To advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics: An account of the one-hundred-year history of the American Physical Society (2025)

1.

“…the first great American scientist after Franklin” [The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, 1975), 15th ed., Micropaedia Vol. IV, p. 1029], and first head of the Smithsonian Institution, who took the initial steps to cultivate a physics community. In discussions leading to the organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1847, he proposed that physics should have a section of its own in the Association (but that did not happen until 1882). The other major science organization, the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1863, was reorganized by Henry between 1867 and 1872 into an honorary society for recognizing and advancing original research.

The Academy’s early members were principally from the physical sciences [George H. Daniels, Science in American Society (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1971)].

2.

Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists—The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Harvard U.P., Cambridge, MA, 1995), 2nd print., p. 7.

3.

Ibid., p. 26.

4.

5.

6.

Kevles, op. cit., p. 77.

7.

Rowland, who was descended from a line of Yale-trained ministers, had decided while in college to devote himself to science and to the kind of research that brought “not…filthy lucre but good substantial reputation.” (Kevles, op. cit., p. 25). At the age of twenty-seven, he was appointed the first professor of physics at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University. While working in Helmholtz’s laboratory in Berlin, he had succeeded in demonstrating that an electrically charged rotating disk would produce a magnetic field. Back at Hopkins he meticulously obtained an authoritative measure of the ohm and an improved value for the mechanical equivalent of heat. Then, in 1882, he revolutionized the study of light spectra through his invention and use of the Rowland grating (ibid., pp. 26–27). When he assumed the presidency of the APS he was already will and he died in office on April 16, 1901.

In his obituary for Rowland [“Henry Augustus Rowland, Physicist,” Phys. Rev. XIII (1), 60–64 (1901)], E. L. Nichols records Rowland’s extraordinary accomplishments and goes on to say: “The recognition of Rowland’s genius was early and unusual… . In 1881, when he was only 33 years of age, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the youngest man probably upon whom that honor has ever been conferred.” (The record probably still stands.) But Nichols adds: “For routine teaching he had neither taste nor aptitude and even of the more advanced students only those who were able to brook severe and searching criticism reaped the full benefit of being under him.”

(One would be surprised to see such a frank appraisal of the teaching performance of a distinguished physicist-colleague in a physics journal today, but not necessarily because it would never be deserved.) It seems unnecessary, for the audience for which this article is intended, to provide any biographical information on Michelson, except perhaps to remark that he was not only the first American Nobel laureate in science—he received the physics prize in 1907—but also the first, in what was later to become a long list of foreign-born physicists, who served as presidents of the APS. He appears, incidentally, not to have been very diligent as president—seven successive proceedings of meetings in 1901 and 1902 carry the notation “in the absence of the President, Vice-President Webster presided”—and failed to give a presidential address.

8.

Gibbs, chary of organizations, had earlier declined to help organize the Mathematical Society: “[though] I have felt favorably inclined towards the plan…[in view] of my confirmed absenteeism in the few societies to which I belong, it seems hardly worth while for me to join in the undertaking…” [Lynde Phelps Wheeler, Josiah Willard Gibbs (Yale U.P., New Haven, CT, 1951), pp. 181–182].

Aware of these sentiments, Webster apparently did not try to involve Gibbs in the organization of the Physical Society and, in fact, Gibbs never became a member.

9.

Although Webster remained all his life a classical physicist and apparently did not assimilate the new developments coming from Europe, he was important and highly esteemed. J. J. Thomson praised him and O. W. Richardson remarked: “None of those who, like myself, had the privilege of being associated with him will ever forget his great geniality, his quick mind, and his forceful methods of expression. Any scientific gathering which secured his presence was assured of success.” Webster, by every appearance, also was not only a genial but a contented man for most of his life. In 1910 he reported to the secretary of the Harvard class of 1885: “My life has been entirely devoted to scientific work [this was not quite accurate—he also pursued his interests in languages and writing], which I have thoroughly enjoyed. I…have ample time for my own researches. My life has been totally uneventful, unmarred by accident or sadness. I have hardly been ill since leaving college, a result of the use of the gymnasium then and since, and the avoidance of athletic contests. My scientific work has been rewarded by election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences… .” Yet, on May 13, 1923, he killed himself, using a gun he had obtained the day before, ostensibly for use in his research laboratory. Melba Phillips (Ref. 5, from which all quotations in this note are taken) reports that the new president of Clark University, Wallace W. Atwood, had clashed with Webster over academic freedom issues during the “red scare” of the early 1920’s. Among other actions, Atwood had banned the left-leaning Nation magazine, to which Webster had been a frequent scientific contributor, from the University’s library. More directly threatening to Webster, Atwood was clearly embarked on a course of diminishing graduate work and research at Clark. He abolished the graduate department of mathematics, forcing two full professors into retirement. There were rumors that the entire graduate school was to be closed and that physics would go next. In 1922 Princeton University conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Science on Webster, but at Clark he was in imminent danger of losing his job. The shocking and astonishing event of Webster’s suicide was noted in scientific circles both in the US and abroad. It was the subject of a special feature in the New York Times and there was a five-column obituary in Science. There was only a brief—though moving—obituary in The Physical Review, written by its managing editor, G. S. Fulcher, who had been a student of Webster. The Council of the American Physical Scoiety took no notice of the death of the Society’s founder. Phillips rightfully deplores this disregard and her 1987 article served finally, but only partially, to repair the omission.

10.

Michael Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor (Scribner’s, New York, 1925), pp. 91–103.

11.

Phys. Rev. 75, 1601–1604 (1949).

12.

13.

Kevles (op. cit., p. 77) states that there were thirty-eight participants. He apparently assumes, erroneously, that Rowland and Michelson were there.

14.

Reference 12, Appendix B gives the names and institutions.

15.

As early as 1893, a firm of druggists had offered to exchange its magazine with the newly founded Physical Review (Meyer Brothers Druggist to E. L. Nichols, 23 February 1893, Cornell University Rare Manuscripts Division).

16.

Amy Halsted, “From Manhattan to Maryland—The American Physical Society and Its Relocation,” unpublished master’s thesis, Baruch College of the City University of New York, 1993, p. 3.

The main contribution of this work is to tell the story of the controversial move of the Society from New York to College Park, which was debated from 1988 to 1990, and took place in 1993.

17.

Kevles, op. cit., p. XXIV.

18.

To be sure, much of the time, particularly in the flush post World War II years, when there were two to four times more openings than the number of physicists looking for jobs, the placement service provided more of a benefit to the country than to the physicists.

19.

20.

Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. I (1), 4–16 (1900);

reprinted in Spencer Weart, ed. Selected Papers of Great American Physicists (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1976), pp. 91–103.

21.

“As a new fact arrives the scientist changes it [the probability of truth] from one compartment to another… . The ideal scientific mind, therefore, must always be held in a state of balance which…new evidence may change in one direction or another. It is in a constant state of skepticism, knowing full well that nothing is certain. It is above all an agnostic with respect to all facts and theories of science as well as to all other so-called beliefs and theories. Yet it would be folly to reason from this that we need not guide our life according to the…knowledge that we possess… . Our only course…is to act according to the chances of our knowing the right laws. If we act correctly, right; if we act incorrectly, we suffer. If we are ignorant we die. What greater fool, then, than he who states that belief is of no consequence provided it is sincere.” Apparently physics had to contend with both postmodernists and “final theorists” even in Rowland’s time.

22.

Rowland characterized the dichotomy as “the pursuit of so-called practical science which ministers to our physical needs” as opposed to “the grander portion of the subject which appeals to our intellect alone.” He unapologetically declared curiosity-driven research to be the more valuable of the two: “He who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is the benefactor of mankind; but he who obscurely worked to find the laws of such growth is the intellectual superior as well as the greater benefactor of the two.” But he also gave full recognition to the need for and the usefulness of applied, practical work. After deploring the ignorance of and lack of attention to medical science, he said “… all the sciences are linked together and must advance in concert. The human body is a chemical and physical problem, and these sciences must advance before we can conquer disease. But the true lover of physics needs no such spur to his actions. The cure of disease is a very important object and nothing can be nobler than a life devoted to its cure. The aims of the physicist, however, are in part purely intellectual: he strives to understand the Universe on account of the intellectual pleasure derived from the pursuit, but he is upheld in it by the knowledge that the study of nature’s secrets is the ordained method by which the greatest good and happiness shall finally come to the human race.”

23.

“Where,” he asked, “are the great laboratories of research in this city, in this country, nay in the world? We have a few miserable structures here and there occupied by a few starving professors who are nobly striving to do the best with the feeble means at their disposal. But where in the world is the institute of pure research… with an income of $100,000,000 per year? Where can the discoverer in pure science earn more than the wages of a day laborer or cook? But $100,000,000 per year is but the price of an army or navy designed to kill other people. Just think of it, that one percent of this sum seems to most people too great to save our children and descendants from misery… .”

24.

To use Kevles’s (op. cit.) ubiquitous and accurate, but, in today’s political atmosphere, somewhat risky term.

25.

Kevles, op. cit., p. 43.

26.

Ibid., p. 50.

27.

Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 1 (1), 4–14 (1925).

28.

Kevles, op. cit., p. 87.

29.

The decision to organize that society was actually made at a scientific conference of astronomers and astrophysicists, organized by George Ellery Hale and held in October 1897 in connection with the inauguration of the Yerkes Observatory. It took two years—until September 1899—for the society formally to come into existence. The hotly debated name adopted at the time was the “Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America.” The older astronomers, reflecting their training and orientation, wanted simply to call it the “Astronomical Society,” but Hale had a very different society in mind—one that would include more than the old astronomy. He wanted to establish a society that would attract physicists, because he saw physics as central to the pursuit of astronomy and he thought that he had a chance of doing so, because the APS had not yet been formed. In fact his initial choice for a name was the “Astronomical and Physical Society of America” [emphasis added]. A number of prominent physicists, among them Michelson and Rowland, participated in the meetings that led to the establishment of the society and in fact the latter was a major force in the inclusion of “Astrophysical” in the name. Had Hale succeeded in his endeavors to annex physics, an American Physical Society might not have been created in 1899. It is amazing that there appears to be no reflection of this history in the accounts of the founding of the APS. In 1914 the AAS received it present name, “American Astronomical Society.” By that time astrophysics had been fully accepted and it was no longer necessary explicitly to call attention to the legitimacy of the subject in the name. [“The American Astronomical Society’s First Century,” David H. DeVorkin, ed., published for the American Astronomical Society through the American Institute of Physics (1999), pp. 3–19, 27–34.]

30.

The first paragraph of the report provides a summary. “Dissatisfaction exists on the part of many physicists who feel that the activity of the American Physical Society is mainly confined to quantum physics and is not representative of physics in its broadest scope. This feeling is quite general, and whether justified or not, has been definitely evidenced by the formation of such organizations as the Optical Society, the Acoustical Society, the Rheology Society, and others. It is also evidenced by the contemplated formation of the Society of Applied Physics and another Society of Applied Mathematics, the latter being sponsored mainly by mathematical physicists. The feeling is still further evidenced by the fact that numerous papers dealing with pure and applied physics are not even submitted for the consideration of the Physical Review but are published in various chemical, engineering, photographic, and geological journals. This state of affairs is a serious reflection upon the limited activity of the Physical Society in the general field of physics” (Ref. 12, p. 224). It is not clear whether the writers of the report and those for whom they spoke were aware of or impressed by the increasingly pervasive and successful application of quantum mechanics to such subjects as chemistry and (what is now called) materials science. Neither Foote’s criticism of the Society nor his industrial affiliation and orientation seem to have been counted against him: he was elected president for 1933.

31.

Contrary to Phillips (Ref. 12, p. 222) this decision was made not by the Council, but by the membership at a meeting (the 39th, at the University of Chicago, on May 30th, 1907) where the minutes record that “The Council brought before the meeting a request from the College Entrance Examination Board that the Physical Society cooperate with it in the formation of a Committee to consider the revision of the definition of the Board’s present entrance requirements in Physics. After discussion it was moved, and carried by a large majority, that the invitation be declined on the ground that the teaching of Physics and all pedagogical matters lie outside the province of the American Physical Society” [“Proceedings of the American Physical Society, Minutes of the Thirty-Ninth Meeting,” Phys. Rev. XXVI, 1184 (1908)].

32.

Minutes of the Council and Proceedings of the American Physical Society, on file at the office of the American Physical Society, College Park, MD.

33.

The others were to establish a student membership and to make available a special subscription to The Physical Review for individuals who were members of societies interested in the teaching of physics (Ref. 12, p. 222).

34.

For an example, see “The Teaching of Physics—With Especial Reference to the Teaching of Physics to Student in Agriculture,” Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 1 (11) Supplement (1925–26), 25 pp.

35.

A full account of APS’s actions and inactions in education in the first three decades of the century and of the events that led to the formation of the AAPT, as well as of the subsequent history of the Association, is given by Reuben E. Alley (http://www.aapt.org/aaptgeneral/96hist.html). The history is also printed in AAPT’s 1998 Membership Directory.

36.

The other goals were to influence the style and extent of graduate education, to make faculty and students aware of the challenging technological problems of industry, and to examine the need for continuing education of practicing physicists (Ref. 32).

