Our beloved friend and SquareTwo book reviewer, B. Kent Harrison, has recently passed at the age of 90. We miss him terribly already. He was a good man, an enthusiastic physicist, a firm advocate for women, and a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ. Below we have reproduced his 2010 biography from FAIR, where his testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon can be found.
Biography
B. Kent Harrison received his B. S. degree at Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1955, where he was valedictorian, and, attending on a fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF), took his M.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1957 and 1959, respectively. His area of specialty was general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravitation).
After receiving his doctorate, Prof. Harrison worked at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for five years and then joined the BYU Physics Department in 1964. (He took a leave at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for a period after coming to Utah.) At BYU he taught several majors’ and general education courses in physics and also taught Book of Mormon. He supervised the science part of a bachelor’s degree program for adult students who had not previously finished college, acting too as the physics teacher and astronomy teacher in that program. He served as department chair and as a member of several committees and councils, received five NSF grants, was honored with the University’s Alcuin Award for excellence in teaching, and supervised a number of doctoral and master’s degree candidates. A member of the American Physical Society and of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, he retired from BYU in 2000.
Dr. Harrison published approximately fifty papers, most on general relativity and mathematical physics, edited a textbook on physical science, and gave many talks at conferences on five continents. He wrote Ideas and Experiments in Physical Science (2d ed., Dubuque, 2007) for use in general science courses, and, with Kip S. Thorne, Masami Wakano, and John Archibald Wheeler, co-authored Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse (Chicago, 1965). He also authored the chapter “Truth, the Sum of Existence” in David Leigh Clark, ed., Of Heaven and Earth: Reconciling Scientific Thought with LDS Theology (Salt Lake City, 1998).
In the community, Prof. Harrison has been active in Scouting and holds the Silver Beaver award and the Provo Peak Award (similar to the Second Miler Award.) He has long had a particular interest in the concerns of women, co-authoring a paper entitled “Feminism in the Light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” giving several talks on women’s issues and domestic abuse, and co-editing the book Confronting Abuse (Salt Lake City, 1993). He was a member of the board of the Provo Center for Women and Children in Crisis for over ten years and served as president of the Center during several of those years.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dr. Harrison has served as a stake missionary, bishop, high councilor, stake clerk, high priests group leader, manager in transient services, teacher in priesthood and Sunday School, cub scout leader, ward organist, and choir director. He is currently an ordinance worker in the Provo Temple and a volunteer in the Edgemont North Stake Family History Center.
VHC: Kent died August 14, 2024. Kent’s wife Janyce passed several years before he did, and we are happy that they are now reunited. Kent’s faithful service as SquareTwo’s book editor was deeply appreciated by the entire editorial board. I counted him as a dear friend; we first met when I was at BYU teaching national security, and I asked him to come in and lecture about fission and fusion weapons to my students. A wonderful friendship that lasted decades ensued; not only were we both interested in nuclear weapons, but we were also both interested in elevating the voices of women and in fighting domestic abuse, particularly in the Church. Kent had a keen and inquisitive mind until the very end—he was writing another book review for us when he passed! His memory will forever be a blessing to me.
Full Citation for this Article: Editorial Board, SquareTwo Journal (2024) "The Passing of B. Kent Harrison, SquareTwo’s Book Review Editor," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 2 (Summer 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleHarrisonPassing.html, accessed <give access date>.
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