Philip Morrison

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: The Chalk and Its Boulders

We are glad to welcome Professor Morrisons 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 Editors 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: On Being Weightless

This great globe itself, the stage on which until now all the acts of mans history have been played, is, you will agree, only a satellite. With a dozen other huge chunks, the planets, and a myriad of smaller ones, our earth is a satellite of that middle-class star, the sun. The moon, of course, is Earths familiar satellite, and nowadays Earth has acquired a new cortege: a dozen assorted pieces of international hardware. All of these are likewise satellites of the sun and, whatever other motions they may have, orbit around it in gyrating curves of more or less complexity. Each of these members of the solar system feels the suns gravitating pull, and responds to it. Thus sputniks travel each year once around the sun, moving in a great, slightly wavy near-circle, the undulations in which are the little excursions they make around the earth each hour or two. 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.

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 physicists 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 clear that the school text and the popular accounts gave him no conceptual scheme in which to order the innumerable and constantly-multiplying examples of electrical or electronic technology. 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 Darwins 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 sacrifice of mouse and monkey in the laboratory and the vaccine plant. It is less evident that the vital distinctions between the animal world and homo sapiens (or anyway homo faber—for I write as the 101st Airborne flies to Little Rock) can be discerned in laboratory experiment. But recently some of the deepest-lying studies of the psychiatrist have been set in an illuminating light by studies made upon garden spiders; the whole account seems to come very close to the beginnings of an answer to the ancient philosophical question: what is human nature?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: 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: 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 technological and scientific assertions of the day.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.