Abelson was born on April 27, 1913, in
Tacoma, Washington, to
Norwegian immigrant parents. He attended
Washington State University, where he received degrees in
chemistry and
physics, and the
University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he earned his PhD in
nuclear physics. As a young physicist, he worked for
Ernest Lawrence at the UC Berkeley. He was among the first American scientists to verify
nuclear fission in an article submitted to
Physical Review in February 1939. His report anticipated the
nuclear submarine's role as a
missile platform. This concept was later supported by
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and others. Under Rickover, the concept became reality in the form of , the world's first nuclear submarine. In 1946, he returned to work at the
Carnegie Institution, which published his report "Atomic Energy Submarine," in March of that year. From 1953 until 1971 he served as the director of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington's
Geophysical Laboratory, and as president from 1971 to 1978, and as a trustee from 1978 on. Abelson may have been the original source of the phrase '
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', which he used in 1978 and was subsequently popularised by
Carl Sagan. Perhaps his most famous work from this time period is an editorial entitled "Enough of Pessimism" ("enough of pessimism, it only leads to paralysis and decay"). This became the title of a 100 essay collection. During the 1970s he became interested in the problem of world energy supplies. Books on the topic include
Energy for Tomorrow (1975), from a series of lectures at the University of Washington, and
Energy II: Use Conservation and Supply. He pointed out the possibilities of mining the
Athabascan tar sands, as well as
oil shale in the
Colorado Rockies. In addition, he urged conservation and a change of attitude towards public transit. After 1984, he remained associated with the magazine. Some have claimed him to be an early
skeptic of the case for
global warming on the basis of a lead editorial in the magazine dated March 31, 1990, in which he wrote, "[I]f the global warming situation is analyzed applying the customary standards of scientific inquiry one must conclude that there has been more hype than solid fact." However, this contrasts what is said in a US National Research Council, Energy and Environment report on which his name appears along with Thomas F. Malone over a decade earlier in 1977: Abelson died on August 1, 2004, from respiratory complications following a brief illness. He was married to
Neva Abelson, a distinguished research
physician who co-discovered
Rh factor testing (with
L. K. Diamond). Their daughter,
Ellen Abelson Cherniavsky, worked as an
aviation researcher for the
MITRE corporation in
Virginia. ==Awards and legacy==