The United States of America has been blessed by many great scientists. One of these is Dr. William (Will) Happer, Professor Emeritus at Princeton.
William (Will) Happer, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, is one of the pioneers in the field of optically polarized atoms. He is also a gentleman and scholar in subjects having nothing to do with his primary fields of study and research which are Atomic and Nuclear Physics. Will Happer is a scientist and an expert on the world-wide effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. He believes those effects are positive and beneficial to plant and animal life, including human life. Those beliefs make him a target of the climate alarmist community.
Will Happer has been a leading member of JASON since 1976. JASON is a group of scientists and engineers who advise the federal government on matters of defense, intelligence, energy policy, and other technical problems. In a 1982 JASON summer study, he proposed to use a thin sodium layer in the upper atmosphere as a source of an artificial guide star to correct the “seeing” distortions in optical telescopes due to the effects of atmospheric turbulence. Today, most large optical telescopes use such laser guide-star systems based on his research. Methods to polarize nuclear spins by spin-exchange optical pumping, developed by Dr. Happer’s group have been used in electron scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and are now being used at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in a variety of nuclear physics experiments. His research has even reached into the field of medicine to include magnetic resonance imaging of the lungs. Since nuclear-spin-polarized noble gases are generally inert, they can be safely inhaled, leading to beautiful images of lung air spaces that could not be obtained by any other means. Dr. Happer and his collaborators started a company to commercialize this technology, which eventually became part of General Electric. Today, dozens of research groups in the world are exploring biological applications of nuclear spin polarized noble gases.
From 1987 to 1990, Dr. Happer served as chair of the steering committee of JASON. At Princeton, he served as the chair of the University Research Board from 1995 to 2005. He has published over 200 scientific papers. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
From 1991 to 1993, Dr. Happer served in President George H. W. Bush’s administration as the Director of Energy Research in the Department of Energy, where he oversaw a basic research budget of roughly $3 billion. His responsibilities included directing much of the federal funding for high energy and nuclear physics, materials science, magnetic confinement fusion, environmental science, the human genome project, and other areas. He was dismissed from the Department of Energy in 1993 by the Clinton Administration after disagreements with then Vice President, Al Gore, a proponent of anthropogenic global warming, now called catastrophic climate change by the climate alarmist community and the mainstream media. In 2018, President Donald Trump appointed him to the National Security Council as the Senior Director for Emerging Technologies. In addition to other work during his one-year service at the White House, he argued, unsuccessfully, for an expert review of the hypothesis that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions could cause catastrophic climate change. More recently, Dr. Happer chaired the National Research Council’s standing committee on improvised explosive devices. He is a founder and active member of the CO2 Coalition.
William Happer was born in Vellore, India, on July 27, 1939. He and his mother, Gladys Morgan Happer, a medical missionary, soon came back to the United States while his father, Colonel William Happer, a physician, served with the Indian Army in the Middle East and North Africa during World War II. Will was on one of the few ships from India to the United States that was not sunk by GermanU-boats. Near the end of the war, he lived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where his mother served as the first medical doctor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a part of the Manhattan Project. Happer’s uncle, Karl Ziegler Morgan, was one of the first physicists to join the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He was put in charge of protecting the workers from radiation. Later, Karl Morgan would be known as the “Father of Health Physics.” The excitement of this childhood experience led to Will Happer’s career in physics.
William Happer PhD is an American hero, a gentleman and an outstanding scientist. He is an American Emeritus.