scattering under an international fel-
lowship. Thanks to Morse's early renown, Karl T. Compton,
then president of MIT, asked Morse to join the MIT physics
faculty when he returned from his fellowship in Europe.
As Morse recounts "It was easy to say yes."
So Morse joined the MIT physics faculty in 1931 as assis-
tant professor, rapidly rose to associate professor in 1934,
and became a full professor in 1938. With his very broadly
gauged interests, he participated in the development of
the physics curriculum and accepted the position of graduate
registration officer. His research continued in a diverse
fashion; during this period he worked on electron scattering,
nuclear binding forces, and even on the subject of stellar
interiors in astrophysics. One of his important contributions
to physics was the acoustics textbook Vibrations and Sound
published in 1936. This work presented the application of
scattering theory to sound waves. In fact it was also during
this early period in Morse's life that he developed course
notes that were later combined with those of Herman Feshbach
to produce the famous two-volume work Methods of Theoreti-
cal Physics, published in 1953. The book is a basic source
of methods of mathematical physics to this day.
With the advent of World War lI, Philip Morse's renaissance
talent entered a new phase in his technical life. By the
time the United States entered the war, the catastrophic
loss of allied ships to the German U-boats in the Atlantic
Ocean was a major concern. It was imperative that the
U.S. develop superior equipment that would locate and
neutralize this threat. The British, who had been engaged
in the struggle for two years, already had several operations
research groups not only designing equipment but also studying
and maximizing its effectiveness in actual war operations.
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PHILIP McCORD MORSE
253
Early in 1942 the U.S. armed forces established an operations
research group in the navy. Morse, who was considered a
distinguished scientist and who had been the director of a
project at the Underwater Sound Laboratory at Harvard
University for the previous two years, was chosen by the
National Defense Research Council to head the operations
research effort.
Several months after the formation of the operations re-
search group, the navy consolidated the antisubmarine op-
erations under the Tenth Fleet, and the Antisubmarine Warfare
Operations Research Group was transferred to Washing-
ton, D.C. Morse had a substantial fraction of the group
out in the field working with the operational commands.
He did an outstanding job both in coordinating the technical
work and in his liaison with the operational leaclers running
the actual war operations. Those who worked with Morse
during this period report that it was a continuous learning
experience. As the war effort and operations research became
more successful, the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations
Research Group became the navy's Operations Research
Group. This group took on submarine activity studies in
the Pacific Theater of Operations. It then addressed naval
air activities and ultimately became involved in all aspects
of navy task force operations. The group became very well
accepted and at the conclusion of the war Morse received
the Presidential Medal for Merit, the nation's highest civil-
ian award.
After the war Morse generated an orderly windup of the
group's activities, part of which became the nucleus of the
Operations Evaluation Group. He returned to research
and teaching at MIT but continued to monitor this postwar
transition. In 1946, he had been at MIT no longer than
one year when he became the director of the Atomic Energy
Commission's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The posi-
tion occupied all of his time in organization and administration
and left no time for personal scientific research. In 194S,
with Brookhaven well established, Morse went to Washing-
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
ton to organize an operations research group for the Secretary
of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This resulted in
the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group for which he served
as deputy director and director of research until 1950. The
group's civilian unit developed into the Institute for Defense
Analyses in 1956; Morse served as a trustee.
In another area of interest, Morse was convinced of the
great importance of computation and the rapidly growing
power of the digital computer. This no doubt arose from
his experience with calculations in acoustics and astrophysics
in the late 1930s. The establishment of the MIT Computation
Center was a result of his efforts to introduce computers to
research and research to computers in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. He became its first director and served in that
position until 1967.
In 1952 Morse created an operations research activity at
MIT with an interdepartmental committee and a small contract
for fundamental research from the U.S. Army. In two years,
the first doctoral student, John D. C. Little, was graduated,
and in 1956 the Operations Research Center was formally
established with Morse as director; he remained in this role
until his official retirement in 1968. His high research
activity in the field of operations research was continuous
and included the following books: Queues, Inventories and
Maintenance, 1958; Library Effectiveness: A Systems Approach, 1968;
Operations R~searchfor Public Systems, 1967, coeditor; and Analysis
of Public Systems, ~ 972, coeditor.
The Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) was
founded in 1952, and as might have been expected, Morse
became its first president. Of the next eight presidents,
half had worked for him in one capacity or another, mostly
during World War lI. About twenty years later, there came
an echo of Morse's influence as two of his former students
became presidents of the society. Morse received the Frederick
W. Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society in
1968 for his library work and was the first recipient of that
society's George E. Kimball Medal in 1974 for his contributions
OCR for page 255
PHILIP McCORD MORSE
255
to the profession of operations research in general and to
the Society in particular.
Professor Morse's worldwide promotion of operations
research never ceased. He was involved in organizing the
first International Operations Research Conference in 1957;
the International Fecleration of Operations Research Soci-
eties originated at this conference. Interest in the operations
research discipline overseas led to the 1959 North American
Treaty Organization conference with Morse as chairman of
the advisory panel. He was associated with many international
operations research projects in which he always stressed
that the discipline was applicable to a host of fundamental
problems that were neither military nor industrial in nature.
It is interesting to recall that most recently, in April 1985,
at the age of SI, Morse chaired a session at ORSA's Boston
meeting and spoke on the early use of computers in operations
research, a topic that combined two of his major interests.
Morse's honors are legion. Among these, he was a member
of the National Academy of Sciences; and a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Acoustical Societ,v
of America, and the American Physical Society. He was
elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985.
He was also a member of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and the
Cosmos Club of Washington. He received the Silver Medal
of the Operational Research Society of the United Kingdom,
and the Gold Medal of the Acoustical Society of America.
He was the president of the Acoustical Society of America
~~950-l95~ and of the American Physical Society ~971-
1972~. In addition, he was a member (197~1977) and
chairman (1975) of the Governing Board of the American
Institute of Physics. From 1958 to 1960 he was chairman of
the MIT faculty.
Philip Morse, one of the first wave of homegrown American
scientists, made outstanding contributions to science and
technology through his work in physics, computer science,
and operations research. He influenced and guided many
students and colleagues in the struggle to seek scientific
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
truth. In his autobiography Morse gives great food for
thought to many of us. He reflects that his successes would
have been fewer had he not chosen, back in 1923, to become
a physicist through training that forced him to look facts in
the face, that maple him want to measure them and work
out their implications, whether these facts applied to atoms
or automobiles.
The last comment of Morse's autobiography conveys much
of his philosophy "For those who like exploration, im-
mersion in scientific research is not dehumanizing; in fact,
it is a lot of fun. And, in the end, if one is willing to grasp
the opportunities, it can enable one to contribute something
to human welfare."
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
mccord morse
