(Man has a great tendency to get lost or to hide, as the c...)
Man has a great tendency to get lost or to hide, as the case may be, in a jungle of details and in unnecessary complications. Why do anything simply if you can do it complicated? And still, life itself presents a sufficient number of problems to keep us busy. There would seem to be no need to create additional difficulties, just for the fun of it, especially if these self-made difficulties become practically insuperable and if in the end they cause much unhappiness. The morphological mode of thought and of action was conceived to break the vicious hold which the parasitic wild growth of complications exerts on life in all of its phases. Morphological thought and action are likely to be of value in all human activities, once such thought and action have been clearly delineated and fully developed, and once they have been practised by a sufficiently large number of people. Since the morphological method is of the greatest universality, the choice of the field to which one applies it first is not particulary critical. The author intends to write two or three books on the morphology of several large scale problems, which are both of a technical and of a general social nature. The present book is concerned in particular with some implications of morphological thinking in astronomy. We shall above all emphasize the basic character of the morphological approach, and we shall demonstrate its constructive power in a number of specific cases.
Zwicky was born on February 14, 1898 in Varna, Bulgaria, the eldest of three children born to Fridolin Zwicky, a Swiss accountant and international merchant, and Franziska Wrcek, a Czech national. At the time of Fritz's birth, his father was serving as the Norwegian consul to Bulgaria.
Education
From 1914 to 1916, Zwicky attended the Oberrealischule secondary school in Zurich, Switzerland, and received a B. S. from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich, in 1920. He began graduate study in theoretical physics, and published his first scholarly work, "The Second Virial Coefficient of the Rare Gases, " in 1921. He wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled "On the Theory of Ionic Crystals, " and received his Ph. D. in 1922.
Career
Zwicky remained at the institute as a research assistant until 1925, when he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller International Education Board to work with Robert A. Millikan and Paul Epstein at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. Caltech appointed Zwicky assistant professor of theoretical physics in 1927, and he was promoted to associate professor in 1929. In 1933, Zwicky changed his field of study from theoretical physics to astrophysics. He became interested in a special class of exceptionally bright, short-lived, nonperiodic novas (new stars). Zwicky renamed them supernovas and redefined them as the results of the transformation of ordinary stars into neutron stars, which resulted in the release of an extremely large amount of radiation. In late 1933, Zwicky, in collaboration with Dr. Walter Baade, who had emigrated from Germany to teach at Caltech in 1931, began a study of supernovas for use as measures of galaxies' distances. Initial attempts to search for supernovas in a group of galaxies known as the Virgo Cluster were hampered by the limitations of the equipment in use at that time. Even though a two-hundred-inch Hale telescope was already being built for Caltech's Palomar Mountain Observatory, Zwicky was able to persuade Caltech's Observatory Council to also install an eighteen-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Mountain. Construction of the telescope began in 1933 and was completed in late 1936. In early 1937, Zwicky began using the new telescope to conduct a systematic search for supernovas. He recorded his first supernova using this new telescope on February 16, 1937. After the discovery of his second supernova on August 26, 1937, Zwicky hypothesized that if nature could produce these types of nuclear explosions, then so could humans. This premise was proven nearly ten years later, with the development of the atomic bomb. During the next five years, Zwicky, along with Baade and Rudolph Minkowski, recorded a total of eighteen supernovas. At the same time that he began to study supernovas, Zwicky also began measuring the motion of galaxies, focusing on the Virgo Cluster. It took the scientific community approximately forty years to acknowledge the importance of Zwicky's hypothesis, now known as the theory of dark matter. In 1942, Caltech promoted Zwicky to professor of astronomy. That same year, Zwicky helped Theodore von Karman and other scientists raise capital to form the Aerojet Engineering Corporation, which was headquartered in Azusa, California. Zwicky became the corporation's director of research in 1943, and held this position until 1949. During this period, he helped pioneer the development