37.

The well known and versatile physicist, author, and university administrator Kenneth W. Ford. He had been president of the AAPT in 1972 and would go on to become executive director of AIP in April 1987. Ford’s history illustrates the fact that all along there were persons of substance whose leadership in both APS and AAPT helped to foster positive interactions. Thus J. W. Buchta, who had held senior editorial positions on the APS’s Physical Review and Reviews of Modern Physics, later became AAPT’s first full-time executive officer. Judy Franz, APS’s executive officer since 1994, was president of AAPT in 1990–1991. And Edward U. Condon served both societies as president: APS in 1946 and AAPT in 1964–65. Another common bond is the AAPT’s respected and engaging American Journal of Physics, in which a number of APS members publish and which many more read for profit and pleasure.

38.

This unique institution “combining the functions of a government agency, a private foundation, and an industrial trade association” (Ref. 12, p. 224), which also directly supported researchers in physics and, to a much larger extent, chemistry, had been funded through the resale to “loyal Americans” of German-held plants and patents that had been seized by the US Department of Justice following World War I.

39.

Though AIP’s history is shorter and, perhaps, less portentous than APS’s, it deserves an up-to-date presentation of its own.

40.

Some of the leading lights in the Society—particularly those with interests and achievements in several areas of physics—viewed this development with apprehension. Thus Eugene Wigner, who was to become president of the Society in 1956, wrote to J. H. Van Vleck (president in 1952) on July 25, 1945: “…It seems to me that if we split up the American Physical Society into many sub-organizations we may do an excellent job as an employment agency for people who want to specialize in certain fields. However, the charm of physics consists for me, and I am sure for most of our colleagues, in the fact that it comprises all the phenomena of the non-living world and that a Society which has abandoned general interest in all this is not a physical society any more. As you say, the example of the American Chemical Society should be a warning to us all…” (Ref. 229).

41.

The dates of organization and capsule descriptions of the divisions and other units of the APS, as well as lists of their past and present officers, are given in the American Physical Society 1998–1999 Centennial Membership Directory, pp. A–12 to A–20.

42.

W. W. Havens, Jr. (private communication). That there was strong sentiment for giving the divisions recognition, representation, and power is evident from a report in the 1966 Bulletin of the results of a meeting of divisional officers with the Council: “The Council notes with sympathy the views presented in favor of a strong divisional structure for The American Physical Society and recommends…[that] 1) Each clearly recognized field of physics should be represented by a Division. 2) Each Division should be represented on the Council. 3) Each Division should be responsible for organizing or advising on the presentations for Society meetings and topical conferences.” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 11 (1), 6 (1966)].

These proposals were spelled out in detail in the proposed new Constitution that was presented to the members in a subsequent issue [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 11 (4), 666–684 (1966)].

K. K. Darrow did not like the new provisions. In his Valedictory, upon his retirement as Secretary at the end of the 1967 Annual Meeting, he writes: “…That some leaders of Divisions want a voice in the Council is understandable; but the divisive forces have gained in strength, and will tend to convert the Society into a likeness of Place Vendôme in Paris, where the harmonious façades designed by the original architect now disguise a medley of interiors totally changed and not always changed for the better.”

The 1966 constitution made several other changes, including having the Council, instead of the membership, elect the Secretary and the Treasurer, and specifying the duties and mode of operation of the Council in much greater detail than before, and Darrow didn’t like any of them: “…Our old Constitution was a masterpiece of economy and flexibility, giving immense freedom with a minimum of restrictions. Much of the new Constitution consists of commands laid upon the Council and the officers to do things that they were doing already, or things that they could have done had they deemed it judicious.

Unconstrained, the officers have wrought as well for the Society as though they had been bound by such constraints; unguided, they have furnished their own guidance; uncontrolled, they have needed no control…” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 12 (1), 5 (1967)].

43.

Forums, which had in the meantime been established, were each given one voting councillor regardless of size, so long as it met a minimum threshold. Geographic sections, were given non-voting representation (“advisors”) on the Council, if their membership exceeded the threshold.

44.

Finally there is a provision for non-voting “administrative representatives”—the director of AIP and high ranking APS staff members. In 1997 the Council consisted of the seven officers, two other ex-officio (voting) members—the chair of the Nominating Committee and of the Panel on Public Affairs—twenty divisional councillors, four forum councillors, sixteen general councillors, five section advisors, and nine administrative representatives, for a total of sixty-three participants.

45.

This has led, during the past year, to a consideration of reversing the growth of the Council by reducing the number of general councillors and returning the representation for each division to one, regardless of size, as well as eliminating the section observers. In order to preserve the representation from the various constituencies, an alternative approach would leave the size intact, but involve the councillors more in the running of the Society by requiring them to serve, in larger numbers, on Council committees that will prepare “legislation” for the full Council.

46.

Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II, 37, 59 (1901).

He wrote to his mother: “I left for New York after Christmas in order to attend the meeting of the American Physical Society. The meeting was held in Columbia University, where I gave two papers which were pretty well received, as I am the only worker in the field of excited radioactivity in the English-speaking world…” [Arthur Stewart Eve, Rutherford (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, 1939)].

At McGill, during his seven-year stay, he wrote eighty papers [Thomas Edward Allibone, “Rutherford, Lord,” in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia 16, 107 (1975)].

47.

“The magnetic and electric deviation of the easily absorbed rays from radium” [Phys. Rev. XVI (3), 181–182 (1903)] under “Proceedings of the American Physical Society—Minutes of the Eighteenth Meeting.” A footnote announces that “the minutes of all meetings of the American Physical Society and abstracts of papers presented to the Society will hereafter be published in the PHYSICAL REVIEW.

The publication of the Bulletin of the American Physical Society has been discontinued.” Rutherford continues with “Does the radioactivity of radon depend on its concentration?” [Phys. Rev. XVIII (2), 117–118 (1904)];

“The heating effects of the random emanation” (with H. T. Barnes, ibid., 118–120);

“Radioactive charge”—an invited paper at a joint meeting with the International Electrical Congress [Phys. Rev. XIX (4), 298 (1904)]—

the meeting was in September 1904 in St. Louis, but the talk is listed in the Physical Review Proceedings by title only; “Some properties of the alpha rays from Radium, II [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. XXII (2), 80–81 (1906);

and “Magnetic and electric deviation of the alpha rays” (ibid.).

48.

Phys. Rev XVI (3), 183 (1903).

49.

Ibid., pp. 184–192.

50.

“Reciprocal diffraction phenomena,” ibid. 391 (1995);

“Use of the concave mirror with diffraction gratings, ibid.

51.

Phys. Rev. XXII (2), 122–123 (1906).

52.

Phys. Rev. XXIV (2), 227 (1907).

53.

Phys. Rev. XXIV (1), 116–118 (1907).

54.

Phys. Rev. XXII (6), 318 (1906).

55.

Phys. Rev. XXIV (4), 379 (1907).

56.

Phys. Rev. XXII (2), 82–110 [it was a long talk] (1906).

57.

Phys. Rev XXVI (96), 497–511 (1908).

58.

At the meeting of the Society, in October 1899—the one following the creation—all four papers were read by founding members, one by Rowland, one by Pupin, and two by Webster; in addition there was Rowland’s presidential address. The following meeting, in December, featured a joint session with the American Mathematical Society which heard AMS President R. S. Woodward’s address on the “Century’s progress in applied mathematics” and a paper by Pupin on “The propagation of electric waves along non-uniform conductors.” This time there were three contributed papers, by Rowland, Webster, and one non-founder, D. B. Brace. At the June 1900 meeting, which was joint with Section B of the AAAS, the number of papers reached sixteen, but the meeting thereafter again had only four. The 1901 joint meeting with AAAS had six papers, four of which were read either by title or by stand-ins; the location of the meeting at Denver (in the High School Building)—the first time that a meeting was not held at Columbia University—almost surely accounted for the dearth of papers and attendees. In 1902, back at Columbia, the Society, meeting alone, was able to muster fourteen papers. The 22nd meeting, in December 1903, was held at Central High School in St. Louis and attracted twelve papers. The 23rd meeting in February 1904, back at Columbia, had only six. The 24th meeting, in April 1904 in Washington, set a record with twenty papers; it was broken at the 26th meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in 1905, when twenty-nine papers were read. Columbia made a temporary come-back at the 28th meeting of April 1905, where thirty-seven papers were given, including the three by Michelson, but soon relaxed to its lower norm. The 33rd meeting in June 1906 was the first to be held at Cornell and attracted thirty-one abstracts. At the 34th meeting in December at the University of Chicago, which had twenty-one papers, a resolution was adopted “directing the attention of the Council to the desirability of holding a regular yearly meeting in Chicago.” (Sixty years later, in the wake of the suppression of the anti Viet-Nam war demonstrations, members petitioned the Council not to hold its 1970 meeting in Chicago; see Sec. V.) That same month, the joint meeting with the AAAS meeting at Columbia set a new record of forty-five papers. The number fifty was reached at the 1907 meeting in Chicago, where papers were given over four days including New Year’s eve and New Year’s day.

59.

The 1905 version of the APS Constitution and By-Laws and list of members, issued by the Society as a separate pamphlet while the Bulletin was not published (having been partially absorbed by The Physical Review), contains the announcement: “Members are…requested to state the time required for the presentation of each paper. If the time is not stated by the author the time announced on the program will be fifteen minutes.” Volume I of the resumed Bulletin, for 1925–26, provides an interesting and informative picture of how the meetings had evolved from twenty years earlier, and how often and where they were held.

60.

Phillips (Ref. 12, p. 224), citing APS Secretary (1923–1928) H. W. Webb, reports that “Millikan was especially adamant on the subject, but three days of sessions, eighteen papers per session, lasting until 6:00 p.m. on Saturday with no audience finally reconciled him.”

61.

This at the time practically unique fellowship program played an important role in furthering the development of the most promising American physicists and scientists in other fields. Being named a fellow not only conferred a signal honor on the recipients, but provided much needed resources.

62.

The nature of cosmic rays was the subject of the longest and perhaps most heated debate at APS meetings, according to John Blewett (private communication, February 18, 1999) and other participants and listeners. The chief protagonists were Robert Millikan, W. F. G. Swann, and Arthur Compton (all presidents of the APS, in 1916–17, 1931–32, and 1934, respectively). All that was known for a long time was that cosmic rays were very energetic, but attempts to identify their source yielded cryptic results. Speculations—some wild—about their nature and origin could therefore neither be proved nor disproved for many years. Millikan continued to insist that they were gamma radiation, even when Compton conclusively demonstrated that the intensity of the radiation depended on magnetic latitude. It took more than thirty years to discover its true nature: for the most part positively charged atomic nuclei arriving at the top of the atmosphere. Kevles (op. cit., pp. 179–180, 231–233, 236, and 240–242) has much of interest to say not only about the controversy, but also about the light it cast on the protagonists, and especially on the strong religious convictions of Millikan.

63.

does not substantiate the interpretation of a statement by W. W. Havens, Jr. (Ref. 185) that Dunning et al. at that time demonstrated Uranium 235 to be the important isotope in fission. The abstract confines itself to announcing that the talk will give the range in air of fission products of uranium and the energy distribution of the fission products and reports the measured cross section of delayed neutron emissions after exposure to a strong neutron source to be 1/100 of the value for the fission cross section by slow neutrons.

It references a letter to the editor that appeared on March 1, 1939 in The Physical Review by Andersen, Booth, Dunning, Fermi, Glasoe, and Slack [“The fission of uranium,” Phys. Rev. 55 (5), 511–512 (1939)], which, in turn, contains the following sentence: “As suggested by Professor Bohr, a possible explanation [for the known fact of uranium having a sharp resonance for slow neutrons of about 25 ev that does not lead to fission but to the formation of $U239$] is that the fission does not occur from $U238$ but from $U235$ which is present in an amount of somewhat less than 1 percent.”

Bohr made that suggestion in a letter to the editor of The Physical Review, which appeared just two weeks earlier, on February 15, 1939, and was written on February 7 [“Resonance in uranium and thorium disintegrations and the phenomenon of nuclear fission,” Phys. Rev. 55 (4), 419 (1939)], where he advances theoretical arguments that “…we have the possibility of attributing the effect concerned to a fission of the excited nucleus of mass 236 formed by the impact of the neutrons on the rare isotope of mass 235.”

The definitive paper by Bohr and Wheeler on fission, published on September 1, 1999 [“The mechanism of nuclear fission,” Phys. Rev. 56 (5), 416–450 (1939)] again states on theoretical grounds that “a considerable part of the fission phenomena…[are] reasonably attributable to the rare isotope $U235.$” Thus it is unlikely that any experimental identification of $U235$ as the responsible isotope was announced before then. Of course we do not know what, if anything, was said at the April meeting, that went beyond what was published.

recounts the fascinating story of the interplay between Bohr, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, and others, in arriving at and announcing the interpretation of Otto Hahn’s, Fritz Strassmann’s, and Meitner’s discovery and of the head start that Enrico Fermi and the Columbia group had in initiating follow-up experiments. It does not deal with the experimental identification of $U235$ as the fissionable isotope, nor with the question whether the experimenters and Bohr announced their results first in print (in The Physical Review) or at an APS meeting. It is worth noting that in 1939 the delay between the submission of letters to The Physical Review and their appearance in print was easily short enough for the publication to have occurred first.

