Biographical Memoirs Volume 78 (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Edward Mills Purcell
Edward Mills Purcell
Pages 182-205
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From page 183... ...
Pouncl of nuclear magnetic resonant absorption (NMR) , and in ~ 95 ~ his successful detection with Haroic!
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From page 184... ...
Purcell, was manager of the local telephone exchange in Taylorville, en cl moved, when the boy Ec~warcl was fourteen years of age, to Matoon, Illinois, some 60 miles southeast to become general manager of the Illinois Southeastern Telephone Company, an inclepenclent regional company. Ecl's mother, Elizabeth Mills Purcell, was a graduate of Vassar College and taught Latin in the Taylorville high school before her marriage.
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From page 185... ...
It was the arrival of Karl Lark-Horovitz as the new heacl of the physics department there that lecl to an increased visibility of that subject. The department that previously clicl not even offer a major unclergracluate program began to inclucle graduate students engaged in research.
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From page 186... ...
In traveling to Germany by ship that autumn Ed had met Beth C Busser, another exchange student, from Bryn Mawr College, who was to visit Munich.
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From page 187... ...
University as a graduate stuclent in the fall of 1934, where he wouIcl remain for the rest of his life, except for various leaves of absence for special purposes. Of particular influence on his interests in later years was the course on electric en cl magnetic susceptibilities of Professor John H
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From page 188... ...
With the completion of his thesis project, Ecl joined the teaching staff of the Harvard physics department, becoming a Faculty Instructor, a rank with a five-year term that was created in Harvarcl's reconstruction of its faculty structure en c! tenure policy.
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From page 189... ...
radio waves. The concept of nuclear magnetic resonance in molecular beams hacl recently been highlightecl with the award of the 1944 Nobel Prize for physics to our colleague I
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From page 190... ...
Curry Street to provicle bencling of tracks of cosmic rays in his cloucl chambers. Our threemember team worker!
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From page 191... ...
I Ewen to Took for an astronomical spectral line basecl on the hyperfine splitting of the ground state of the interstellar atomic hydrogen in the galaxy.
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From page 192... ...
Following almost immecliately from the period at the MIT Racliation Laboratory he served for many years on tne Air force Science Actv~sory Coerce at tne request of Lee Dubricige. In the fall term of 1950 Ecl took a leave of absence from his cluties at Harvard to join Project Troy, a secret stucly baser!
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From page 193... ...
NMR to calibrate the magnetic field! of a specially constructed ,8-ray spectrograph to establish a better value for the absolute energy of an internal conversion electron from radium, often user!
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From page 194... ...
set of energy states. Negative temperatures are even hotter than infinite temperatures, not colder than absolute zero, as might naively be supposed.
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From page 195... ...
optical feedback, thus attempting to clevelop the scheme into an FEL. The new strong-focusing accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the alternating gradient synchrotron, was to begin in the early 1960s to run a beam of protons having the unprececlentecl laboratory energy of 3 x 10~° electron volts (30 GeV)
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From page 196... ...
out over the course of a year en cl a half in 1960-62 an unsuccessful search for evidence of the Dirac monopole at the alternating gradient synchrotron ~ ~ 963)
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From page 197... ...
He hac! always been strongly attracted to theoretical mocleling en cl analysis, en cl the problem of unclerstancling the mechanisms of the interactions of interstellar dust and light propagating through the galaxy consumed a large part of his efforts in his later years.
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From page 198... ...
He demonstrated the inefficiency of their mechanism by scaling up to small spiral wire coils that he dropped through a viscous fluid, observing the small rotation induced in the coils by their falling velocity. He thus showed the reciprocal effect of the rotationto-thrust mode!
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From page 199... ...
To conclucle, Ec~warcl Purcell contributed strongly to the advance of many sciences en c! taught a large number of students en cl colleagues his special insight for explaining complex phenomena in simple ways.
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From page 200... ...
ALTHOUGH ~ HAVE HAD a close personal and professional relationship with Edward Purcell for almost sixty years, I found two recent biographical sources helpful with some details. In 1991 the IEEE held a special session of its meeting in Boston commemorating the fifti
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From page 201... ...
John Bryant interviewed Ed, and these, entitled Rad Lab: Oral Histories Documenting World War II Activities at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, were published by the IEEE in 1993 (ISBN number 0-7803-9968-4, Center for the History of Electrical Engineering, Piscataway, N.T.~. Another source of biographical information appeared in a chapter that amounts to an authorized biography, written with considerable consultation with Ed and many other sources, by Tames Matson in the volume The Pioneers of NMR and Magnetic Resonance in Medicine: The Story of MRI (Bar-Iran University Press, Ramat Gen, Israel; published in the U.S.A.
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From page 202... ...
Resonance absorption by nuclear magnetic moments in a single crystal of CaF2.
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From page 203... ...
Visible light from localized surface charges moving across a grating.
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From page 204... ...
In Magnetic Resonance Imaging, eds., C Leon Partain and others.
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