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Dr. Harris discusses his career in acoustics, his training and education, and membership in the Acoustical Society of America.
Harry Bernard Miller, an amateur violinist and a chemistry major at Harvard, became a graduate student in physics and engineering upon becoming acquainted with physics professor Frederick Saunders, who was doing acoustical research on violins. After many conferences and consultations with Professor Ted Hunt, and graduate courses in electrical engineering and physics, Harry Miller was employed by Brush Development Company and did early research and development on magnetic recording. During World War II, while working on Navy hydrophones at Brush, Miller took additional graduate physics courses at Case Intitute of Technology to complete his Master's Degree in physics. He became manager of electroacoustics at Brush, and later at the Stromberg Carlson division of General Dynamics Corporation. At Brush, he made two inventions which are widely used by the Navy. Then in 1968, Miller went to the Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory where he continued to do research in underwater loudspeakers and arrays. He has authored the widely used "Handbook of Piezoelectric Transducers" for the Navy, and a book entitled "Acoustical Measurements: Methods and Instrumentation" in the Benchmark series edited by Dr. Bruce Lindsay. Miller is still active in the Engineering Acoustics Division of the Acoustical Society and is admired by his peers for his contriubtions and continuing participation.
Topics include his childhood and the influence of his mechanic father and religiously idealistic mother; his work in graduate school at UCLA with Norman Watson and Vern Knudsen; other mentors including Sepmeyer, Veneklassen, Cyril Harris, and Isadore Rudnick; his move to San Diego and start of his Naval career; activism in noise control; Fletcher's critical band theory and the training of sonar operators; work in underwater environmental acoustics; his interests in sailing and church work; influence of Alpha Gamma Omega christian fraternity; his transition after World War II to permanent Naval employment; contributions with John Webster and Paul Veneklassen to the development of noise-reducing headsets enabling acoustic communication on noisy carrier decks; his retirement in 1980.
In this interview Basil Hiley discusses topics such as: family background; nuclear physics; Cyril Domb; quantum mechanics; Hermann Bondi; University of London; Birkbeck College; Dave Bohm; Werner Ehrenberg; John Bernal; Maurice Wilkins; Roger Penrose; Leon Rosenfeld; Rudolph Peierls; Louis de Broglie; Schrodinger equation; Hamilton-Jacobi equation; Alan Wilson; Abner Shimony; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Alberto da Rocha Barros; Marco Fernandes; Mario Schenberg; determinism; philosophy; chaos theory.
Family background; freshman course instructors at the University of Chicago; war-time training program; living next door to Manhattan Project people; Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University; work on jamming tools (radar counter-measures) and antennas; work and graduate study at the Institute for the Study of Metals the University of Chicago (with Clarence Zener); work with Andy Lawson; E. R. Piore and the Office of Naval Research; early history of the Institute for the Study of Metals; Cyril Stanley Smith; Zener’s course in solid state physics; Lazarus’ doctoral dissertation; University of Illinois at Urbana, fall 1949; work on diffusion in metals; interaction with Frederick Seitz and Japanese physicists. Also prominently mentioned are: Chuck Barrett, Enrico Fermi, Doug Fitchen, James Franck, Bill Fretter, George Friedel, Lou Girifalco, Marvin Leonard Goldberger, Mel Gottlieb, Pete Harvey, Gerald Holton, Hillard B. Huntington, Peter Gerald Kruger, Ting Tsui Kuh, Harvey Brace Lemon, Earl Long, Francis Wheeler Loomis, Robert Joseph Maurer, Douglas McArthur, Louis Ridenour, Win Salzberg, Larry Slitkin, Don Stevens, Leo Szilard, Carl Tomizuka, Chen Ning Yang; Argonne National Laboratory, Columbia University, General Electric Company, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States Atomic Energy Commission.