64.

The Committee consisted of Gregory Breit (chairman), Jesse W. Beams (who was to become APS’s president in 1958), George Pegram (the APS treasurer whose term, from 1918 to 1957, spanned the time of his war-time service), and later, Eugene Wigner (APS President 1956), who was added at Breit’s request. H. A. Barton of AIP was put in charge of the repository of secret papers; he carefully noted the date of receipt of each paper (Ref. 12, p. 226), which was important for establishing priority when many of the papers were published after the War.

65.

In his announcement of the meeting, Secretary K. K. Darrow wrote: “Those whose knowledge of the Society began after Pearl Harbor will be surprised at the magnitude of the program, which is a reminiscence of prewar days and a foreboding of the future. Gone are the times of small meetings with ample intervals for leisure and for discussion, which for the past three years have reminded our older members of the early days of the Society.

It is no longer possible to arrange the papers so that everyone can hear everything in which he may be interested, and the Secretary can only hope that he came somewhere near to achieving the minimum amount of interference possible under the limitations of time” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 21 (1), 3 (1946)].

66.

For the benefit of very disengaged or very young readers, the editors of Physics Today found it necessary, in an excerpt from this article, to add the explanation that the term was “a droll reference to a week of raunchy round-the-clock rock concerts and nudity displays in 1969 that had no connection at all to scientific research” (Ref. 228, p. 30).

67.

The program for the 1926 annual meeting includes an obvious crank abstract, “Theory of the magnetic nature of gravity” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. I (5) (1925–26)].

68.

In fact few “eccentric” abstracts are submitted and even fewer authors actually show up to give the papers. Usually they are slotted for the beginning or end of bona fide sessions, but occasionally they have been accorded a session of their own, under the rubric “Miscellaneous Topics.” Those, like this writer, who have been importuned into chairing such sessions, tend to favor the distributional approach.

69.

The New York Times, July 16–19, 1952. According to these reports, Peakes was “upset” because the APS had refused in 1949 to publish a pamphlet by him, entitled So You Love Physics. He had the work privately published and sent it to 6500 APS members. By 1952 he was convinced that his electronic theory held the key to prolonging human life. He went to the APS office to “kill some physicists,” but found only the eighteen year old Eileen Fahey. He said that he hoped that “the shock of the murder” would draw attention to his ideas.

70.

In the 1930’s a single room in New York at the Hotel Pennsylvania cost $3.50 and prices were at that or an even lower level throughout the depression. After the War, hotel prices rose first slowly and, beginning in the 1980’s, rapidly, and by the 1990’s had reached three figures (before the decimal point) in the large cities of the East and West coasts. The 1999 Centennial Meeting was held in Atlanta, rather than in one of the historically and politically more appropriate locales, New York or Washington, because in Atlanta a room in the headquarters hotel could be obtained for “only” $131 per night. Official dinners in 1925–26 were $2.00, except for Washington, where they cost $2.50. (Washington seems to have been an expensive city even then.) For those who did not want to pay that much, the Bulletin also carried information on restaurants famous for (what would now be called) ethnic dishes: Thus, in New York, dinners at the Russian Tea Room were $0.75 and $0.95, while at Luchow’s, the (then perhaps justly) famous German restaurant, dinner was $1.50. By the nineties, in order to keep the “banquet” at the Spring meeting going at all, APS was selling tickets at the subsidized price of $30.

71.

At a meeting at the old New Yorker hotel in Manhattan in the late fifties, the author overheard two bellboys (as they were then called) commiserating about the lack of business, “I don’t understand these guys,” one said, “all they do is stand around all day and talk.” “Yeah,” replied the other, “and not one of them has asked me for a girl yet.” And W. W. Havens remembers, when in 1987 the March meeting was held for the first (and last) time in Las Vegas, the local paper reported that, with the physicists in town, the casino take was the lowest in history [W. W. Havens, Jr. (private communication)]. We have been unable to document Havens’ recollection, but si non è vero, è ben trovato.

72.

At the Society’s founding and for many years thereafter participation in APS’s meetings had been free of charge. In 1952, the Society’s Secretary, K. K. Darrow, announced that “a registration fee of one dollar will be requested. The parlous financial situation of the Society, of which our members are destined to hear more, requires this alteration” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 27 (4), 3 (1952)].

In 1955 the fee was raised to two dollars for the annual meeting because, as Darrow explained a year later, “… what with the need of renting so capacious a hall as the Manhattan Center and of paying other expenses attendant on conventions in hotels [these meetings] are costly affairs” [Bull. Am. Phys Soc. II 1 (1), 1 (1956)].

In 1959, in an attempt to induce recalcitrant members to pay up, Darrow added, accurately, “To those acquainted with the fees of other societies [the two dollar charge] is more likely to appear absurdly small than unbearably large” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 4 (1), 2 (1959)].

This demonstration of APS’s frugality and restraint apparently did not move all attendees, for in 1962 Darrow had to become more insistent and even to threaten a (minor) sanction: “The registration fee stays at the modest figure of two dollars. We insist on registration and we do not accept messages to be posted [on the message board] from anyone who has not yet registered” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 7 (1) (1962)].

By 1996 the least expensive registration (that for a regular member who sent in the fee sufficiently in advance) for a “general” meeting was $195. Students, retired members and otherwise unemployed members (i.e., those classes who had little prospect of having their fees covered by employers) were assessed much less. At that, APS’s registration fees have remained smaller than those of many other professional associations. The Bulletin was also initially free. In 1925 an annual subscription, for the six issues, cost $1; by 1939 it had risen to $5. By the nineties, members had been given the opportunity to subscribe to the eight to ten issues individually, at prices ranging from $7 to $14 (for the massive March meeting issue, which in 1998 weighed 1.7 kg). In 1999, “domestic non-members” (i.e., libraries) could subscribe to the Bulletin for $470 for the year. With programs and abstracts available over the Internet, Bulletins were no longer mailed out in advance of meetings. However copies continued to be available, gratis, to registrants at the meetings.

73.

Frederick Seitz, who had joined the Society in 1932 and served as its President in 1961, in a private communication (February 7, 2000) describes the creation of the March meeting: “…Everything changed at the end of the war…those of us who had been working in solid state physics missed the special atmosphere we had enjoyed… a group of six of us applied to [K.K.] Darrow in 1948…for an added set of meetings to be held in less frequented cities and devoted to affairs centered about solid state physics. They would have only one or two sessions…Darrow agreed and the new pattern started with great success, meetings being held at places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Graduate students were prominent [thanks to] Federal money, and many things were reviewed over a solitary bottle of beer in the evenings, much to the chagrin of the bartenders and waitresses. These idyllic conditions lasted for four or five years…the March meeting boomed..[and] finally came to be the gargantuan one.” As early as 1952, Darrow had soured on the idea of the March meeting, recognizing its specialized and, to him, divisive nature, and he deplored the “diversion of contributed papers in electron physics and solid state physics to Divisional and other meetings… . The Annual Meeting is [therefore] coming to be dominated by nuclear physics and its generality is in danger of being lost” [Bull. Am. Phys Soc. 27 (1), (1952)].

By 1962 he was more specific: “The ‘March’ meeting, though in principle a general meeting of the Society, is practically a congress of three divisions of the Society—…the Division of High Polymer Physics, the Division of Solid State Physics, and the Division of Chemical Physics. This year, only one of its forty-five sessions…lies outside the fields of all three” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 7 (1) (1962)]. Other divisions had been holding their own separate meetings since the fifties, but they apparently went unrecognized by the Bulletin until 1963, when the notices of meetings to come included announcements of the Fifth [emphasis added] Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics, and of the Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics.

74.

One measure to help assure better communication and help reduce alienation from the Society was taken in 1987, when Executive Secretary W. W. Havens, Jr. and Treasurer Harry Lustig instituted an annual “unit convocation” at headquarters, to which the chairs and secretary-treasurers of the divisions, topical groups, forums, and sections are invited.

75.

Kevles, op. cit., p. 40.

76.

Ibid, p. 81.

77.

The first few volumes contain reviews of books by such scientists as Mach, Ostwald, J. J. Thomson, Nernst, Heaviside, Poincaré, Helmholtz, Pascal, and Rayleigh. Vol. XII (4), 254–256 (1901) carries an extensive review of the Festschrift (“livre jubilaire”) for H. A. Lorentz on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his having received the doctor’s degree. It contains contributions by Wien, Planck, Poincaré, Wiechert, Thomson, Boltzmann, Rayleigh, and others. The reviewers, for the most part Nichols and Merrill, evidently had no problems with the untranslated German and French works in their original languages.

78.

Phys. Rev. 2, 109–124, 133, 136–143 (1913).

Millikan’s first publication in The Physical Review had occurred in 1896 when he was a graduate student; it was a study of the polarization of the light emitted by incandescent solid and liquid surfaces [Phys. Rev. III, 81–98 (1896)].

(Volumes of the journal were designated with Roman numerals before the take-over by the APS in 1913; at that time a new series, labeled with Arabic numerals, was begun).

Another group of interesting papers, from the pre-APS period, were those by E. F. Nichols and G. F. Hull on the pressure of heat and light radiation [Phys Rev. XIII, 307–308, 317–320 (1901);

XV, 26–50, 91–104 (1903)].

79.

Phys. Rev. 21, 483–502 (1923).

80.

Phys. Rev. 30, 705–740 (1927).

81.

Phys. Rev. 34, 1293–1322 (1929).

82.

Phys. Rev. XXV, 31–38, 60 (1907).

83.

Phys. Rev. 2, 409–410, 415–416, 430 (1913).

84.

Phys. Rev. 2, 450–457, 485–486 (1913).

The editors and contributors to the Stroke volume (Ref. 101) selected fifteen articles that were published in The Physical Review before 1930 for inclusion among the 200 reprinted articles. Unsurprisingly, nine of these and all four from the first two decades fall into the category “Science and Technology.” Among another 800 articles, reproduced on a CD ROM, there are forty-five dating from before 1930. The book and disk, although entitled THE PHYSICAL REVIEW—The First Hundred Years, actually covers, with a few exceptions, only the first nine decades. The total number of articles published in The Physical Review before 1930 was about one-thirtieth of that published since then. For example, twenty articles were published in the first year, by 1913 the count had risen to only seventy-five; by 1933 it had reached 480 articles and letters; in 1953 it was 1423; in 1973 it was 4654; and by 1993 it reached 11,698. The last two numbers include the by then separate Physical Review Letters. (Figure 5 shows the numbers of articles received and published annually by the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters since 1963.) Fifteen pre-1930 papers among the 200 selected for reprinting from the entire ninety-year period is thus not only a respectable, but a disproportionately impressive showing. The higher percentage of articles deemed worthy of preservation may seem, at first sight, to invalidate the conclusion that in its early years The Physical Review occupied a less important place among physics journals than after 1930. Putting aside the unlikely possibility that the editors of the book used more lenient selection criteria for the early period, this seeming inconsistency is resolved by noting that the standing of a journal is judged by the number and the fraction of the world’s important papers published in it. By these two measures, the later Physical Review is a clear winner, in spite of the fact that the ratio of important to total articles appearing in the Physical Review judged important is smaller than in earlier years. The large number of ephemeral papers published is cited in justification by those who advocate more stringent acceptance criteria as an act of mercy toward the journal’s overloaded readers and financially strapped library purchasers.

85.

The Physical Review may have benefitted even before their arrival: Victor Weisskopf reports (Ref. 101, p. 12) that his first paper in The Physical Review was submitted in 1936, while he was still in Europe. “I thought my chance of getting a job in the U.S. would be enhanced if I published a paper in the Physical Review on a topic of special interest in the U.S. [Niels] Bohr visited the U.S. every year to ‘sell his refugees.’ ”

86.

Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, “Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be complete?” [47, 777–780 (1935)]—the famous EPR paradox paper—and Niels Bohr’s answer to it, under the same title

[48, 696–702 (1935)];

87.

88.

The early editorial triumvirate of Nichols, Merritt, and Bedell had been succeeded by the latter alone, as Managing Editor, at the time of the take-over by the APS in 1913. G. S. Fulcher held this position from 1923 to 1925.

89.

Abraham Pais, in Ref. 101, p. 7.

90.

Phys. Rev. 33, 276 (1929).

Only one year after launching Reviews of Modern Physics, and following a decision of the APS Council at its meeting of December 1930, Tate inaugurated and became the editor of yet another APS journal, one devoted to applied physics. Originally simply called Physics, the publication received its present name, Journal of Applied Physics, in 1937, upon being taken over by AIP. Although APS divested itself of the journal largely for financial reasons—this was during the period when even The Physical Review had to be financially managed by the newly formed umbrella organization—the APS action was seen by some as renewed evidence of the Society’s stuffy disdain for practical work, or at least of the waxing and waning of interest in the applications of physics (Ref. 100, p. 151).

91.

92.

