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As Scripps
Institution of Oceanography (SIO) celebrated its centenniel in 2003, its
oldest research unit, the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL), turned
57, still carrying on the tradition of leading innovation in seagoing,
experiment-oriented efforts to unravel the secrets of the ocean
and the subsea environment. The emphasis at MPL in the early years
was on ocean acoustics and geophysics/geology. Though its research
base has expanded to include physical and biological oceanography
and atmospheric and ocean optics research, acoustics and signal
processing still play a central role as subjects of research and
as methods of ocean exploration and imaging. Over more than a
half century of existence, the emphasis at MPL is still on ocean
observation and exploratory research with the parallel development
of unique technology to carry out this research.
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The Early Years (1941 - 1960)
MPL’s roots go back to 1941 when, faced with
large-scale destruction of ships by submarines in World War II, the nation
mobilized the scientific community to learn how to defend against this
threat. Three university-operated laboratories were thus established:
Columbia University Division of War Research, Harvard Underwater Sound
Laboratory, and University of California Division of War Research (UCDWR).
UCDWR was led initially by Vern Knudsen of the University of California,
Los Angeles, with senior staff recruited from academic institutions across
the country.
Given the primitive initial knowledge of the ocean, and of the technology
for dealing with its problems, there was immediate progress as this new
flood of activity built up. By the end of the war, there were effective
new sonar systems and the beginnings of understanding the environment,
but there were also new questions about the nature of the ocean and the
seafloor and a vision of how to create even more effective detection systems.
While many academics returned to their home universities at the close
of the war, a few leaders had become interested in the challenges and
opportunities they could see ahead. At the same time, some in the Navy
realized the academic research potential that had been tapped and decided
to support academic groups in parallel with the maintenance of a much
larger in-house research establishment than that which had existed before
the war. Both the academic and Navy communities were motivated by the
probability that the USSR would, as they did, initiate an energetic development
of submarine capabilities built on technology and personnel drawn from
Germany.
The key scientist at this point was Carl Eckart, an eminent theoretical
physicist who had come from the University of Chicago to head the theoretical
efforts of UCDWR. Eckart directed UCDWR during its closing days, editing
the laboratory’s final report, which ably summarized the newly gained
knowledge while noting the underwater-acoustics challenges that lay ahead.
Most of the UCDWR personnel and their programs were taken over by the
newly formed Navy Electronics Laboratory, but Eckart foresaw the essential
role that a small parallel academic unit could play and was personally
interested in many of the newly opening vistas. This view was shared by
Roger Revelle, then still on active duty as an officer in the sonar development
component of the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. The result was an exchange
of letters between the chief of the bureau and the president of the University
of California, which led directly to the establishment of MPL in mid-1946
as a research unit of the university with a subsequent allocation of three
tenured faculty billets. The Navy provided space and facilities in the
Navy Electronics Laboratory on Point Loma, facing San Diego Bay.
Eckart had a multifaceted vision for the laboratory. He realized that
studies of sound in the sea really meant a study of the ocean environment
and could thus produce not only new sonar systems but also new understanding
of the environment itself. This led to his bringing Russell Raitt with
him from UCDWR. Raitt was a geophysicist interested in using acoustics
to understand the nature of the earth’s crust as viewed from an
oceanic perspective. Eckart also had become fascinated with immediate
challenges that wartime work had raised, focusing on two emerging problems.
One was the question of the anomalously high sound absorption that had
been measured at sea in wartime studies of sound transmission. This led
him to recruit Leonard Liebermann, a physicist who had been a member of
the wartime effort at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was interested
in unraveling the interactions between sound waves and molecular-level
physical/chemical processes. Eckart’s other question was how best
to detect signals in the presence of noise. Within this context, his own
work played a significant role in the birth of the field of optical processing.
Overarching these research threads were two guiding operating principles:
to devise innovative experimental approaches to problems and to involve
students in the resulting research. Eckart recruited two more experimentalists—Phillip
Rudnick and Fred Spiess—as well as a number of visiting physicists
from other institutions. Graduate students were involved in the program
from its inception in spite of the complexities of working through the
distant Physics Department at UCLA.
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