Professional and Personal Coherence: The Life and Work of Melba Newell Phillips

Abstract

Melba Newell Phillips (1907–2004) was a participant in a heroic age of physics, when the wraps were still being taken off the quantum and the nucleus. Her research collaborators included some of the greatest physicists of the age, yet she was first of all a teacher dedicated to her students. Having been privileged to be among Melba’s friends, we describe her life and career through personal anecdotes and reminiscences garnered from informal conversations with her over the years and quotations from her articles, talks, letters, and interviews. These glimpses, taken from her own words and those of her correspondents, offer an intimate view of the spirit of community that existed among the physicists of Melba’s generation and provide a window into the personalities of the physicists who strongly influenced the intellectual, technological, and geopolitical landscape of the twentieth century. We see a physics community that transcends national and cultural differences, challenges the misuse of authority, and lives out evidence-based reasoning. Through Melba’s recollections and correspondence, names in textbooks become genuine human beings with families, humanist interests, social values, and personal cares. For Melba and her friends, physics was more than a career – it was an adventure larger than life done with passion and craftsmanship. Yet they cared deeply about culture, art, books, politics, justice, history, music, and one another. We review Melba’s research and pedagogical legacies, from the Oppenheimer-Phillips process to textbooks, and the broad sweep of her leadership, from her role as a statesman of science and educator to a historian of physics. The dedication she poured into the understanding of Nature, the responsible stewardship of science, and the welfare of her students, are enduring monuments to her devotion and integrity.