Memories of Philip Morse

Thank you for the illuminating article “Memories of Feynman” by Theodore Welton (Physics Today, February 2007, page 46 ). Richard Feynman’s career might have been substantially different had he not been directly influenced as an undergraduate at MIT by Philip Morse. Each week Morse gave Feynman, Welton, and Albert Clogston the unusual attention of an afternoon of advanced quantum mechanics. Having his own PhD from Princeton University, he is said to have influenced Feynman’s choice of Princeton for the graduate studies that resulted in his germinal work with John Wheeler.

Readers may be interested to know that Morse had a distinguished, multi-faceted career: He was a founder of the field of operations research, first president of the Operations Research Society of America, president of the Acoustical Society of America, and the first director of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Morse also served as president of the American Physical Society in 1972 and chairman of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics from 1975 to 1980. His two-volume Methods of Theoretical Physics, written with Herman Feshbach, is still in print more than 50 years after publication.