Melba Phillips
Melba Newell Phillips ( born 1 February 1907 in Hazleton, Indiana, † November 8, 2004 in Petersburg, Indiana) was an American physicist.
Life and work
Phillips studied at Battle Creek College in Michigan (Master 's degree in 1928 ) and at the University of California, Berkeley physics, where it was in 1933 one of the first graduate students of Robert Oppenheimer. In 1935, she took with her teacher the " Oppenheimer -Phillips process" in the scattering of deuterons, in today's terminology, a stripping reaction. After that, she was a Post-Doc at Bryn Mawr College and the Institute for Advanced Study and 1937/8 at Connecticut College for Woman in her first university teaching job. From 1938 she was in New York at Brooklyn College and from 1944 also the Radiation Laboratory at Columbia University. During the Second World War, she also taught for some time at the University of Minnesota. In the McCarthy era, she lost her position at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, 1952 when she refused, before a McCarthy - committees ( the McCarran ) testify (1987, the Brooklyn College publicly apologized for the dismissal ). After that, she worked for several years without position and wrote during the time of two textbooks: Principles of Physical Science with Bonner and the famous textbook Classical Electricity and Magnetism by Wolfgang Panofsky. In 1957 she presented Edward Condon ( which was itself classified as a "security risk " in the McCarthy - committees ) at Washington University in St. Louis in order to lead ( for teacher training ) the Academic Year Institute Program. From 1962, she was at the University of Chicago, where she retired in 1972. Then she was until 1975 a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and 1980 at the University of Beijing.
Phillips was a leader engaged in physics education in the United States. 1966/7 she was the first woman president of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The organization awarded her the first Melba Newell Phillips Award, which is awarded in her honor and the 1974 Oersted Medal and 1981. At the University of Chicago, she also led a scientific courses for students who are not specialized in the natural sciences.
Phillips was also politically active and in 1945 was one of the founding members of the Federation of American Scientists.
In 2003 she received the Joseph Burton Forum Award of the American Physical Society. In 1981 she was awarded the Karl Taylor Compton Award of the American Institute of Physics.
Writings
- Wolfgang Panofsky: Classical Electricity and Magnetism. Addison -Wesley, first in 1955, 2nd edition, Dover, 2005, ISBN 0-486-43924-0.
- With Francis Bonner: Principles of Physical Science. Addison-Wesley, 1957.
- Classical Electrodynamics, in Siegfried Flügge (Editor), Encyclopedia of Physics, Volume IV, Springer Verlag 1962.