Education, decision to go into physics. Environment at the University of California, Berkeley in early 1950s, especially Charles Kittel's group; Charles Overhauser, et. al. At Berkeley as a graduate student after Charles Kittel's arrival, 1950, Kittel's development of the department (after the loyalty oath); focus on solid state physics, mainly resonance physics (ferromagnetic resonance, cyclotron resonance); University of Chicago and Berkeley relationship. Cohen at Chicago's Institute for the Study of Metals, from 1952. Discussion of the established Institutes for Basic Research: Institute for Nuclear Studies (Enrico Fermi); Institute for the Study of Metals (Cyril Smith, Andy Lawson, Stuart Rice); Low Temperature Laboratory (Earl Long). Contributions in resonance physics, semiconductor physics (Kittel, Cohen, Albert Overhauser, Carson D. Jeffries), superconducting alloys (Bernd T. Matthias and John Hulm); semi-metals, crystal structure, band structure; Fermi surface and Fermi theory of liquids; Clarence Zener anecdote; University of Chicago model of an interdisciplinary research institute for materials science; Lars Onsager's theory (1951) and its stimulating effect; Cohen's encounter with Brian Pippard; General Electric consultant (Walter A. Harrison, free electron model interpretation); James C. Phillip's critical point spectroscopy; Pippard and Eugene I. Blount "missed" the Fermi theory of liquids. Philosophical summarizing on declaring fields "closed," importance of young people in positions of responsibility. Also prominently mentioned are: Luis Alvarez, Chuck Barrett, Robert Dicke, Leopoldo Falicov, Arthur Kip, Lev Landau; and General Electric Company Research Laboratory.
Early life in the Cotswolds, England; Bristol University, 1943, and physics program during WWII; teachers include Nevill Mott and Edward Tyndall; effect of WWII; work with Harrie Massey on meson capture; University College, London; meets wife and growing contacts in astronomy, late 1940s; thesis, 1952; work in stellar atmosphere; visit to U.S. at Howard and Terkes, 1951-1953; Cavendish group under Martin Ryle, house theoretician; contact with William Fowler and growing interest in nucleosynthesis, 1954; fellowship at Pasadena, 1955; opinions on operation of major observatories, philosophy of cosmological research, reaction to steady state; problem of high energy sources, synchrotron radiation; belief structure in cosmology; Halton Arp’s work; Nuclear Processes in Astrophysics - B2FH; Yerkes Observatory, 1957; physics of galaxies, 1959. Also prominently mentioned are: Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade, Margaret Burbidge, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Paul A. M. Dirac, Enrico Fermi, William Alfred Fowler, James Edward Gunn, Fred Hoyle, Martin Ryle, Allan Sandage, Maarten Schmidt, and Arthur Wolfe.
Early interest in radio; Carnegie Institute of Technology's physics department, 1932-1936; first department research program; summer research experience, 1932-1936; graduate work at University at Berkeley under J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1936-1940; sources of fellowship support; Berkeley journal club; interactions of theorists and experimentalists at Berkeley, and with Stanford University and Caltech, late 1930s; reactions to fission; nuclear physics at University of Illinois, 1941-1942; sources of funds for accelerators to 1941; recruitment to University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, 1942; Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 1944-1946, personnel, research, plans and expectations for peacetime work; scale and financing of physics at Cornell University in immediate postwar period; rise of particle physics after 1949; differences between pre- and postwar physics, job expectations, style of research; evolution of accelerating and detecting methods, 1920s to 1950s; connections between physics and astronomy. Also prominently mentioned are: Paul Aebersold, Luis Walter Alvarez, Hans Albrecht Bethe, Raymond Thayer Birge, Niels Henrik David Bohr, Kevin Burns, Robert F. Christy, Immanuel Estermann, Enrico Fermi, Richard Phillips Feynman, William Alfred Fowler, Otto Robert Frisch, Maurice Goldhaber, Harry Hower, Fred Hoyle, Donald W. Kerst, Charles Christian Lauritsen, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Philip A. Morrison, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Ernest Rutherford, Emilio Gino Segrè, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Robert Rathbun Wilson; Allegheny Observatory, California Institute of Technology, Cavendish Laboratory, Columbia University, Cornell University, International Conference on High Energy Physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, United States Army, United States Navy, United States Office of Naval Research, University of Birmingham, University of California at San Diego, University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nuclear Engineering Program.
Topics discussed include: family background and childhood; his education at King's College, London; the difference between American and British physicists; quantum mechanics; and David Baum.
Brief account of family background and childhood; education: Stanford University from 1922; Munich spring and summer 1926 (Sommerfeld and Wentzel); Harvard University 1926. Main part of interview discusses publications and collaborators. War-related work at Watertown Arsenal 1942-1945; most to Institute for the Study of Metals, University of Chicago, to work on micro-mechanism of fractures. Ferromagnetism work starts 1950. Move to Westinghouse, comments on industrial laboratories (U.S. Steel, Bell Laboratories); move to Carnegie-Mellon 1968.