Thomas Erwin Phipps Jr. 91 of Mahomet formerly of Urbana died at 8:50 p.m. Monday, July 11, 2016 at the Farmer City Rehab and Healthcare Center, Farmer City. Renner-Wikoff Chapel and Crematory is in charge of arrangements. There will be no services.

Mr. Phipps was born on January 26, 1925 in Champaign, the only child of Thomas Erwin Phipps Sr. and Mary Eleanor Morgan Phipps. He married Mabel Lee Maier, then following her death to Frances Motz Boldyreff in 1979 in Woodward, Pennsylvania; she died on September 30, 2003. He then married Kathleen L. Leahr in 2015, she survives.

He graduated from Uni High School, Urbana. He obtained a national scholarship from Harvard, where he earned an AB degree in 1944, MS in 1948, and a PhD in 1951 in Nuclear Physics. Dr. Phipps worked during 1945 -1946 in P.M. Morse's Operations Research Group in the Navy Department, subsequently returning to Harvard to do an experimental thesis on Molecular Beam Nuclear Magnetic Resonance under Norman Ramsey. His career included a total of twelve years in the Pentagon - ten in systems analysis for the Navy and two in research management for the Department of Defense - as well as similar employments at Navy laboratories in California and Maryland. In 1980 he retired to form a small private physics laboratory in collaboration with his father, an emeritus professor of physical chemistry at the University of Illinois, in which they performed experiments in electromagnetism. In 1986 he wrote a book, Heretical Verities: Mathematical Themes in Physical Description. After his father's death in 1990, he continued both experimental and theoretical investigations into basic physics, and published in 2005 a second book, Old Physics for New, of which a second edition was issued in 2012.

He was a member of Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa, and a past member of the American Physical Society and the Operations Research Society of America. He has about 40 publications in mainline physics journals, and more than twice that number in dissident physics outlets. In 2010 he received the Sagnac award of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, of which he was a member, in recognition of contributions to dissident physics.

Tom's lifelong passion was the study of physics; it was both his vocation and avocation. He had a special interest in Special Relativity Theory (SRT); although his ideas about SRT differed from its established acceptance, he encouraged physicists to revisit the theory because he saw problems with it. His writing on this subject and others led to friendships and associations with the following scientists of note: Mike H. Brill, Emilio Panarella, David Dameron, David Roscoe, Henry Lewis, Ronald H. Hatch, Tom Van Flandern (dec.), Ronald Newburgh (dec.), and H. Pierre Noyes (dec.).

His peers often commented on his writing style as being clever and funny, his letters as "literary masterpieces". He will be remembered and missed by his wife Kathleen and his many friends and associates.

Memorial contributions may be made to Physics Essays journal: Physics Essays Publication at P.O. Box 8141 Station T, Ottawa, Ontario K1G 3H6, Canada.