Wendell H. Furry

Wendell Hinkle Furry (February 18. 1907 - December 1984) was a professor of physics at Harvard University, and made notable contributions to theoretical and particle physics.

Background

Furry was born in Prairieton, Indiana on February 18. 1907.^[1] He earned an A.B. degree from DePauw University in 1928 and an A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1930 and 1932, respectively^[2][3]

Career

Furry made important contributions to the early development of Quantum Field Theory with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Vladimir Fock, and others. During World War II he worked on radar at MIT's Radiation Laboratory. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1949.

After the war, Prof. Furry continued teaching at Harvard, later becoming a full professor and serving for three years as chairman of the Physics Department from 1965 to 1968.^[4] After several years of half-time partial retirement he accepted full retirement in 1977.^[5]

McCarthyism

In 1953, Furry was subpoenaed several times as a suspected communist by the House Unamerican Activities Committee and by US Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in refusing to answer questions about his past membership in the Communist Party. In early 1954 he dropped the Fifth Amendment defense in a nationally televised hearing before Senator McCarthy and answered questions about himself but refused to name others. Because of that refusal, he was indicted for contempt of Congress but the case was dropped several years later.^[6]

Furry was defended by newly appointed Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey, who refused McCarthy's demands to fire him, and also by Nobel laureate in physics and fellow Harvard professor Edward M. Purcell.^[7] He co-authored a general physics text of the time with Purcell and J. C. Street.^[8]

Prof. Furry, like so many other intellectuals of the depression era, had great interest in the then on-going Russian experiment in attempting to create a "communist" society. As part of that interest he taught himself Russian and for many years supplemented his income by translation and editing of Russian Physics journals published by the American Institute of Physics. He later played a significant role in the writing of Irving Emin's, "Russian—English Physics Dictionary," John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1963 (with his contribution acknowledged p. vii, "Preface")—a work that is still widely used. A soft-spoken man, but an excellent, well-organized teacher, he is remembered by his former students for his many kindnesses. As part of his wartime work at the MIT Radiation Laboratory he made significant, still useful work on radar propagation that is documented in Chapter 2 (pp. 27–180) in Vol. 13, "Propagation of Short Radio Waves," edited by Donald E. Kerr, as a part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory Series, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1951.

Death

Furry died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in December 1984.^[9]

References