93.

94.

The large number of citations of the Roothaan papers is at least in part attributable to their appeal to chemists, a much larger community than physicists. The interest of astronomers in the Chandrasekhar article also added to its citations, but it is highly likely that physicists by themselves would have put it on the list of the top 100. The fact that Reviews of Modern Physics has been consistently hospitable to neighboring areas of science and to cross-disciplinary approaches is worth noting: according to Garfield (Ref. 90) it was even singled out, in the 1950’s by an advisory committee to the Genetics Citation Index, as the only physics journal that was important to the emerging field of molecular biology. The core gospel of the Bethe bible, “Nuclear physics. B: Nuclear Dynamics, theoretical,” published in 1937, easily made it into the top 100 with 334 citations. This is remarkable in view of the fact that the half-life for citations of Reviews of Modern Physics articles is about ten years (which, to be sure, is longer than the half-lives of other physics journals), and that the citation count covered the period from 1955 until 1986.

95.

96.

K. K. Darrow, who was APS’s Secretary from 1941 until 1967, in his obituary for Tate [K. K. Darrow, American Philosophical Society Yearbook, 325 (1950)] suggested that The Physical Review should be known as Tate’s Journal, in analogy with Poggendorf’s Annalen (later the Annalen der Physik).

97.

98.

The size and readership of Reviews of Modern Physics were in decline when Pines was invited to consider becoming its editor. He refused at first, saying that he could hardly be the editor of a journal to which he had just canceled his own subscription. The members of the journal’s board were able to change his mind (Ref. 91) and Pines instituted a number of reforms that have greatly benefitted the journal and the physics community. Among these was the solicitation of “perspectives and tutorial articles in rapidly developing fields… intended to convey to graduate students, and to physicists in other fields, a sense of why a topic is of current interest…and what are its likely future directions.”

John Wheatley [“Experimental properties of superfluid $He3,$” ibid. 487–535 (1975)] on the newly discovered superfluid $He3$—articles which remain the “bible” for researchers in that field. In a similar spirit, following a suggestion by Ugo Fano, the journal strove to publish, in each issue, several “colloquia”—short, non-technical presentations of work of current interest, written in the style of a colloquium talk (or at least the Platonic ideal of such a talk). Fano solicited and edited these colloquia from 1992 to 1995, a task that is now in the hands of Anthony Starace.

99.

when the following footnote was added: “This letter was received on [28 January 1941], but was voluntarily withheld until the end of the war… .” Notwithstanding Melba Phillips’ statement (Ref. 12, p. 227) that “…the Reviews of Modern Physics suffered a critical shortage of papers. No one had time to prepare review articles…,” that journal’s size did not shrink significantly during the war years.

100.

Paul Hartman, The Physical Review—A History of the First Hundred Years. Sponsored by Cornell University. Published by The American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics (AIP Press, Woodbury, NY, 1994).

101.

The Physical Review—The First Hundred Years. A Selection of Seminal Papers and Commentaries, H. Henry Stroke, ed. Published by The American Physical Society and American Institute of Physics (AIP Press, Woodbury, NY 1995).

102.

The splitting, in 1964, into an “A” and a “B” section, and, in 1966, into four “numbers,” was mostly for convenience in publication; all subscribers received all sections. Beginning in 1967, five numbers appeared each month, reflecting the growth of solid state physics; members (but not libraries) could now receive annual subscriptions to each number separately. In 1970, in a more significant development, four subject matter sections were created: A—General Physics, B—Solid State Physics (changed to Condensed Matter Physics in 1978 and to Condensed Matter and Material Physics in 1998), C—Nuclear Physics, and D—Particles and Fields. Almost immediately B and D were split into B 1/15 and D 1/15 respectively, and A had followed suit by 1988; by 1990 the two sections had acquired the different subtitles, “General Physics” and “Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics.” Each section could be separately subscribed to by members, and libraries could separately order each lettered journal, but not the individually numbered sections. In 1991, $D15$ acquired the title “Particles, Fields, and Gravitation” and, in 1993, A spun off A15 as E—Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics. Altogether every month nine Physical Review “books” are now published; the number is nine, rather than seven, because the two numbered B sections each require two separately bound volumes. With the 1970 reorganization, the name The Physical Review (with the article) ceased to exist; there are, in fact, five semi-autonomous journals with their own names, Physical Review A, Physical Review B, etc. (without the article). We will refer to these journals collectively as the Physical Review (with the article “the” in regular, rather than in italic font). The trend has been to appoint part-time “remote” editors—working physicists at universities and research laboratories—to be in charge of the journals for definite terms. In some cases they have been backed by full time, full editors at Ridge. Only Physical Review B has had a sole, inside, full editor—Peter Adams—all along. Physical Review A has successively had C. L. Sneed, R. H. Tucker, Benjamin Bederson, and Bernd Crasemann at its helm. Physical Review C has been run, in succession, by H. H. Barschall and Sam Austin. Physical Review D was headed, from Ridge, by Simon Pasternack and Stanley Brown, and then by external editors Lowell Brown and Erick Weinberg, with Dennis Nordstrom working with the latter two at Ridge. Since its inception, Physical Review E has been directed by remote editor Irwin Oppenheim.

103.

Private communication, October 30, 1998, from George L. Trigg, who was associated with Physical Review Letters for close to thirty years, first as assistant editor to Goudsmit and then as editor.

104.

In addition to Goudsmit and Trigg (see Ref. 103), the editors of Physical Review Letters have been Simon Pasternack, Gene Wells, George Basbas, and Stanley Brown at the editorial office at Ridge, and James Krumhansl, Robert Adair, George Vineyard, and Jack Sandweiss from their remote locations. The Physical Review Letters outside editors are less remote than those of the Physical Review journals; they come regularly and often to Ridge to work closely with their colleagues.

105.

Prestigious, yes; but according to The New York Times, also “the most impenetrable periodical in the English language.” In an article (April 20, 1993), marking the journal’s centenary celebration, the Times claimed that “In Physics Review, intelligibility is required only for the first paragraph; then the equations begin.” The Times must have liked the phrase “most impenetrable periodical in the English language” so much that it repeated it in an obituary (December 23, 1995) for Nathan Rosen, whose paper, written with Einstein and Podolsky, had appeared in The Physical Review

In a letter to the editor of the Times (December 28, 1995), the APS Editor-in-Chief, Benjamin Bederson, responded that “…in addition to publishing the famous article…concerning determinism (or lack thereof) in nature, Physical Review also was the first place to present the invention of the semiconductor, the maser and many aspects of the laser. There must be a very skillful crew of interpreters somewhere out there who are translating these impenetrable articles for the rest of us!”

106.

Figure 6 actually shows the numbers of manuscripts submitted, rather than the number of papers published, by geographic origin (US versus foreign) of the authors. The ratio of acceptances to submissions for non-US manuscripts has been slightly smaller than for US manuscripts.

107.

The position that there is something ethically or conceptually wrong with page charges is not one of the credible reasons. The refereeing of the results of one’s research and their communication to other scientists and to the public are an indispensable part of the research process and should be paid for along with the other costs. At about $50 per page (the average APS charge in 1995) page charges were a trivial component of many research budgets. Because they are voluntary, scientists who do not have external or institutional support, or who have other reasons not to pay them, do not need to do so. Page charges have the financially attractive feature of scaling with growth in the number of articles published. However, in Europe they have been looked at askance (the European Physical Society used to publish an “honors list” of physics journals that did not request page charges) and many of the APS’s journals’ authors reside in areas of the world where there is no tradition or possibility of paying page charges. Commercial publishers generally do not have them in their repertoire, which has been a contributing factor both for the proliferation of commercial journals and their high subscription prices. In the APS, in the late eighties and early nineties, page charges became a divisive issue. High energy and nuclear theorists, in particular, felt that they were an avoidable drain on their tight budgets and, in a number of cases, submitted their papers to commercial journals rather than to the Physical Review. The APS tried to cope with this problem by suspending or reducing page charges for Physical Review C and D on a “pilot project” basis. At the end of the trial period, in 1995, the Treasurer, with the support of the Publications Committee and a majority of the Council, moved toward an equalization of page charges, which would have involved reinstating or increasing the charges for C and D. There was a revolt by leaders of the Particles and Fields and Nuclear divisions, including the resignation by the editor and most of the editorial board of Physical Review D. Coming on the heels of the SSC controversy (see Sec. V) and the still lingering animosities in the Society, the Treasurer and the Council reversed themselves and moved toward eliminating or reducing page charges for electronically submitted manuscripts in all fields, while maintaining or raising them for conventional submissions. As electronic “compuscript” submissions are becoming the dominant mode, page charge income is all but disappearing for the Physical Review.

108.

On October 10, 1955, Karl Darrow wrote to President R. T. Birge, who had apparently suggested that the Society establish a (second) prize: “…Our Society cannot afford to distribute $1000 prizes, other than those for which the money is given to us (meaning actually the Buckley prize). Our financial policy is still that of giving the Physical Review all that it wants and requiring the other activities of the Society to make do with the remainder. Actually the foregoing statement is too weak: Our policy is to give the Physical Review all that it wants, even when this entails a deficit, and to expect the other activities of the Society to add as little as possible to the deficit. This system must be changed…” (Ref. 229). The system was eventually changed. However in spite of the ensuing financial prosperity of the Society, prizes and awards (there are now some fifty of them) are still financed from corporate and individual gifts and, in some cases, the surpluses from divisional meetings. From time to time the Council has questioned the continued proliferation in the number of prizes, evidently on the Gilbertian maxim that “if every one is somebody then no one’s anybody.” (The reference is to W. S. [William Schwenk] Gilbert in The Gondoliers, not to the William Gilbert who might well have supported the establishment of a prize in magnetism.) However, several task forces, the most recent under former President Mildred Dresselhaus, in 1998, have reported that stopping the creation of more awards was either undesirable or impossible. Instead their importance could be enhanced by increasing the stipend. While this has been accomplished for some awards, divisions have resisted it for others, if it meant conferring the prize every two years, instead of annually. For a description of the prizes and awards and a list of recipients, see the American Physical Society Centennial Membership Directory, pp. A21–A40 (1998).

109.

The rule has been that Meetings and Membership Operations are to be budgeted to break even, while the surplus from the Journals is to be used to pay for the costs of Public Affairs Programs that cannot be met from grants and from individual and corporate contributions. In 1996 the journals achieved their surplus as a result of the income and expenses shown in Fig. 7. The bulk of the revenues come from library subscriptions. Under a long established policy, members receive journals at only the marginal (distribution) cost of their copy;

for on-line subscriptions this has now been set at $25 per journal. In spite of the steady, long-term decline in library subscriptions, they constitute an ever increasing fraction of the revenue. Expenses have three main components, each accounting for about 30%: Editorial, Compositions, and Printing and Distribution. [In Fig. 7(B) editorial and composition expenses are lumped together and also make up a large fraction of the “allocations.”] Some readers may be surprised at the high editorial costs, i.e., those of receiving, refereeing, accepting or rejecting manuscripts, and preparing them for composition. In 1996 these costs amounted to about $350 per manuscript received or $500 per manuscript published. After all APS pays neither its authors (except for nominal honoraria in the case of Reviews of Modern Physics) nor its (more than 25,000) referees. But while authors and referees come free, mediating between and otherwise interacting with them decidedly does not. APS’s editorial costs may be somewhat higher than those of other publishers because it maintains a centralized editorial facility for all its journals (except Reviews of Modern Physics). (In contrast, many other scientific and scholarly journals are fully edited at the institution where their editor resides, and receive support from those institutions.) Although most of the APS journals have “remote” senior editors, operating from their home institutions for part-time compensation from APS, the Society maintains an editorial in-house staff for its publishing operations of about 120, including some twenty-five Ph.D. physicists, at the central facility at Ridge on Eastern Long Island of New York. The location is close to the Brookhaven National Laboratory where APS’s editorial operations were carried on rent-free, under Goudsmit, until 1970, when the Laboratory instituted an annual rent of $25,000 [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 15 (9), 1234 (1970)]. The APS-built and owned facility has had to be substantially enlarged twice and now measures 30,000 square feet. There is a consensus that the unusual centralized cum remote editors modus operandi of the APS journals add to their quality. As Ben Bederson has put it (Ref. 101, p. XII):

“Because all full-time editors of all our journals are physically located at one site, an editorial coherence and consistency is obtained that would not have occurred otherwise. Editors of different journals can easily consult with each other, and lend their expertise to each other as needed.” The fact that the fixed costs of publishing the journals—editorial plus composition/production—amount to about two-thirds of the total, before a single copy is printed, is what makes library subscription prices so sensitive to the (shrinking) numbers of subscriptions, but also accounts in large measure for the fact that the APS journals are so much more “cost-effective” than those of other physics publishers: Even after decades of significant and apparently unstoppable declines in circulation, Physical Review sections typically still have from 1100 to 1600 library subscribers, Physical Review Letters has 2100, and Reviews of Modern Physics 1800, while the numbers for the journals of most other publishers are much smaller. For a more detailed exposition of the economics of journal publishing, see Harry Lustig, “Economic Issues in a Time of Transition,” in Electronic Publishing for Physics and Astronomy, edited by André Heck (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1997), or Astrophys. Space Sci. 247, 117–132 (1997).

110.

The loss of the last meeting site at the Bureau of Standards was mourned by K. K. Darrow in 1966: “A misfortune foreshadowed last year has come to pass: owing to the departure of the National Bureau of Standards for a rural locality, we have lost one of the most ancient shrines of the Society, the East Building Lecture Room in which hitherto the Society has been holding sessions for so long that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 11 (2) (1966)].

111.

6 (10), 18–20 (1953).

A petition from a group of APS members in the Washington area, including Karl Herzfeld, N. P. Heydenburg, and a future editor of Science, Philip Abelson, asking the Council to take action on behalf of Astin and the Bureau used more colorful language: “…Any scientist who bends his findings for the sake of the business community or the labor community or a political party is untrue to his trust and to the American people. The Apostle Paul has said ‘the truth shall make you free,’ not ‘the market place will make you free.’ We request the Council to declare, in the name of the American Physical Society, that a scientist, in government or out of it, must be guided by truth alone, without bending it to conform to political or business pressures, or we might just as well be in Soviet Russia” (Ref. 229).

112.

During World War I it took effort and time to persuade the government that scientists, and not only military officers and engineers, could make a contribution to the war effort (Kevles, op. cit., pp. 106–138). Two governmental agencies were set up, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1915, and the Naval Consulting Board (the progenitor of the Naval Research Laboratory), in 1916. The Aeronautics Committee’s appropriation, after it had been raised by Congress seventeen-fold, was $85,000. The Naval Board did receive $1,500,000 for an experimental research laboratory, whose staff would include “scientific civilian assistants.” The most respected and listened to civilian advisor to the government on matters of military preparedness was Thomas Edison; he told the Secretary of the Navy that he did not think that scientific research would be necessary to a great extent. The Naval Consulting Board’s membership was drawn overwhelmingly from the country’s major engineering organizations and included only two scientists. One of them was Arthur Gordon Webster, but he was there as a representative of the American Mathematical Society. He pressed hard for the appointment of members from the American Physical Society, as well as from the National Academy of Sciences, but was told that Edison, who has compiled the membership list, had omitted the APS “because it was his desire to have this Board composed of practical men who are accustomed to doing things, and not talking about it.” The Mathematical Society was included “because Mr. Edison realizes that very few really practical men are…expert mathematicians, and thought it advisable to have one or two men on the Board who could figure to the ‘$nth$’ power, if required.” In October 1915, George Ellery Hale, the distinguished astronomer, who was then foreign secretary of the National Academy, launched an intensive campaign to secure a place for and the participation of the Academy in the defense effort. The outcome was the formation of the National Research Council (NRC) in June of 1916. Without a governmental appropriation of its own, the Council had to scrounge for funds from private industry and from the military. The differences in culture between these two groups and the scientists represented by the NRC, who insisted that not only applied but also pure research should be undertaken, made for a difficult relationship. However, scientists were able to make major contributions, particularly in the field of antisubmarine warfare. Three APS personalities, in addition to Webster, deserve particular recognition for bringing about and pursuing the participation of physicists in the war effort. Michael Pupin secured industrial support for the NRC. Robert Millikan, as chairman of the NRC’s committee against submarines, proposed the commencement of submarine detection experiments at the New York City laboratories of Western Electric. He later took charge of all Signal Corps research, as Major Millikan, Army Reserve, and served, during that time, as the 1916–17 president of the APS. And early in 1918 Charles Mendenhall, who was to become APS’s president for 1923–24, was appointed the commanding officer of the Signal Corps Science and Research Division’s laboratory for the development of aeronautical instruments at Langley Field, Virginia. The contributions of physics and physicists to World War II are too well known to require and too extensive to permit much documentation here. Indeed, this time, most of the leadership of the scientific effort for the war was exercised by APS-connected physicists. The two prominent exceptions were the chemist James Conant and the engineer Vannevar Bush. Together with Karl Compton and other physicists, they established and led the National Defense Research Committee, compiling lists of extant facilities, critical projects, and available scientists, and letting contracts. The inventorying of scientists led to the only known instance of official participation by the APS in the war effort, when the Council authorized a committee to assist in the compilation of a National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel (Ref. 12, pp. 225–226). Thousands of scientists and engineers responded to the national effort, including Albert Einstein, who reminded the Roster officials that he “was always interested in practical technical problems.” The two major new science based war projects, the Radiation Laboratory at MIT (the “Rad Lab”) and the Manhattan Project, were inspired and mostly led by past and future APS presidents. The Rad Lab was directed by Lee A. DuBridge (APS president in 1947) with the essential help of his “son of a bitch” associate, F. Wheeler Loomis (president, 1949). (Loomis, in fact, though an autocrat, was an amiable autocrat, a trait which served him well in building a first class physics department at the University of Illinois during his long headship from 1929 to 1957.) The most important leaders in the Manhattan project were Arthur Compton (1934) as head of the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago, and J. Robert Oppenheimer (1948) at Los Alamos (Kevles, op. cit., pp. 293–326).

113.

In addition to the participation in the compilation of the roster of scientists, the only action during the second world war was a December 1941 statement by the Council urging the government to allow well-qualified students to proceed with their studies as a means of assuring “a supply of thoroughly trained young men for defense and future needs” (Ref. 32).

114.

In 1938 almost 1300 American scientists and scholars, representing 167 academic institutions and ranging ideologically from the profoundly conservative Robert Millikan to the decidedly Marxist, eminent mathematician Dirk Struik, issued a manifesto. It condemned the fascist suppression of science, castigated Nazi racial theories, asserted the legitimacy of modern theoretical physics, and concluded: “Any attack upon freedom of thought in one sphere, even as nonpolitical a sphere as theoretical physics, is an attack on democracy itself” (Kevles, op. cit., p. 287).

115.

116.

The New York Times (March 5, 1948) stated with only slight hyperbole, that the American Physical Society, in a move “unprecedented for an organization devoted exclusively to the affairs of pure science, entered the field of politics yesterday with a letter vigorously assailing the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee in reference to Dr. Edward U. Condon… . The distinction between this message and those from other organizations lies in the fact that the American Physical Society prides itself on its aloofness from all matters except the intricacies of pure physics.”

117.

Reference 32. The signatories of the letter, “the Officers and Council of The American Physical Society” were: J. R. Oppenheimer—President, Karl K. Darrow—Secretary, George B. Pegram—Treasurer, J. A. Bearden, J. W. Buchta, Karl T. Compton, Henry Crew, Lee A DuBridge, Harvey Fletcher, F. W. Loomis, Theodore Lyman, Ernest Merritt, R. A. Millikan, P. M. Morse, I. I. Rabi, Frederick Seitz, W. F. G. Swann, John T. Tate, Louis A. Turner, Merle A. Tuve, and George E. Uhlenbeck—as representative a collection of American physicists in the first half of the twentieth century as could have been imagined, had they been conjured up especially for the purpose.

118.

In June of 1948 Philip Morse (who was to become APS’s president in 1972), resigned as director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, as he revealed several months later, in protest against “irresponsible smears” by the House Un-American Activities Committee (New York Star, September 14, 1948, p. 1). On September 13, President Truman, at the 100th meeting of the AAAS, accused “some politicians—and I can name them—of creating a totalitarian climate for”…and a “smear campaign” against atomic scientists, without whom “we would have no atomic energy program… . We cannot drive scientists into our laboratories, but, if we tolerate reckless or unfair attacks, we can certainly drive them out.” He then publicly shook hands with Condon in a gesture that no one could misunderstand (Kevles, op. cit., p. 380). Truman had not always been a hero to liberal physicists. In the weeks before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, he and his advisors turned deaf ears to the entreaties of James Franck, Leo Szilard, and other physicists, including some at Los Alamos, not to drop the bomb for moral reasons, or so as not to endanger the future of mankind. At least, some of them argued, the use against the Japanese population should be postponed until a demonstration drop in an uninhabited area took place that might result in surrender by Japan. The contrary advice of the military and of the majority of the Manhattan project’s and other scientific leaders, including Oppenheimer, Arthur and Karl Compton, Bush, Conant, Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence, that there was no acceptable alternative to direct military use, was decisive.

119.

Kevles, op. cit., p. 379.

120.

Condon never completely overcame the effects of his persecution and in fact the attacks on him continued for much of his lifetime. He was not reluctant to recall the period or to take those who had failed to act to protect him and other victims of McCarthyism to task. In 1957, when he was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, he told an APS meeting in that city that in 1955 he was offered the post of physics department chairman in “a leading university.” But the university chancellor withdrew the offer “because a high government official threatened that…the university would lose all of its federal funds… .”

And he accused the Eisenhower administration of having permitted “persecution” of scientists as a matter of “settled policy.” (“U.S. Scientists Persecuted, Condon Says,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 30, 1957.)

121.

a letter to the editor on the subject by Ben R. Oppenheimer (no relation to J. Robert) and replies to it by Gottfried and by Harry Lustig [Phys. Today 52 (6), 13, 15 (1999)].

122.

Phys. Today 7 (8), 7 (1954).

123.

Not all APS members who had problems with security clearances were famous, and in at least one instance the Society itself was implicated. On January 1, 1955 a member, John H. Sweer, wrote to APS Secretary K. K. Darrow stating that his employer had requested access for him to certain classified material. The Eastern Industrial Security Board had referred to certain reasons that in its judgement required it to deny the request. Among these was: “Subject, on his PSQ, lists membership in the American Physical Society since 1938. This organization contributed $3000.00 to the defense of a Canadian scientist who was implicated in the Russian espionage ring uncovered there in 1947. The society has been reliably described as having the announced purpose of exchange of scientific information between scientists in the United States and those of the Soviet Union.” The member asked Darrow for the facts about the $3000 and stated that unless the Society has adopted a revision of article 2 of its constitution, he would cite it in response to the second allegation. The story about the donation to the defense of the Russian spy was apparently a complete fiction and the APS has, of course, never substituted the exchange of scientific information with the Soviet Union for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics as its purpose. The outgoing APS president, Hans Bethe, “was horrified by the matter” and in a letter of January 12, 1955 to Darrow, and to R. T. Birge, his successor as president, not only agreed with Darrow that “we certainly must demand a retraction,” but also “an investigation how such slanderous statements arose and request that the persons responsible be removed from positions of influence in the Eastern Industrial Personnel Security Board” (Ref. 229).

124.

Reference 32.

The APS’s protest does not appear to have done much good, at least in the short run. In 1954, P. A. M. Dirac, then at Cambridge University, was denied permission to enter the United States to spend the year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton [Phys. Today 7 (7), 7 (1954)].

125.

On December 16, 1952, incoming President Enrico Fermi wrote to Secretary Karl Darrow “…I agree entirely with your suggestion that there should be no banquet unless all our members are allowed to attend. In fact, I would go somewhat further than this…it is not wise for our Society to call a meeting in which a distinction on the basis of color [with respect to housing accommodations] is explicitly mentioned on the summons card. I realize that our Society is non-political, however, by recognizing officially a color issue, we might actually give indirectly support to a trend that is political and that I am sure the overwhelming majority of our members disapprove…” (Ref. 229).

126.

The vote was 8559 against reversing the decision and 6405 for doing so. Altogether 15,217 ballots were cast from those sent out to the 25,874 members (Ref. 32), an unusually high rate of return. Almost two decades earlier, during the cold war-inspired restrictions on who could speak at universities, the APS had to face, apparently for the first time, a decision to move a meeting for reasons of principle. The Ohio State University, on whose campus the March 1952 meeting was to be held, had instituted a requirement of screening those who would be allowed to speak on its campus. No consultation of the membership was necessary or contemplated on that occasion. Acting on a firmly established commitment to scientific freedom, and after a brief discussion by the Council, APS past president F. Wheeler Loomis wrote to the Ohio State Physics Department “that the Physical Society could under no circumstances tolerate any screening by any outside agency, of its speakers or its program.” In informing the APS President, C. C. Lauritsen, of the plans that were being quickly made to move the meeting, Secretary K. K. Darrow simply stated: “For reasons too self-evident to require description, our Society cannot meet under such conditions.” The president of Ohio State University backed down (Ref. 229).

127.

Already two years earlier, in 1967, Charles Schwartz had proposed an amendment to the APS constitution to allow one percent of the membership to force a vote on any (social or scientific) issue of concern.

the proposal had its roots in a letter which Schwartz tried to publish in Physics Today urging physicists to oppose the Vietnam war. The editor turned him down, saying that the letter did not deal with “physics as physics” or “physicists as physicists.” The Council submitted the proposal to the members with a recommendation against it and it was defeated by a margin of three to one (Ref. 32). (The amendment put forward by Robert March of the University of Wisconsin in 1971, which is mentioned in Sec. I of this article, was an attenuated echo of the Schwartz proposal.)

128.

