Philip Morrison, 1915 – 2005

space.com...

one is called upon to name the true pioneers of SETI, there are only three: Frank Drake, Giuseppe Cocconi, and Philip Morrison. Morrison died in his sleep on April 22, at the age of 89.

It was while he was at Cornell University, in the late 1950s, that Morrison, together with his physicist colleague Cocconi, made the fundamental calculation that justified a search for signals from other worlds. He was motivated to do this while considering the generation and detection of gamma rays, and whether these types of particles could be used to send signals across interstellar distances. While this seemed possible, it occurred to the two researchers that radio might be a better communication medium (Morrison had acquired a crystal set at a very early age for listening to the broadcasts from KDKA, the country’s first commercial radio station, in his home town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Morrison soon became an avid radio amateur.)

The physicists wrote up their calculations showing that radio technology, even at the level current nearly a half-century ago, was easily capable of sending information across light-years of distance. They speculated that, since advanced societies might be making their presence known with such emissions, a search for signals should be made by radio astronomers. This result appeared in an article the two physicists wrote in 1959 for the British journal, Nature – and that became the undisputed seminal paper in the history of modern SETI research.

i hope this is a good place to post this...

i mean, it IS SETI related...

ENJOY!!!