He greatly admired Einstein and went on to amass a collection of Einstein memorabilia that included Einstein's birth certificate. In 1950, he 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 Studies. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow at 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. He married the doctor's maid, Alice Brown they had no children, but he was to reach millions of children through his popular science programs.Īfter submitting over 700 job applications, he was offered a place in 1937 in the Physics Department of Dillard University, a private, African American liberal arts college in New Orleans. Due to the Great Depression, he worked as a butler for a wealthy Boston doctor for the next two years. Miller graduated with a Master's degree and a PhD in physics from Boston University in 1933. His father was Latvian, his Lithuanian mother spoke 12 languages. The Days of My Life : An Autobiography (1989), p.Julius Sumner Miller was born in Billerica, Massachusetts, as the youngest of nine children.Why cloud the charm of a Chladni plate with a Bessel function? If I had done what they wanted my programs would be as dull as their classes! I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics. They charged me with being superficial and trivial. The academics were a special triumph for me. My first TV series on demonstrations in physics - titled Why Is It So? were now seen and heard over the land.Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor. We don't have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can't read, write or calculate. We are approaching a darkness in the land.As quoted in "TV and Classroom Physicist : 'Professor Wonderful,' Julius Sumner Miller, Dies" by Gerald Faris, in The Los Angeles Times (16 April 1987).Kids are my favorites … their spirit and curiosity has not yet been dulled by schools.in Science Demonstrations, #30 Physics of Toys: Electrostatic - Magnetic, Instructional TV Service (1969).I have some stuff in a state of combustication. Julius Sumner Miller, in What Science Teaching Needs, Junior college journal, volume 38 (1967), by American Association of Junior Colleges, Stanford University.To my own teachers who handled me in this way, I owe a great and lasting debt. What we do, if we are successful, is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination. This is a sorry endeavour for no one can be taught a thing. (I take physics merely as an example.) What is the same thing: No one is taught anything! Here lies the folly of this business. We do not teach physics nor do we teach students.
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