engineering. While there he became interested in physics. He earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in 1936. He then entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in theoretical physics in 1940 under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer, writing his thesis on "Three Problems in Atomic Electrodynamics". In 1938, Morrison married Emily Kramer, a girl he had known in high school, and a fellow Carnegie Tech graduate. They divorced in 1961. In 1965 he married Phylis Hagen. They remained together until Phylis died in 2002. Manhattan Project After he finished his Ph.D. Morrison took a position as an instructor at San Francisco State College. In 1941 he became an instructor at the University of Illinois. In December 1942, with World War II raging around the globe, he was recruited by Robert F. Christy to join the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in January 1943. There he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors. Concerned about the danger from the German nuclear energy project, Morrison helped persuade the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., to initiate the Alsos Mission in order to gather information on it. With the work in Chicago winding down in mid-1944, Morrison moved to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico as a group leader. His first task was to help determine how much plutonium a bomb would require. He calculated that would be sufficient. He then worked with George Kistiakowsky on the explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon. Morrison transported the core of the Trinity test gadget to the test site in the back seat of a Dodge sedan. He was an eyewitness to the test on July 16, 1945, and wrote a report on it. A month later, as leader of Project Alberta's pit crew, he helped load the atomic bombs on board the aircraft that participated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, Morrison and Robert Serber traveled to Hiroshima as part of the Manhattan Project's mission to assess the damage. Activism Morrison returned to Los Alamos, where he remained until 1946. He turned down an offer from Ernest O. Lawrence to return to Berkeley, and instead accepted an invitation from Hans Bethe to join him at the physics faculty at Cornell University. After surveying the destruction left