Raymond Thayer Birge (March 13, 1887 - March 22, 1980) was a physicist. Born Brooklyn, New York, into an academicscientific family, Birge obtained his Doctor's Degree from Wisconsin University in 1913. In the same year he married Irene A. Walsh. The Birges had two children, Carolyn Elizabeth (Mrs. E.D. Yocky) and Robert Walsh, Associate Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1973-1981. After five years as an instructor at Syracuse University, he became a member of the physics department at University of California, Berkeley where he remained until he retired, as chairman, in 1955.
Birge's later work arose from his initial bewilderment at the variety and inconsistency among measurements of the fundamental physical constants. His interest led to a broad mastery of all branches of the physical sciences and gave fruit with many publications, in particular, a 1929 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics that recommended a standard set of values for the constants based on earlier published results. There ensued a frustration with the conventional methods of statistics as applied in physical science which led to a collaboration with W. Edwards Deming. Following their 1934 joint paper in Reviews of Modern Physics, their approaches diverged with Deming following the work of Walter A. Shewhart while Birge became interested in the more conventional statistical approaches of least squares and maximum likelihood. Birge's interest in statistics led him to the investigation of parapsychology in which he conducted many experiments without finding any conclusive results.
Birge was an active administrator and was the architect of the Berkeley department's prestige, seeking out physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence and guiding the department through its golden years of the 1930s and through the changes brought on by World War II, the Manhattan Project, and the birth of "Big Science." However, during the McCarthy era in 1949, the Regents of the University of California enforced an anti-communist oath to be signed by all employees. Though an outspoken critic of the oath, after much searching of conscience, Birge decided that his loyalty to the department and the university demanded that he sign and fight from within for freedom of speech. Many of his colleagues did not sign and were dismissed.
Birge died in Berkeley, California. His honours include:
Birge was a member of the physics faculty at Berkeley from 1918 until his retirement in 1955, and he was chairman of the department from 1932 to 1955.
E.A. Birge was a pioneer in the study of limnology, a distinguished member of the faculty, and from 1918 to 1925 president of the University.
Birge stayed at Syracuse for five years and he taught a variety of courses and did research in spectroscopy, measuring and interpreting spectra obtained during his years as a graduate student and a summer spent at Madison.
Also included is important correspondence with such statisticians as A. Aitken, RaymondT. Birge, Harold French Dodge, Churchill Eisenhart, J. Juran, Gregory Lidstone, Jerzy Neyman, John Wilder Tukey, and W. Allen Wallis.
Feeds |
Contact