Wendell H. Furry

Who is Wendell H. Furry?

Wendell Hinkle Furry was a professor of physics at Harvard University, and made notable contributions to theoretical and particle physics. He was born in Prairieton Indiana on February 18. 1907, and died in Cambridge Massachusetts in December 1984. He received his Ph.D from the University of Illinois in 1932. He made important contributions to the early development of Quantum Field Theory with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Vladimir Fock, and others. During World War II he worked on radar at MIT's Radiation Laboratory. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1949.

In 1953, he was subpoenaed several times as a suspected communist by the House Unamerican Activities Committee and by US Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in refusing to answer questions about his past membership in the Communist Party. In early 1954 he dropped the Fifth Amendment defense in a nationally televised hearing before Senator McCarthy and answered questions about himself but refused to name others. Because of that refusal, he was indicted for contempt of Congress but the case was dropped several years later. Furry was defended by newly appointed Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey, who refused McCarthy's demands to fire him, and also by Nobel laureate in physics and fellow Harvard professor Edward M. Purcell. He co-authored a general physics text of the time with Purcell and J. C. Street.