The target of the bombing was a mathematics research institute, located in the same building;

it was funded by the US Army, but was not doing classified or war-related research. The death of the post-doc, the destruction of Barschall’s laboratory together with all of his research records for the previous twenty-five years, and what he considered the physics department’s insensitive and inadequate response to the tragedy caused Barschall to terminate his career as an experimental nuclear physicist—where he had made major contributions—and to leave the University of Wisconsin for two years. When he returned as the John Bascom Professor of Physics, Nuclear Engineering and Medical Physics, he resumed his teaching, but turned his research to medical applications of neutrons for cancer treatment, a field in which he carved out a new, distinguished career [Robert Adair and Willy Haeberli, “Henry Herman Barschall 1915–1997,” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences Vol. 75 (The National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1998)]. He redoubled his volunteer activities for the American Physical Society, serving as the (unpaid) editor of Physical Review C from 1972 to 1987, and secretary-treasurer of the Forum on Physics and Society from 1988 to 1993. He became an expert in scientific publishing, a field in which his studies of the cost of physics journals (Ref. 93) brought him recognition and honors from librarians, as well lawsuits by a commercial publisher whose journals fared poorly in Barschall’s price and citation studies (see Sec. VII).

129.

Over the past twenty-seven years, the Forum has conducted more than 200 sessions at regular APS meetings, ranging from arms control topics such as land-based intercontinental missiles and safeguards on plutonium and highly enriched uranium, through environmental and health-related subjects such as the risks of climate change and the linear model of low dose radiation damage, to the inroads of pseudoscience (which featured a talk by the magician-debunker James Randi on “Fooling Some Scientists Some of the Time”). The Forum has sponsored studies and short courses, out of which have come seven books, among them Physics Technology and the Nuclear Arms Race, Energy Sources: Conservation and Renewables, and Global Warming: Physics and Facts. A series of conferences and publications on the crisis in physics jobs anticipated later official APS initiatives on this subject. Under the Congressional Fellowship Program, physicists, selected and supported by APS, spend a year in Washington in a Congressional office. While many of the forty APS Congressional Fellows to date have returned to their home institutions or to another job in science, wiser in the ways of Washington, others have remained in or returned later to government or other public service, often in important positions. One of the currently prominent returnees is Rush Holt, who was a Congressional Fellow in 1982–1983 and was elected to Congress in 1998 as a Democrat from New Jersey. The only other physicist in Congress, Representative Vernon Ehlers (Republican, Michigan), was never a Congressional Fellow, but like Holt, was made a fellow of the Society upon his election to Congress. Both Ehlers and Holt served (years before) on the Forum’s Executive Committee. The Forum’s initiative to institute the Congressional Fellowship Program was supported and implemented by the Society’s Executive Secretary, W. W. Havens, Jr. and it helped to endow the Forum and the APS’s new activism with respectability. In 1973 Havens wrote to the then chairman of the Forum, Barry Casper: “… by establishing a Congressional Science Fellowship, the American Physical Society gives its blessing to this type of activity and encourages physicists to become engaged in public service science… . I believe you should stress the fact that the APS is supporting the long range goal of legitimizing for physicists other than traditional teaching and research in universities and industry.”

The story is brought up-to-date by David Hafemeister, a later Forum chair (1985–86), member of the APS Council (1988–91) and chair of the Council’s Panel on Public Affairs (1996–97) (Ref. 130).

130.

131.

A complete list of publicly issued APS policy statements appears on p. 32 of Phys. Today 52 (3) (1999).

132.

The position was first established when W. W. Havens became Deputy Secretary (to K. K. Darrow) in 1955. It was abandoned when Havens succeeded to the renamed position of Executive Secretary in 1967, but was revived in 1974 with the appointment of Mary L. Shoaf as Deputy Executive Secretary. She was succeeded, from 1980 to 1982, by David W. Kraft, who was followed, from 1982 to 1984, by Lawrence R. Bickford. Miriam A. Forman served from 1985 to 1990. Havens’ successor (1991–1993) as Executive Secretary, N. Richard Werthamer, “renormalized” the title to Associate Executive Secretary, and appointed Brian B. Schwartz, who was already serving as the Society’s education officer, to the job. All of these deputies and associates were part time. When Judy R. Franz became APS’s Executive Officer (rather than Executive Secretary) in 1994, the associate’s title was changed accordingly. Barrett H. Ripin has served as Associate Executive Officer since 1994.

133.

For a more complete account of APS’s education, minority and women’s programs see “Education Outreach,” a Special Issue of APS News (January 1998).

134.

“The APS China Program: Chinese–American Cooperative Basic Research Program in Atomic, Molecular and Condensed Matter Physics of the American Physical Society 1983–1991. Final Report of the American Coordinating Committee,” Harry Lustig, ed. (The American Physical Society, New York, 1992).

135.

Phys. Today 32 (1), 101 (1979).

136.

Phys. Today 36 (3), 63–64 (1983).

137.

Harry Lustig, “Two presidencies: The City College of New York and the American Physical Society,” in A Gift of Prophecy—Essays in Celebration of the Life of Robert Eugene Marshak, edited by E. C. G. Sudarshan (World Scientific, Singapore, 1994), pp. 303–309;

Ernest M. Henley and Harry Lustig, “Robert Eugene Marshak 1916–1992,” Biographical Memoirs, Vol. 76, National Academy of Sciences (The National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1998).

138.

Keyworth criticized the APS (of which he was a fellow) for its “arrogant action” in seeming to challenge President Reagan’s armaments policies. He said he was shocked to learn that its Council had taken an official stand on nuclear arms reduction despite the “specific will of its membership” that the Society refrain from political action and stick to science. His remarks, which appeared in Physics Today 36 (5), 8 (1983), were reportedly toned down considerably from an even angrier first draft.

(“Physicists Arms Stand Criticized,” The New York Times, May 7, 1983.) Marshak, citing past engagement by the Society with public issues, replied that Keyworth was mistaken in asserting that the membership had opposed the taking of stands on urgent public matters and suggested that the Administration should “welcome the balanced tone of the Council’s resolution and should “embrace its sober message” about the need for arms control [Phys. Today 36 (5), 9 (1983)].

139.

Some of them imaginatively but wildly misinterpreted or exaggerated the claims of scientist-proponents; thus, Deputy Secretary of Energy Henson Moore III (quoted from US Senate Hearings by Kevles, op. cit., p. XXI) stated that magnetic resonance imaging had been made possible by the work on superconducting magnets for the SSC, and New Orleans Congressman Robert Livingston praised high energy physics for producing, among other things, “virus remedies, maybe even for aids” (quoted from the Congressional record by Kevles, op. cit., p. XXIV).

140.

Stressing that the Super Collider was expected to reveal the presence of the Higgs boson, Lederman attempted to explain its importance by telling a Senate hearing to think of a group of extraterrestrials watching a soccer game who are somehow incapable of seeing the ball: “They see a lot of people running around seemingly at random in a chaotic disorganized activity, but if someone postulated the existence of a soccer ball, then the whole thing becomes clear and simple and elegant” (US Senate Hearings, quoted by Kevles, op. cit., p. XVI).

Later, in 1993, Lederman would refer to the Higgs boson as the “God particle” (Leon Lederman, with Dick Teresi, The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1993). Weinberg preferred to emphasize that physicists were desperate for the SSC because they were stuck in progressing toward a final theory of nature—a complete, comprehensive, and consistent description that accounted for all the known forces and particles in the universe.

The SSC was a good bet, he stressed, not because it would reveal the deity or enhance American prestige, but, even if it did not find the Higgs boson, would expose the existence of new forces and phenomena that would bring the achievement of a final theory closer [Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (Random House, New York, 1992)].

141.

Roy, who had been critical of American science policy since World War II for giving too much support to esoteric fields of research, considered high-energy physicists “spoiled brats” for wanting a multibillion dollar machine when the country was running up $200 billion annual deficits (Kevles, op. cit., p. XXIV). Anderson told Congress that discoveries in condensed matter physics were no less fundamental than those in particle physics and that his field served society at far lower cost and with far greater payoffs than did elementary particle research. Schrieffer, who called himself a “loyal opponent” of the machine who admired and respected particle physics, nevertheless said that it cast no light on the behavior of ordinary matter even in its disaggregated forms, and that it was therefore irrelevant to most of atomic and molecular physics and to chemistry, and as such to any science with utilitarian potential (Kevles, op. cit., p. XXV).

142.

R. L. Park, The Scientist (June 15, 1987).

143.

The Division of Condensed Matter Physics had 6441 members, the Division of Particles and Fields 3463. Altogether less than half of the APS membership belonged to any division or topical group, a statistic which casts doubt on the image of APS as an exclusive club of single-minded practitioners of research.

144.

Phys. Today 44 (3), 79 (1991).

145.

Senate Hearings, as quoted in Kevles, op. cit., p. XXVI. In a later letter to an official at Fermilab, Bloembergen did allow that superconducting wire technology had, in fact, greatly benefitted from work at Fermilab and for the SSC and that this had improved the equipment in magnetic resonance imaging.

146.

James Krumhansl (private communication, March 15, 1999).

147.

Consequently he derided the SSC for its endlessly increasing costs, threats to other science, and unwarranted predictions of spin-offs for competitiveness. “Contrary to all the hype, the SSC will not cure cancer, will not provide a solution to the problem of male-pattern baldness, and will not guarantee a World Series Victory for the Chicago Cubs,” Boehlert opined. And he doubted “that the most pressing issues facing the Nation include an insufficient understanding of the origins of the universe, a deteriorating standard of living for high-energy physicists, or declining American competitiveness in the race to find elusive subatomic particles.” (Senate Hearings, as quoted by Kevles, op. cit., p. XXIX).

148.

Kevles, op. cit., pp. XXX–XXXV.

149.

Malcolm Browne, “Building a Behemoth Against Great Odds,” The New York Times, March 23, 1993, p. B9.

150.

151.

House Hearing, as quoted in Kevles, op. cit., p. XXXIII.

152.

Kevles, op. cit., p. XXXVIII.

153.

The LHC will, however, have only a third of the energy that the SSC was designed to achieve. It is scheduled to begin operating in 2005. By early 1999, 590 American scientists and engineers—more than two-thirds of them refugees from the SSC—were working on the European machine (Malcolm W. Browne, in The New York Times, January 19, 1999, p. D5). In spite of upgrades at Fermilab and at SLAC, the “replacement” of the SSC by the LHC marks a shift in experimental high-energy physics from the United States to Europe. Continued US participation depends on the increasingly uncertain annual funding decisions of Congress. The now frequently exercised power of the Congress to renege on international commitments, by refusing to authorize previously promised funds (the refusal to pay the required dues to the United Nations is the most dramatic example), has meant that “the United States has a very bad reputation as an international partner now, particularly since the fiasco over the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor [ITER]” (Burton Richter, as quoted in The New York Times, ibid.). According to an agreement signed by the US, ITER was to be built, in Japan, with support from that country, the US, Europe, and Russia. After more than $1 billion had been spent, Representative James Sensenbrenner, the chairman of the House Science Committee, blocked US participation, thereby jeopardizing the project.

154.

Kevles, op. cit., p. XLI.

155.

Second Series I (1926). (Einstein would not be elected until 1930. Altogether, the APS had sixteen honorary members over the course of its history, though never all at the same time. In addition to those already mentioned, they were Louis de Broglie, James Chadwick, P. M. A. Dirac, H. A. Kramers, Max von Laue, and Arnold Sommerfeld. The category of honorary members became redundant after foreign physicists could be elected to regular fellowship and membership and became depleted in 1988 with the death of de Broglie.) Not including residents of Canada, of which there were about twenty-five in 1926—a surprisingly small number, considering that the Canadian Association of Physicists was not yet in existence—we estimate, from the addresses, that there were close to fifty foreign members and fellows. The fellows included Abraham Joffe of Leningrad, Russia (as the USSR was designated in the 1926 Membership List, in a display of either nostalgia or anticipation); Charles Darwin of Edinburgh, Scotland; M. Le Duc De Broglie of Paris, France; Victor Hess of Graz, Austria; and Sir C. V. Raman of Calcutta, India. An E. Shrödinger (sic) of Zurich, Switzerland is also on the list, not as a fellow, but as an ordinary member. Schrödinger was one of those who refused to become fellows because of the higher dues. Perhaps his name was misspelled in retaliation. More than a dozen of the members residing abroad, such as Edward U. Condon, were Americans who were studying or working there. For authentic overseas members, Japan led the list with nine, China followed with five, and the other countries represented—Italy, England, Poland, Germany, Holland, and Belgium—each accounted for three or fewer.

156.

Dues were to be used only for services directly connected with membership-based operations such as mailings, APS News, and the collection of the dues themselves. Meetings and, a fortiori, the journals had to pay for themselves. Unlike many other professional associations, APS stayed away from providing commercial “services” to its members, such as issuing credit cards or endorsing or selling other products. An important exception has been the American Physical Society Insurance Trust program. Established in 1969 and joined in 1970 by AAPT and subsequently by other AIP member societies, the Trust makes available group term life insurance and other coverage (including the special bonus of double indemnity for accidental death or dismemberment). The program is particularly useful for those members who cannot obtain inexpensive term insurance at their places of employment.

157.

