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Parry Hiram Moon was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin to Ossian C. & Eleanor F. (Parry) Moon. He received a BSEE from University of Wisconsin in 1922 and an MSEE from MIT in 1924. Unfulfilled with his work in transformer design at Westinghouse, Moon obtained a position as research assistant at MIT under Vannevar Bush. He was hospitalized for six months after sustaining injuries from experimental work in the laboratory. He later continued his teaching and research as an Associate Professor in MIT's Electrical Engineering Department. He married Harriet Tiffany, with whom he had a son. In 1961, after the death of his first wife, he married his co-author, collaborator and former student, Domina Eberle Spencer, a Professor of Mathematics. They have one son. Moon retired from full-time teaching in the 1960s, but continued his research until his death in 1988.

Moon's early career focused in optics applications for engineers. Collaborating with Domina Eberle Spencer, he began researching electromagnetism and Amperian forces. The quantity of papers that followed culminated in Foundations of Electrodynamics, unique for its physical insights, and two field theory books, which became standard references for many years. Much later, Moon and Spencer unified the approach to collections of data (vectors, tensors, etc.), with a concept they coined as ?holors?. Through their work, they became disillusioned with Einsteinian relativity and sought neo-classical explanations for various phenomena.

Articles: (with Domina Eberle Spencer)

• "Cylindrical and Rotational Coordinate Systems", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V252, pp. 327- (1951).
• "Separability Conditions for the LaPlace and Helmholtz Equations", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V253, pp. 585- (1952).
• "Separability in a Class of Coordinate Systems", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V254, pp. 227- (1952).
• "Theorems on Separability in Riemannian n-space", Am. Math. Soc. Proc., V3, pp. 635- (1952).
• "Recent Investigations on the Separability of LaPlace's Equation", Am. Math. Soc. Proc., V4, pp. 302- (1953).
• "Some Coordinate Systems Associated Wtih Elliptic Functions", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V255, pp. 531- (1953).
• "Binary Stars and the Velocity of Light", Journal of the Optical Society of America, V43, pp. 635-641 (1953).
• "Electromagnetism Without Magnetism: An Historical Approach", American Journal of Physics, V22, N3, pp. 120-124 (Mar 1954).
• "Interpretation of the Ampere Force", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V257, pp. 203-220 (1954).
• "The Coulomb Force and the Ampere Force, Journal of the Franklin Institute, V257, pp. 305-315 (1954).
• "A New Electrodynamics", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V257, pp. 369-382 (1954).
• "A Postulational Approach to Electromagnetism", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V259, pp. 293-305 (1955).
• "On Electromagnetic Induction", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V260, pp. 213-226 (1955).
• "On the Ampere Force", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V260, pp. 295-311 (1955).
• "Some Electromagnetic Paradoxes", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V260, pp. 373-395 (1955).
• "On the Establishment of Universal Time", Philosophy of Science, V23, pp. 216-229 (1956).
• "The Cosmological Principle and the Cosmological Constant", Journal of the Franklin Institute, V266, pp. 47-58 (1958).
• "Retardation in Cosmology", Philosophy of Science, V25, pp. 287-292 (1958).
• "Mach's Principle," Philosophy of Science, V26, pp. 125-134 (1959).