Morse describes his childhood and early education; his entry into Case Institute (later Case Western Reserve) where he initially studied mathematics with Jason J. Nassau; his dabblings with radio; studies in physics at Case under Dayton C. Miller, which convinced him to change his concentration from math to physics; graduate studies at Princeton University under Karl T. Compton, Edward U. Condon, and Ernst C. G. Stueckelberg; summer school studies at the University of Michigan; post-graduate summer employment at Bell Laboratories; Rockefeller Scholarship in Munich with Arnold Sommerfeld, Stueckelberg, and William P. Allis, where he met Linus Pauling and William L. Bragg; his move to Cambridge University where he worked with Neville F. Mott and Harrie S. W. Massey and became acquainted with Patrick M. S. Blackett, Paul Dirac, Ralph H. Fowler, Ernest Rutherford, and John Cockcroft; teaching position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; his graduate students William Shockley, James B. Fisk, and Richard Feynman; research in the 1930s in quantum mechanics and atomic collisions; contacts with Harvard Observatory; society memberships; World War II work for the Navy and at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and the National Research Council; his role in organizing and directing the construction of Brookhaven National Laboratory followed by more work for the Navy; his return to teaching and research at MIT in the 1950s in theoretical physics; trusteeships of a number of organizations, including the American Institute of Physics and the RAND Corporation; his work through 1962 in atomic physics, acoustics and operations research; and his non-scientific interests.