Life memberships date to the very beginning of the Society, but in 1899 only one member took the plunge of betting that a saving was likely to result. At that time a life membership cost $50, ten times the annual dues. In recognition of today’s longer life expectancy, the ratio is now fifteen.

158.

APS 1998 Annual Report, p. 4.

159.

In spite of the fact that the Physical Review almost certainly provides more opportunities than any other journal to appeal the recommendations of referees and the decisions of editors not to publish a manuscript, there have been aggrieved authors before and since. A few have turned nasty, for example accusing the editors and the Society of being part of a Jewish conspiracy to prevent the dissemination of a refutation of Einstein’s relativity. Some have implicitly or explicitly threatened lawsuits, but before 1987, none of these threats ever materialized. The most egregious and tragic case of a (mentally ill) rejected author taking revenge was that of Bayard Peakes, mentioned in Sec. III.

160.

Meserve, a partner in the Washington law firm Covington & Burling, is a physicist (as well as a lawyer) and fellow of the APS. He has successfully represented the Society in all the cases described here. In late 1999, upon confirmation as head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he left Covington & Burling and relinquished his position as APS’s legal counsel.

161.

Solarex Corp. v. Arco Solar, Inc., 121 F.R.D. 163, 179 (E.D.N.Y. 1988); Arco Solar, Inc. v. American Physical Society, 870 F.2d 642 (Fed. Cir. 1989).

162.

163.

Slaby v. American Physical Society, No. 87-3172 (D.D.C. 1987).

164.

Kiess v. Rubin, Civ. No. 95-CV-01267 (Md. Cir. Ct. 1995).

165.

The cost per printed character (perhaps better “price per printed character”) is the amount paid by an American library for an annual subscription to a journal divided by the total number of characters published in that journal during the year. (In order to neutralize the effect of variations in typography and page size, Barschall and some investigators in other fields before him used characters rather than pages in the denominator.) The impact is the average number of times that articles from a journal were cited during the two years following their publication, as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information. It was Barschall’s innovation also to obtain and report the quotient of the price per character divided by the impact, resulting in the cost-effectiveness. Readers of the Bulletin article, if they were so inclined, could thus calculate that there was a factor of eighty between the journal with the highest price per character on the list, Gordon & Breach’s Physics and Chemistry of Liquids, and that with the lowest, the American Astronomical Society’s Astrophysical Journal. With the impact figured in, the cost-effectiveness difference between these two journals became a factor of 409. There were two articles because Physics Today was only able to publish a summary of the results (which included some background to the “library crisis” of rising journal costs and a discussion of what could be done to ameliorate it), and the Bulletin was consequently used by the author to document the methodology and to provide the complete results.

166.

The claims included that Barschall passed over such differences as copying licenses, airmail delivery, and Gordon & Breach’s “flow system,” under which libraries were charged not by the year, but by the volumes published. To the extent that these issues had any relevance at all, their effects fell within Barschall’s announced 20% margin of uncertainty. There was also a complaint that Barschall did not take into account all of G&B’s journals. Their absence was in line with the announced criteria for the inclusion of journals in the survey, and when they were taken into account, the results for Gordon & Breach did not improve. And as the litigation developed, the plaintiff’s case concentrated increasingly on the claim that the articles were improper because Barschall failed to note that Gordon & Breach’s journals, because of their “specialized nature” and low circulation, should cost more than those of other publishers.

167.

This offer for resolving the complaint was maintained by APS and AIP during the many years of the ensuing litigation.

168.

Dozens of briefs and counter-briefs were filed and motions made; hundreds of documents were produced, and, eventually, more than a score of witnesses were examined either by deposition or at trial.

169.

Gordon and Breach Science Publishers S.A. v. American Institute of Physics, 859 F. Supp. 1521 (S.D.N.Y. 1994).

170.

The “secondary uses” included the distribution of a draft to some librarians at a convention, and the favorable mention of the Barschall findings in the 1988 annual presidential letter to the membership by APS President Val Fitch, which included the phrase “tell your librarian about it.”

171.

In one of the European suits, Barschall was characterized (in translation) as “a disguised megaphone,” “a common market-hawker” and a lazy researcher. The allegation of a conspiracy was based largely on the fact that before the initiation of the survey, there had been some consultation between Barschall and APS and AIP officials about whether a survey would be useful, and while it was in progress, some correspondence about Barschall’s work. During one of these exchanges, the APS treasurer made the suggestion that Barschall might explicitly mention the favorable results for the societies’ journals. The suggestion was rejected. The reason put forward by Gordon & Breach for the societies’ allegedly enlisting Barschall in a marketing effort was their need to maintain library subscriptions in the face of sharply increased prices. While it is true that prices had to be raised, in the face of declining numbers of subscriptions and of income from page charges, most of the increase was necessitated by the steep increases in the numbers of articles submitted and published. The societies clearly welcomed the news that, in spite of the increases, their journals were still (perhaps even more than before) extremely cost-effective. Some in AIP and APS did see an advantage in publicizing the results among librarians while others, including the APS treasurer, saw their value in justifying, to understandably concerned, library-sympathetic colleagues on publications committees and councils, the painful price increases that were necessary to keep the journals solvent.

172.

OPA (Overseas Publishing Ass’n) Amsterdam BV v. American Inst. of Physics, 973 F. Supp. 414 (S.D.N.Y. 1997).

173.

APS and AIP were able to document ten instances of (mostly successful) attempts at intimidation, including those of librarians at two campuses of the University of California, at Colorado State University, and at the University of Liège, Belgium; a professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University; two professors of chemistry at Northern Illinois University; a scientist at IBM; the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers; the European Mathematical Council; and the American Mathematical Society and its Executive Director personally.

174.

In Europe, under a system in which the courts typically award partial compensation for the expenses of the victorious party, the societies were able to recoup a fraction of their costs. In the United States the Lanham Act allows the possibility of such compensation only in “exceptional cases,” a definition that is usually applied to mean completely frivolous suits. Judge Sand found that Gordon & Breach’s actions did not meet that threshold. The Court of Appeals, although observing that the “litigation may not have been strong on its merits,” upheld the district court. APS’s expense would have been even higher, had Richard Meserve not represented it on a reduced-fee basis in this case (as he has in all other cases) in recognition of the Society’s non-profit status.

175.

176.

Extensive documentation about this case is available on the Web at 〈barschall.stanford.ed〉 and at 〈www.library.yale.edu/barschall〉.

177.

Until 1932, presidents (with the exceptions of B. O. Peirce and H. A. Bumstead) served two year terms. Since then they have had one year terms, except in 1941 when, after George Pegram’s resignation (Ref. 183), G. W. Stewart served for six months, and for Val Fitch who, in 1988, stayed in office for a second year as a result of George Vineyard’s untimely death. For most of the early years the serving vice-president was explicitly but routinely elected by the Council to the presidency, until the succession was made automatic. In 1963 the position of vice-president elect was created; the person chosen succeeded automatically to the vice-presidency and then to the presidency. In 1980 the hierarchical nomenclature was changed to vice president, president-elect, and president. With the past president also having some official functions, running for vice-president of the APS now implies, upon election, a four year commitment of service. The four elected officers together constitute the “presidential chain,” an important subset of the executive board. A complete list of presidents, as well as of vice-presidents and presidents-elect who were unable to succeed to the presidency, appears on p. A-8 of the 1998–99 APS Membership Directory.

178.

They are, in order of their APS presidency: A. A. Michelson, R. A. Millikan, A. H. Compton, P. W. Bridgman, J. H. Van Vleck, Enrico Fermi, H. A. Bethe, E. P. Wigner, Felix Bloch, C. H. Townes, John Bardeen, L. W. Alvarez, E. M. Purcell, W. A. Fowler, N. F. Ramsey, A. L. Schawlow, V. L. Fitch, Nicolaas Bloembergen, Burton Richter, J. Robert Schrieffer, and Jerome Friedman. Thirteen received the prize (or, in the case of Bardeen, one of his two prizes) before serving as APS president, seven after serving, and one—Schawlow—during his presidency. In 1968 the presidential line constituted a perfect line-up of Nobelists: Charles Townes was immediate past president, John Bardeen president, Luis Alvarez vice-president, and Edward Purcell vice-president elect. For more on the Nobel laureate-APS president nexus, see Michael Scanlan, “Nobel APS Presidents,” in APS News (January 1996).

179.

Thus the proceedings of the Eighth meeting of the Society, on December 27, 1900, state that the tellers “reported a total of 74 votes cast [from a total membership of 96]: H. A. Rowland, 73 for President; A. A. Michelson, 73 for Vice-President; Ernest Merritt, 74 for secretary; W. Hallock, 74 for treasurer; Henry Crew, E. B. Rosa, 74 for Councillors, and these persons were declared elected.” Apparently one voter felt alienated from those officers whose titles merited capitalization.

180.

W. W. Havens remembers (private communication) that in 1972, when C. S. Wu was put up as the first female candidate, she ran unopposed. Whether this was an act of chivalry, condescension, or realism, we do not know. Contested elections for the presidency, and even for the Council, although undoubtedly an improvement over single name slates, have deprived the Society of the services of some outstanding individuals.

181.

This occurred in 1989, when C. N. Yang lost the election for Vice-President to Walter E. Massey, who was the first (and only) African-American nominated for the presidential line. (After Massey became Director of the National Science Foundation, he resigned from his APS office and did not succeed to the presidency.) In general, minority and women candidates have been elected when they were put up for office in the APS. In recent years the fraction of women on the Council and on the Executive Board has tended to exceed their fraction of the membership.

182.

Merritt’s minutes, though clear, are extremely laconic. On the few occasions when he missed a meeting, the minutes taken by secretaries-pro-tem appear, by contrast, positively verbose.

183.

Hartman, op. cit., pp. 36–44.

184.

Lee Anna Embry, in National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs Vol. 41 (The National Academy Press, Washington, DC), p. 358.

185.

W. W. Havens, Jr. in Dictionary of American Biography— Supplement Six, 1956–60, pp. 500–502, edited by John A. Garraty, American Council of Learned Societies (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1980). See, however, note 63.

186.

Embry, op. cit., p. 391.

187.

John Van Vleck recalled that once during the early fifties when scientists frequently traveled between New York and Boston on the New Haven Railroad’s night sleeper, the Owl, Pegram missed the sleeper on a trip to Boston. In order not to be late to the meeting of the Physical Society the next morning, he took the next (coach) train and sat up all night. When one remembers that he was in his seventies at the time, his devotion to the APS becomes apparent (Embry, op. cit., p. 391).

188.

Darrow continues: “On the other hand his term as President of the Society [for the first half of 1941, simultaneously with being treasurer!] was the shortest on record, and this was characteristic of him. In the middle of what should have been Pegram’s year-long presidency, the Vice-President who, in the normal course of events should have succeeded him, announced that he would not…[be able] to serve [as President in the following year], because of serious family problems. Pegram instantly resigned the presidency and the Vice-President was forthwith appointed to the rank for the year, so that his name follows that of Pegram in the roster of the presidents. Pegram always said that he resigned because he was so busy, but we all knew the truth.”

189.

190.

W. W. Havens, Jr., “Karl Kelchner Darrow (25 November 1891–7 June 1982),” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1983, pp. 95–99.

191.

Made available to this author by W. W. Havens, Jr.

192.

Darrow’s valedictory [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 12 (1), 5 (1967)] bears out Havens’ assessment of his predecessor’s conservatism, at least in Darrow’s later years. In addition to the passages already quoted (Ref. 42), Darrow wrote: “Now I take my leave of the post which I have so long been honored to fill by the suffrage of the Society. The post has been extinguished by the new Constitution, and no one hereafter will ever sign one of these Preambles over the title of ‘Secretary.’ [In fact the title had merely been changed to ‘Executive Secretary.’] I have enjoyed these twenty-six years, and I hope that everyone will refrain from calling my work or myself ‘dedicated.’ I am proud to belong to the ancien régime with George Pegram and John Tate dearly held in remembrance… . I rejoice to have been part of the piccolo mondo antico, the ‘little old world’ of the Society into which I came, unified, unregimented, and serene—the Paradise Lost which so many are desperately trying to regain in conferences limited in size by narrowing of the scope or closing of the doors. Talleyrand said that celui qui n’a pas vécu sous l’ancien régime n’a pas connu la douceur de vivre. I often think of this when I see our members thronging the corridors of the official hotels, leafing through the BULLETIN to discover which sessions they must forego in order to attend which others, and squeezing into halls that were expected to be large enough but prove to be too small. I thank the members of the Society who elected me over again until elections were ended… .” In fact what happened is that the new constitution of 1966 transferred the election of the operating officers—the Executive Secretary, the Treasurer, and the Editor-in-Chief—from the membership to the Council. Darrow was promptly replaced by his deputy, Bill Havnes.

193.

Charles H. Townes (APS president in 1967) has reported that when he was an undergraduate at a southern college in the early 1930’s, its physics department was so poorly supported that it did not have The Physical Review in its library. He was advised to consult Darrow’s articles on current developments in the Bell System Technical Journal, which somehow was being sent gratis to the local municipal library. The young student did read Darrow’s review articles and this convinced him to become a physicist (Ref. 190).

194.