of several different types of jet and propulsion engines, one of which, the hydropulse, operated under water. By the end of his career, Zwicky held approximately fifty patents, most of them in the area of propulsion engine design. In 1945 and 1946, Zwicky acted as technical representative of a U. S. Army Air Forces factfinding team sent to Germany and Japan to study those countries' wartime research on jet propulsion. From 1945 to 1949, Zwicky also served as a member of the U. S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. In 1946, he authored a book for the air force entitled Certain Phases of War Research in Germany, which discussed the information gathered during his trips to Germany. Zwicky's interest in space flight led him to attempt to launch a number of artificial meteors in 1946. These projectiles were designed to leave trails in the upper atmosphere similar to those left by meteorites. Zwicky used a V-2 rocket launched from White Sands, New Mexico, to send off these artificial meteors. The results of this air force-sponsored project were initially kept classified. It appears, however, that the launch was unsuccessful due to instrument failure. During 1947, Zwicky developed a system of morphological classification and nomenclature for jets. He published his conclusions as "Morphology and Nomenclature of Jet Engines" in Aviation (June 1947). Often described as a very independent-minded person, Zwicky demonstrated this independence when he gave the Halley Lecture at Oxford University on May 12, 1948. Instead of discussing celestial phenomena, the traditional subject of the Halley lecturers, Zwicky chose instead to discuss the application of his morphological method to astronomy. In 1949, Zwicky resigned his position as research director for the Aerojet Engineering Corp. , but continued as technical advisor and chief research consultant until 1961. In 1955, six years after Zwicky received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U. S. Defense Department rescinded Zwicky's security clearance, insisting that Zwicky either become a naturalized citizen or forever lose his security clearance. Despite Zwicky's fondness for the United States, he believed that naturalized citizens received only second-class treatment. He chose to retain his Swiss citizenship and refused to apply for United States citizenship. Despite his lack of a security clearance, in October 1957, the air force invited Zwicky to participate in the launching into space of miniature artificial satellites. Zwicky had proposed this project several months prior to the launch, but the significance of the project was overshadowed by the launch of Sputnik twelve days earlier. Also in the year 1957, one of his best known works, Morphological Astronomy, was published. In it, Zwicky expands upon his Halley Lecture, discussing the importance of knowing and understanding the structure of the universe through observation and experimentation. Between 1961 and 1968, Zwicky, along with a number of his colleagues, published the six-volume Catalogue of Galaxies and of Clusters of Galaxies. His second book on morphology, Morphology of Propulsive Power (1962), summed up much of his theoretical work on propulsive engines and rocketry. In 1968, Zwicky retired from his academic position at Caltech, but he continued astrophysical research. His final work, Catalogue of Selected Compact Galaxies and of Post-Eruptive Galaxies (1971), was co-authored by his oldest daughter, Margrit A. Zwicky. Fritz Zwicky died of a heart attack at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. He was buried in Glarus, Switzerland.
Zwicky was critical of political posturing by all sides in the Middle East, and of the use of nuclear weapons in World War II. He considered that hope for the world lay with free people of good will who work together as needed, without institutions or permanent organizations.
Membership
Zwicky was actively involved in the work of the Pestalozzi Foundation of America, which provided financial support for orphanages. In 1958, Zwicky was named chairman of the foundation's board of trustees. After the morphological approach to astronomy became popular, Zwicky established the Society for Morphological Research in 1961, and became its first president. In 1965, Zwicky was elected vice-president of the International Academy of Astronautics.
Personality
Among his fellow scientists, Zwicky was known for being opinionated and combative, yet compassionate.
Interests
Zwicky loved the mountains, and was an accomplished alpine climber.
Connections
On March 25, 1932, Zwicky married his first wife, Dorothy Vernon Gates, the daughter of California State Senator Edgar J. Gates. The couple did not have any children, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1941. On October 15, 1947, Zwicky married his second wife, Anna Margarita Zurcher, the daughter of a Swiss hotelier, who was working as a cashier when they met. The couple had three children.