wfn.org | Re: United Methodist Daily News note 460

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Reply-to: owner-umethnews@ecunet.org (United Methodist News list)
"UNITED METHODIST DAILY NEWS 97" by SUSAN PEEK on April 15, 1997 at 14:24
Eastern, about DAILY NEWS RELEASES FROM UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE (466
notes).

Note 463 by UMNS on Nov. 19, 1997 at 16:12 Eastern (5982 characters).

TITLE:	Nobel laureate is active United Methodist

Contact:  Joretta Purdue  	651(10-71BP){463}
		Washington, D.C.  (202) 546-8722  	Nov. 19, 1997

EDITORS NOTE: Photo available.

Nobel laureate physicist invests
in his church as well as his work 

A UMNS News Feature
	by Joretta Purdue
	
	DARNESTOWN, Md. (UMNS) -- What does a new Nobel Prize winner do a month
before he heads to Stockholm in December to pick up the famous prize?
	William D. (Bill) Phillips takes a turn teaching the adult Sunday school
class at Fairhaven United Methodist Church here.
	The class is interrupted at one point as a choir member pops in to don his
robes and several members of the sanctuary choir who had been in the class
pick up their music and leave to perform the anthem at the first service.
	"One argument for just having one service," quipped Phillips, who turned 49
in early November.
	Phillips, one of three 1997 winners for physics, is very proud of the church,
formed in the late 1960s from three congregations: two white and one black.
	It is a truly integrated church, with an African-American pastor and an
active contingent of African-American laity. Among the members are people from
Sierra Leone, China, India and England. 
	Members are from many different walks of life. "There are people in our
church who are farmers, and there are people in our church who are
physicists," Phillips observed.
	He was referring not just to himself but to other colleagues from the nearby
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST in the alphabet soup of
government). One of them, who is still a member, had invited Phillips to the
church when he came to NIST in 1978.
	A mosaic in the narthex depicts the present church with the three it
replaced. Fairhaven supports the historical site that the old African-American
church has become. It offered the first school for black children in
Montgomery County, Maryland. The other two buildings have been demolished.
	Phillips, who is white, is a charter member of the church's gospel choir, and
so is the white music director -- both as singers. The church of approximately
350 members also has two handbell choirs, a children's choir and a youth
chorus.
	"He's very active in the life of the church, including worship committee,
Sunday school teacher and a teacher of a Bible study," the Rev. R. Douglas
Force said.
	Phillips learned he had been named a Nobel prize winner when he was awakened
at 3:30 a.m. Oct. 15 in California, where he was attending a meeting. Two
other Nobel winners who were there joined in the congratulations but also
tried to prepare him for the storm of activity.
	"It's been incredibly hectic, so right now I just have a lot less time to do
things," he laughed.  "Winning an award like this is a very odd thing. People
think that somehow you have some wisdom that goes beyond what you got the
award for -- which, of course, isn't true."
	The day after Phillips was notified of the Nobel prize, The Washington Post
ran the headline "One of Science's Nice Guys Finishes First" on page one under
his picture.
	Phillips, who shares the physics prize with Steven Chu of Stanford University
and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of the College de France, is the first winner in
the history of NIST, which was created in 1901 and was known as the Bureau of
Standards.
	"It's very important to me that I work with a team here, and that team is a
very effective research group," Phillips said. He called it "a very
invigorating environment."
	When Phillips joined the staff in 1978, he had completed his doctorate at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and followed that with a
two-year post-doctorate fellowship at MIT.
	The work for which he is being cited got underway in 1979 as an effort to
build an improved atomic clock and was largely completed by 1989 or 1990.
There are only two atomic clocks in the nation -- the one run by NIST is in
Boulder, Colo.
	Working independently, but making use of each other's discoveries, as
reported in scientific journals and meetings and by personal communication and
visits, the three honorees learned how "to make a gas incredibly cold,"
Phillips said. 
	Cooling gasses ordinarily turn into a liquid or solid, but Phillips and the
others use lasers to push the atoms so they slow down rather than speed up.
	"To say that something is hot is to say that it's moving rapidly, so to cool
something down, what you want to do is slow it down," he explained. "We
actually get things down below one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero."
	He added that in any conventional atomic clock today, the motion of the atoms
limits how well the clock will perform. The accuracy of the clock has
implications for space navigation and satellite positioning systems.
	Other applications of the research will be developed over time. Phillips said
some of the techniques are being used to manipulate atoms in different ways.
One area of study, atomoptics, involves manipulating beams of atoms like beams
of light. The hope, he commented, is to be able to use atoms to make pictures
that have greater sharpness and detail than photographs that use light.
	"Even though our primary job is research, we are involved in doing a lot of
teaching and training," Phillips said. A number of undergraduate students join
the staff in the summer and graduate and post-graduate students join the
department for longer periods. In addition, he and other NIST staff
occasionally teach courses at the University of Maryland.
	The teaching will be a part of the Nobel events as well. Phillips will give a
lecture during the period of formal balls and festivities that accompany the
presentation. 
	For that period, his wife, Jane; the couple's daughters, a high school junior
and a freshman at college; his 84-year-old widowed mother; and siblings plan
to join him in Sweden. Lectures in colleges and universities around
Scandinavia have been scheduled for him before and after the awards ceremony.
	#  #  #

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