11/4/2023 0 Comments Julius sumner miller shotgun![]() During an interview in the 1940s, he stated that intellectual life in America was in trouble, a belief he held for the rest of his life. Miller was intolerant of misspelled words and misplaced punctuation, and often angered his colleagues because he charged that the students of most faculties were not learning enough. In 1952, he joined the physics department at the then small El Camino College in Torrance, California (1952–1974), to maximum student enrollments due to his great popularity and where he was instantly recognizable by his casual hair and horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He greatly admired Einstein and went on to amass a collection of Einstein memorabilia. ![]() In 1950, Miller won a Carnegie Grant that allowed him to visit Albert Einstein at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, and also to visit the Institute for Advanced Study. He was a Ford Foundation fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. During World War II he worked as a civilian physicist for the US Army Signal Corps while holding fellowships in physics at the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma. In 1937, after submitting over 700 job applications, he was offered a place in the physics department of Dillard University, a private, African American liberal arts college in New Orleans. They had no children, but he was able to reach millions of children through his popular science programs. Due to the Great Depression, he and his wife Alice (née Brown) worked as a butler and maid for a wealthy Boston doctor for the following two years. Miller graduated with a master's degree in physics from Boston University in 1933. His father was Latvian and his Lithuanian mother spoke 12 languages. Julius Sumner Miller was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, as the youngest of nine children. He is best known for his work on children's television programs in North America and Australia. Sumner Miller was well known for his catchphrase 'Why is it so?’ and the distinctive way he said it entered the vernacular, but his program is titled Why It Is So (see clip one).Julius Sumner Miller (– April 14, 1987) was an American physicist and television personality. Through practical experiments and with his own unique style of commentary, Sumner Miller tried to show how nature behaves and, by asking rather than answering questions, aimed to provoke scientific thought and imagination in his audience. Content was based on questions drawn from the natural world. Some I thought out – not too well, to be sure – but I was learning to think.Įach ten-minute episode comprised a lesson in some aspect of ‘quantum physics today’. To some I got the answers in dialogue with my Mama and my Papa and with my teachers. ![]() What is the Earth made of? Why is the sky blue? Why is the sunset red? How does a bird soar? Why does a brook gurgle? How does an earthworm crawl? Why is a dewdrop round? Why does corn pop? Why does a wood fire crackle? And a thousand like questions. Writing on his own early childhood and its influence on his philosophy Sumner Miller explains:Īll of a half-century ago – when I was a little boy on the farm in my native New England – I remember asking all kinds of questions. Or, more simply in my own phrase, 'Why is it so?’ To stir your imagination, awaken your interest, arouse your curiosity, enliven your spirit – all with the purpose of bringing you to ask, as young Maxwell put it, 'What’s the go of it?’ – or, as Kepler had it, 'Why things are as they are and not otherwise’. In the preface to his book, Millergrams (1966), a collection of questions and answers originally published in The Australian newspaper, Sumner Miller expresses his core aspiration for his audience: His infectious enthusiasm, animated delivery, wild expressive eyebrows and eccentric turn of phrase meant that science could be fun and entertaining as well as educational. For over two decades, from 1963 to 1986, Sumner Miller and his silent laboratory assistant ‘Mr Anderson’ entertained a surprisingly large ABC television audience in a series of lectures and demonstrations dedicated to questions of physical science. Why It Is So, which was recorded live from the Physics Department of the University of Sydney, featured the iconic Professor Julius Sumner Miller, a professor of Physics from El Camino College, California.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |