Philip Taylor joined Case Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher in 1962. Today, he is a Distinguished University Professor and the Perkins Professor of Physics. Photo by Daniel Milner.
After more than 56 years at what is now Case Western Reserve, Philip Taylor, Distinguished University Professor and the Perkins Professor of Physics, hasn’t lost his momentum. Over the course of his career, he’s published hundreds of academic papers, mentored more than 50 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and had six physical phenomena and models named after him. Today, he continues to teach and publish as a member of CWRU’s Condensed Matter Physics group. But despite his many years of renowned work in his field, Taylor’s path into physics was almost accidental.
“I was going to do mathematics in university,” he recalls. “But the type of math on the scholarship exam was quite different from what I was used to, so I thought I’d do the physics exam instead.”
That one decision laid the groundwork for his career. Taylor attended King’s College in his native London for his undergraduate degree, then Cambridge University for his doctorate. Almost immediately after graduating in 1962, he took a postdoctoral position at Case Institute of Technology. When he was offered a chance to join the faculty, he accepted at once, and he’s been a member of the physics department ever since.
Taylor’s research explores the properties of materials on an atomic scale. In his early work, he concentrated on metals—investigating, for example, the complex ways that sound waves interact with electrons in copper. Since the 1980s, he’s expanded his focus to include “soft” materials that are squishy and flexible, like polymers and liquid crystals. Regardless of the materials he’s studying, however, Taylor has made a point of applying his largely theoretical branch of physics to real-world problems with tangible social impact.
To that end, Taylor has provided insights into problems as diverse as the biological effects of the nuclear fallout from weapons testing and the detection of lung disorders in premature infants. He’s also consistently taken up one of the world’s biggest and most urgent issues: global climate change. Like soft condensed matter, he points out, climate change is a result of what he calls “emergent phenomena.”
“Think of it this way,” Taylor says. “You may know all there is to know about a particular molecule of water—its size, shape, etc.—but even that knowledge won’t tell you when a glass of water will freeze. That’s because the freezing process is a collective behavior, as trillions of molecules interact. Climate science, of course, is the epitome of that. Any changes in global climate emerge from the interaction of extremely complex systems—the oceans, the atmosphere, the polar ice caps and so on.”
Just by working on the topic in his spare time, Taylor has added significantly to our understanding of climate change. During the late 1990s, he showed that predictions of its severity matched up neatly with real observations of climate in the field. He has since helped the American Physical Society, one of the world’s largest organizations of physicists, craft its statements and policy on tackling climate issues. Most important, though, he’s become a continuing champion for the role of scientists in rebutting climate-change skeptics—a passion he says is driven not only by his interest in the underlying physics, but also by the existential threat that a warming planet poses.
“At its core, climate change is the most serious problem we’ve faced as humans in the past century,” Taylor says. “It could cause crops to fail, floods that wash communities into the sea, sea-level rise to the point where all the coastal cities are under water. It’s just horrifying to imagine. If someone has the ability to contribute to the solution and doesn’t, that’s unforgivable.”
Taylor’s main contribution to climate awareness at Case Western Reserve has been a course he created long before “climate change” became a household term. Energy and Society, an interdisciplinary class he devised in the 1970s and later offered through SAGES (the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), impressed the urgency of the problem on undergraduates for more than 40 years.
In addition to presenting his own lectures, Taylor invited faculty colleagues in physics, earth and environmental sciences, economics, history, political science and other disciplines to share their perspectives on the topic. By the end of the semester, Taylor says, students gained a holistic view of modern energy use and its effects on climate, and an appreciation for the importance of developing environmentally sustainable energy sources.
“The idea was to let students know the consequences of our existing energy sources, and learn about the alternatives we have,” Taylor says. “That seemed a no-brainer, really. It just was so apparent to me that renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, are plentiful and clean, and that by their use, we could eliminate so many technical and social problems.”
In this photograph from 1979, Philip Taylor offers an impromptu physics lesson in his office in the Rockefeller Building. CWRU Archives.
Taylor’s wide-ranging influence as a teacher and researcher was showcased at TaylorFest, a celebration of his 80th birthday this past April. Dozens of physicists, former graduate students and other colleagues converged on CWRU from around the world for a day of accolades and scientific lectures, each reflecting a different area of Taylor’s broad interests.
Climate scientist Michael Mann gave a presentation on extreme weather events; cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin (one of Taylor’s former postdocs) expounded on black holes. Other discussions covered topics as diverse as nanomagnets, evolution and the chemistry of the cosmos. Even Douglas Hofstadter, author of the famed book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, weighed in, sending an original ambigram (a piece of writing that can be read in multiple directions) wishing Taylor a happy birthday.
While speakers at the event testified to Taylor’s scientific eminence, they also made clear the impact he’s had beyond the world of physics. Professor Harsh Mathur, a fellow member of the physics faculty and the organizer of the celebration, noted that Taylor and his wife, Sarah, were early advocates of renewable energy in Ohio.
Longtime residents of Cleveland Heights, they were among the first homeowners in the state to equip their roof with solar panels. At the time, back in 2000, only a handful of installers across the nation could do the work, and the city’s architectural board of review raised objections, fearing that the panels would “ruin the look” of the Taylors’ street. Even after they located a reputable company and pacified the review board, their problems weren’t over; they battled equipment failures for the first year. Yet when the company offered to replace the faulty equipment at cost, Taylor demurred, and insisted on paying the full price.
