Codiscoverer, with Harold I. Ewen, at Harvard in 1951, of the 21-centimeter line of hydrogen, for which he shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Felix Bloch who had done similar work at Stanford). In a lecture delivered at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in 1960, Purcell attacked the notion that interstellar travel would ever be possible, arguing that radio signals were probably the best way of establishing contact with other intelligent races.1 A similar discouraging outlook for flight between the stars was expressed by Pierce and von Hoerner.
Reference
Purcell, Edward. "Radio Astronomy and Communication Through Space." In A. G. W. Cameron, ed., Interstellar Communication (1963).
