"I've been given a lot of gifts," he said, "and a lot of them came from my undergraduate and graduate experiences at Tennessee."

Born and raised in Memphis, Burt came to UT as a freshman and double-majored in physics and math. He finished his bachelor's degree in 1956 and entered the physics graduate program in the fall of 1957. However, by the time he became a graduate student he was also a husband and father, so he decided to work for awhile to put some money back. He got a full-time job teaching in the engineering drafting program, carrying graduate courses in physics at the same time. Although he enjoyed the work, Burt said he knew he "was not going to be a career draftsman, for sure." He earned a grand total of $4,000 for one year and managed to save half of it.

In 1958, Burt embarked on full-time graduate study in physics and became Dr. Ed Harris's first master's degree candidate. Harris later recounted how the arrangement came about when he spoke at a theoretical physics symposium honoring Burt in 1994.

"I do not remember if I approached Phil or he approached me about a theoretical master's thesis. In either case I took him on. I mentioned this to Dick Present who was the senior theorist in the department, and he looked rather dubious and said that Phil's undergraduate grades were not very good. This did not bother me. I had done my Ph.D. dissertation under Dick's direction, and wondered if he knew what my undergraduate grades were like. They were not so hot. I had better things to do as an undergraduate than to work at good grades and supposed that Phil did too. Anyway, when Phil's thesis was finished, Dick told me that it was one of the best M.S. theses he had seen."

Burt has his own recollections of the professor-student relationship. When he had finished a first draft of his master's thesis, he drove to Harris's house to have him look it over. Burt recalled that Harris had devoted two and a half rooms of his home to wine making and had just finished the first batch when his student arrived. Harris offered his guest a glass of wine, but did not partake of any himself.

"I concluded that he was waiting to see if I died," Burt said.

Burt survived the wine tasting and went on to finish both his master's degree and his Ph.D. (1961), under Harris's direction. After wrapping up his studies at UT, he moved to the California Institute of Technology where he was a senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Southern California for one semester and spent a year at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. In 1965 he headed to Clemson University, where he is still a professor of physics.

Burt said that when he arrived at Clemson, the physics department was in much the same shape as Tennessee's had been when he enrolled as a freshman. Clemson was just beginning to develop graduate studies in physics, and through consulting work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Burt was able to tap Drs. Bill Bugg and Dick Present, among others, for advice on how to put together a strong graduate program. He served for a time as head of the Clemson physics department, an assignment he said was very rewarding.

"What you learn as department head is that there are a lot of ways to touch people's lives," especially by the most subtle means, Burt explained. For example, he gave a faculty member time and encouragement to pursue some basic research, which in turn led the scientist to switch fields and become an expert in a different area of physics. You can see tremendous results and earn great satisfaction in the job, Burt said, "if you don't insist on taking credit for those things."

A tenet underlying Burt's philosophy of administration, research, and teaching is that being open-minded is imperative. He can trace this attitude, in part, to his own college experience.

"I had a liberal arts education at Tennessee," he said, emphasizing that the university's climate encouraged students to follow whatever avenues piqued their interests and imagination. Although his physics and math studies consumed most of his attention, Burt developed a deep interest in languages as well. (Two years ago he delivered a commencement address, in German, at the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Hamburg.) He also wrote for the Orange and White, the forerunner to the Daily Beacon student newspaper. His wife, Harriet Clack Burt, was on the newspaper staff as well, and both served as editors during their stints in college journalism. Burt was the editor when UT integrated, and wrote an editorial commending the university's decision. He thought the article would appear only in the campus newspaper, and was astonished to learn that it had been picked up by United Press International and was reprinted all over the world. Burt said he never expected that type of reaction. "I wrote it because I thought it was the right thing to do," he said.

One person who encouraged Burt to embrace a broader perspective on life was physics Professor Isabelle Tipton. What he remembers most about her was the concept she called the "warp and woof of ideas," a reference to the way yarn is woven on a loom. He said Tipton tried to impress on her students that "you aren't learning disconnected things—you don't just learn something isolated." This interconnectedness of ideas is what Burt considers the most fascinating aspect of his career. Several years after completing his master's work on nonlinear physics, he re-introduced the concept into his research (part of his current work is on non-perturbative solution of nonlinear differential equations). The idea encompasses both physics and math, and as a result he was invited to lecture at a math conference for the first time in 1998.

In addition to her "big picture" perspective on education, Burt said Tipton also made an impression on him as a person.

"She was not a narrow person," he said, "and I didn't want to be narrow either."

Burt recalled how most of his college friends, including Dr. Bugg, enjoyed a wide range of interests, an attitude he adopted as well. An important point he tries to get across to his own students is that although you have to specialize, "you don't want to be a pencil sharpener," he said. He counts the diverse mix of people of and ideas he encountered at Tennessee among the gifts he has received in life.

"I wish everyone could have something like that."

Back to Cross Sections, Fall 1998 issue.