“Why had I started this whole exercise in the first place? It was to support the concept of solar energy in Ohio,” he explained in a 2001 article. “If I ended up bankrupting the only installer I knew of in the state, then I would hardly be achieving my objective, so I insisted on paying the extra cost myself.” Besides, he wrote, “The investment is paid back in full, I say, the very first day you see your meter run backwards, and know that you are part of the solution and not part of the problem.”
For Taylor, this ethic of acting for the greater good has long been a way of life. In the mid-1980s, he conceived the idea of a citywide festival marking the centennial of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which was conducted in a basement lab in Adelbert Hall in 1887. The experiment, which examined how light travels through space, challenged the physics of the 19th century and paved the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Philip Taylor conceived the idea of a citywide festival marking the centennial of the Michelson-Morley experiment. As part of the festival, Dale Eldred’s sculpture “Light Path Crossing” was installed on the roof of Crawford Hall in 1987. Photo by Matt Shiffler.
Taylor brought together 13 of Cleveland’s educational and cultural institutions for the celebration, which included a massive physics conference; the installation of a sculpture, Dale Eldred’s Light Path Crossing, atop Crawford Hall on the CWRU campus; and the world premiere of The Light, a work commissioned from composer Philip Glass by the Cleveland Orchestra.
Like her husband, Sarah Taylor is British by birth and came to the United States to pursue a scientific career, but her field is biology rather than physics. The two first met in 1964, when she arrived at Western Reserve University for a research position, and they married two years later. It wasn’t long before she embarked on a life of activism. For example, she was an early member of the Open Housing Task Force, a group supporting racial integration in Cleveland Heights.
“Shortly after we bought our house in 1969, we were harassed constantly by some real estate companies pressuring us to sell and move to Beachwood or Chagrin Falls,” she says. “They were trying to play off the racial tensions of the time in order to sell homes in more distant neighborhoods. So I got together with three women in the neighborhood, and when the next agent called, I invited her over for coffee to give her a piece of our minds. We had a very lively discussion about the importance of retaining diversity, which seemed to go well. But the next day, I got a phone call from The Plain Dealer asking, ‘How do you and your husband feel about being sued for $1 million?’ The real estate company had filed a lawsuit for slander against us.”
The suit was eventually dismissed in federal court, and Sarah continued serving on the Task Force, which collected evidence of discriminatory conduct by the local real estate industry. “We had white couples and African American couples both go to real estate agents with the same requests, and would keep track of the location of each house the agents showed in response,” she explains. “Sure enough, we kept turning up a pattern where people were steered towards one neighborhood or another. I think that exposing the results of our work really helped to end that practice.”
In addition to advancing the cause of fair housing, Sarah Taylor has been a leading supporter of public media in the city. After hearing National Public Radio for the first time in 1973 during a trip to Oregon, she began advocating for the creation of a major NPR station in Cleveland. Eventually, she became one of the four founding trustees of Cleveland Public Radio, now the city’s beloved WCPN.
Sarah is also a strong voice for renewable energy in northern Ohio. In 2006, she created a website, Windustrious Cleveland, devoted to encouraging support among the public, institutions, organizations and corporations for offshore wind farms on Lake Erie. Her activism stimulated the formation of the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force, an initiative of the Cleveland Foundation, and the subsequent founding of a nonprofit corporation, LEEDCo. Recently, Fred. Olsen Renewables, a major renewable energy firm based in Norway, has taken over the task of developing and building what Sarah hopes will be the first of many wind power installations on the Great Lakes.
Philip and Sarah Taylor first met in 1964 and married two years later. They raised their two daughters in their Cleveland Heights home, which has solar panels on its roof and an English garden in the backyard. Photo by Mike Sands
Among her other activities, Sarah has found time to engage with the Case Western Reserve community. During the mid-1990s, she created a Newcomers Committee to welcome arriving faculty members and their families to campus and to their new city. The committee, made up of faculty spouses and faculty members, sponsored a series of events throughout the year, including a family picnic in August and a wine-tasting party each spring.
“These events were much appreciated for the interconnections they fostered between those involved in different fields across the campus,” Sarah says. “They were also valuable as a way of providing introductions to the city’s many organizations and institutions.” Philip was deeply involved in the hosting of many Newcomer events over the years—especially the wine tastings, which he established and for which he selected “a variety of delicate samplings.” These parties have always been very popular, and continue to this day.
“When you talk of Phil, you have to talk about Phil and Sarah together. They are very much a team,” says Mano Singham, adjunct associate professor of physics and retired director of the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education.
“When I arrived as a new faculty member in 1989, Phil and Sarah made it a point to make me feel welcome,” Singham recalls. “They would invite me to parties at their home, introduce me to people to help me fit in. I thought there must be something special about me that they liked. But when I talked to other faculty members across the university, I found that they had the same experience. There was nothing special about me; it was Phil and Sarah who were special.”
“We’re all better faculty members, and better people, as a result of our work and interactions with Phil and Sarah over the years,” adds Cyrus Taylor (no relation), dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Albert A. Michelson Professor in Physics. “Through them, I learned more about what it was to be a physicist, to be an academic, to be a human being.”
David Levin is a freelance science writer based in Boston.