The New Yorker magazine at one time even reproduced his lucid and lively instructions as to what the absent minded or un-metropolitan professor should do in case he found himself, in New York, on the Lenox Avenue rather than the Broadway subway train in trying to get from a mid-town hotel to a meeting of the Society at Columbia University (Ref. 190).

195.

W. W. Havens, Jr. (private communication). No wonder that Darrow was peeved by the decision, in 1961, to move the APS Thanksgiving meeting to October; he realized that if he were to be involved in its preparation, he would have to shorten his summer vacation, and wrote, testily: “The inconveniences of preparing a Bulletin with a summertime deadline are considerable, and the Council has provided that this task may be delegated, preferably to those who have pressed for the change” [Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. II 7 (8), 527 (1961)].

196.

When he was invited to participate in a meeting of the (British) Institute of Physics, he expressed disappointment that the dinner would be “informal.” Explaining his “tenacious rearguard action to keep at least some traces of formality at the banquets of the American Physical Society,” he said that one of his arguments has always been “that Britain will feel ashamed of us if we quit dressing for dinner. Can it be that Britain is also softening in this respect?” (Letter to H. R. Lang, May 1, 1956 in the Center for the History of Physics [Ref. 229].) Darrow’s insistence that it was the tradition of the APS which required formal dress at meeting dinners may have been ahistorical. The minutes of the 27th meeting of the Society of February 25, 1905, record that “On motion the Council was requested to consider a plan for holding an informal dinner in connection with the meetings of the Society [Phys. Rev. XX (3), 172 (1906). Emphasis added].

197.

In a 1968 letter to the editor of AIP’s house organ, he wrote, in part: “I have read your issue just now… I doubt the Latinity of your latinist. Bucca—which in your caption is properly an ablative, buccâ—signifies by itself the cheek, and specifically the inside of the cheek; therefore lingua in buccâ is in itself the full translation of tongue in cheek. Then how did cavum oris get into the caption? If it is inserted as a synonym for buccâ, cavum should also be in the ablative; cavo oris. The phrase would then be: lingua in buccâ, id est in cavo oris… . Speaking of Latin, I have just been rereading the Pervigilium Veneris. If you have any contributors who are not so regular as you wish …try sending them its last two lines, which (as perhaps I do not need to remind you) are: Perdidi Musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit. Sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium… .” Three days letter Darrow writes: “I have rewritten the last stanza of the Pervigilium Veneris, so that you may use it on delinquent contributors. Alii cantant, vos tacetis; quando ver venit vestrum? Quando fitis ut chelidon ut tacere desinatis? Perdetis Musam tacendo, nec vos Apollo respicet; Sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium [“Karl K. Darrow, the Editor’s Editor Edits” in Inside AIP VII (27), 31 December 1968].

198.

For most of the history of the Society, the operating officers, having been volunteers, had open-ended appointments; finite, renewable, five-year terms were adopted only in the 1980’s. In a gentler age, apparently no one had the heart to ask the venerable men, to whom the Society owed so much, to retire when the time had come. W. W. Havens writes in the already quoted letter to Alvarez (Ref. 190): “I do not think it wise to have the Society operated by a tired old physicist because of my few unfortunate experiences with individuals who should have retired but would not.”

199.

Apparently advance budgeting had not been the previous treasurers’ strong suit. In his letter (Ref. 108) to the 1955 president, R. T. Birge, K. K. Darrow describes the precarious financial condition of the Society: “Our policy is to give the Physical Review all that it wants, even when this entails a deficit, and to expect the other activities of the Society to add as little as possible to the deficit. This system must be changed… .” He goes on: “I think we ought to have someone draw up a budget for 1956, and I am glad to report that our Deputy Treasurer [Quimby, who occupied that position from 1955 to 1957] is taking a keen interest in the finances of the Society so that I may propose at the Chicago Meeting that he be asked to draw up a budget for the year 1956” (Ref. 229).

200.

201.

202.

Private communication, 5 May 1998.

203.

The fact that, with this growth, APS functioned well and everything got done quickly and efficiently, did not prevent some members of the Council, from corporate backgrounds, from complaining, near the end of Havens’ tenure, that the Society was still being run as a mom-and-pop operation. It is true that Havens and his two colleagues as headquarters operating officers, Burton and then Lustig, tended to have an approach that was simultaneously hands-on and collegial, and tried to avoid bureaucratic structures and corporate modes and habits. Havens would widely distribute most pieces of correspondence that came into the office so that everyone would know what was going on and almost every day the physicists in the office would lunch together in a neighborhood cafeteria, in order to discuss and organize the pending tasks and to make plans for the future. It is also true that until Burton’s time there were no formal personnel policy or handbook and until Lustig’s no personnel manager, evaluation procedure, or five-year budget plans. And there certainly were no management consultants or annual staff retreats. But during Bill Havens’ time, and in large measure due to his skills and attitude, not only did the Society grow in size and influence, but it was also a good place at which to work. And important changes did take place.

204.

A complete list of publicly issued APS policy studies appears on p. 82 of Phys. Today 52 (3), 1999.

As a precursor to one of these studies, Havens and Marlon Fiske of General Electric organized a conference on “Physics and the Energy Problem” and edited the proceedings (AIP Conf. Proc. No. 19, American Institute of Physics, 1974). Since Havens’ retirement, APS has not undertaken any other major studies. A POPA proposal, in the early nineties, to conduct a review of the status of renewable energy research and development could was not undertaken because of the inability to secure external funding.

205.

In a memoir written on the occasion of Havens’ retirement (Ref. 206), David Lazarus, who was APS’s editor-in-chief from 1981 to 1991, said “He can remember any detail of any matter that ever transpired at a meeting of the APS executive committee or council in the past quarter century. He is the only man I know who can take perfect minutes in his sleep. Whenever any group started to do something stupid at a meeting, it was always Bill who came up with the proper historical account of why that didn’t work before, back in 19XX, so we had better not try it again!”

206.

207.

When the Treasurer, Harry Lustig, in 1992, first proposed a budget of $500,000 for special events at the Centennial, councillors objected not only to the cost but to the events themselves, fearing that they would disrupt the normal divisional routine of the March and April meetings. Happily, as the officers and council members got caught up in the excitement and the public service ramifications of the once-in-a-hundred-years event, and as the net assets of the Society continued to grow, the opposition dissipated and considerably more ambitious plans were laid and carried out.

208.

The APS Meeting did not fill the enormous building. During the first two days, some 30,000 dentists and associated professionals cohabited the Congress Center with the APS. Their name badges carefully delineated the station of the wearer—“dentist,” “dental technician,” “laboratory assistant,” and so on. Companions had badges with titles such as “dentist’s spouse.” One of the physicists at the APS meeting, whose husband is a dentist, wondered whether she should ask for a second badge saying “dentist’s spouse,” to enhance her status. Not that the APS badges were impeccable. In a heretofore never perpetrated and imperfectly mastered imitation of the bonhomie at other conventions of displaying the bearers’ preferred versions of their first names or their nicknames, J. Robert Schrieffer sported a big “J” under his name; W. W. Havens, Jr, who is universally known as “Bill,” was to be addressed as “W. W.”; and there was no clue that Venkatesh Narayanamurti is called “Venkie.”

209.

In a striking rally for unity, all divisions, topical groups, and forums participated in the Centennial meeting, although some only in a token way. In particular, the Division of the Physics of Beams did not convince its partners in the organization of the biennial “Particle Accelerator Conference” (the Division’s annual meeting every other year) that this year’s conference should be held in conjunction with the APS Centennial, rather than, almost simultaneously, in a different part of the country.

210.

Some of the divisional symposia presented the history of their area of physics in the twentieth century or speculated on its future in the twenty-first, and featured such luminaries—merely to give a sample—as T. D. Lee, Burton Richter, Leon Lederman, Edward Witten, Pierre de Gennes, Ben Mottelson, Dudley Herschbach, Stuart Rice, Harry Swinney, Pierre Hohenberg, Norman Ramsey, Michael Turner, David Wineland, Clifford Will, Kip Thorne, Klaus von Klitzing, Paul Lauterbur, Sherwood Rowland, William Brinkman, Charles Townes, Nicolaas Bloembergen, Theodor Haensch, Carl Wieman, Simon Foner, Werner Wolf, Michael Fisher, Ernest Courant, Andrew Sessler, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and Douglas Osheroff. There were panels on “Science policy for the new millennium” (with speakers, among others, from the executive and legislative branches of the government); on “Breakthroughs of women in physics” (with, again among others, the pioneer Esther Conwell and current notables Mary K. Gaillard and Gail Hanson); a similar symposium on the contribution of minority physicists under the title “From particles to atoms and galaxies: Physics in all sizes, by all peoples” (with scheduled speakers Shirley Jackson, Michael Nieto, Arthur Walker, and J. D. Garcia); and a session on “Research and innovation in physics education” [with Sheila Tobias, Charles Holbrow, Donald Holcomb, Edward (Joe) Redish, and Lillian McDermott]. An interesting symposium on the “Impact of immigration on U.S. physics” featured Hans Frauenfelder, Steven Chu, and Boris Altshuler; one on “The history of physics in the national defense” had excellent presentations by Hans Bethe (on the Manhattan Project), Sidney Drell, Charles Townes and others. The indomitable Bethe, at ninety-two, gave another splendid talk in a session on “I. I. Rabi: physicist and citizen,” which also featured contributions by Norman Ramsey, Dudley Herschbach, Daniel Kleppner, Martin Perl, and Gerald Holton. The latter, in turn, was the lead-off speaker at a symposium on “Physicists as concerned citizens,” where he was followed by Philip Morrison and Joseph Rotblat (of Pugwash fame). Joseph Birman, David Pines, Yakov Alpert (a senior refusenik), Ngee-Pong Chang, and Guo-Zhen Yang (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a participant in the APS China program) shared a session on “Physics cooperation in cold war and post cold war eras.” At a panel discussion by presidential science advisers, every living person who had occupied this role was there to give his insights and reminiscences, except the incumbent Neal Lane, who was detained in Washington, but sent a tape. The line-up was D. Allan Bromley, Edward E. David, John H. Gibbons, William Graham, Donald F. Hornig, George Keyworth, Frank Press, and H. Guyford Stever.

211.

“Richardson Vows to Keep Labs Open in Keynote Address,” APS News 8 (5), 1 (1999).

212.

http://www.aps.org/APS News.

213.

The “black tie optional” invitations would have delighted K. K. Darrow; the physics chanteuse (Lynda Williams, a former go-go dancer turned physics lecturer at San Francisco State, who sang songs like “Carbon is a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Solid State of Mind”) probably would not—but then who knows? The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a page-and-a-half story (Kim A. McDonald “A Centennial Celebration of Physics Brings Out the Discipline’s Human Side—Abandoning their somewhat stodgy image, physical-society’s scientists show they also want to have some fun,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 2, 1999, pp. 22, 24) was much taken not only with Ms. Williams performance, but also with her sociological findings. “Based on her experience at various scientific banquets, the Chronicle reported, “Ms. Williams rates geologists as the true party animals, followed by astronomers, then physicists.” “ ‘Physicists are the toughest audience,’ she said. ‘They tend to be very conservative. But you know, physics is a serious business. Astronomers are a lot easier.’ ” Although the gala formed the centerpiece of the Chronicle’s report, the scientific and socio-political program of the Centennial meeting was given fair coverage by that weekly. Not so for the rest of the press. To the best of the Society officers’ knowledge, the Centennial meeting was mentioned in none of the popular media, or even the not so popular ones, like National Public Radio, and this in spite of the fact that the Society had paid a lot of money to a public relations firm to assure publicity for the Centennial and for physics.

214.

“To Advance & Diffuse the Knowledge of Physics: 100 Years of the American Physical Society;” Sara Schechner, curator; Barrett Ripin, exhibit director.

215.

“A Century of Physics;” Brian B. Schwartz, project director; Hans von Baeyer and Sidney Perkowitz, writers; Albert Gregory, designer. The American Physical Society, 1999. Copies of the Wall Chart are being distributed to thousands of high schools.

216.

Benjamin Bederson, ed., with an Introduction by Hans Bethe (who also wrote two of the articles);

XIX+841 pages, Springer and The American Physical Society (1999);

also published as a special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics [99 (1999)].

217.

Written by Curt Suplee; edited by Judy R. Franz and John S. Rigden, 233 pages. Harry N. Abrams in association with the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics, 1999.

218.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times, April 29, 1999. In his mixed evaluation, the reviewer says that “Mr. Suplee [the author] makes a lot of difficult abstract ideas a little clearer, particularly superconductivity, chaos theory and Einstein’s theory of special relativity.” But Lehmann-Haupt faults some of the photographs for showing impressive machinery while “they tell you little.” And he notices a “faintly disconcerting pattern. As each new discovery is explained, the discussion ends with some practical application…you sometimes get a sense that the whole point of 20th-century physics was not simply to extend the frontiers of knowledge but, like Du Pont in the old commercial, to produce things for better living through chemistry.” With a redaction of the word “simply” and, perhaps, the insertion of “only” before “to produce,” many of the participants in the Centennial and of the other members of the American Physical Society would resonate with the reviewer’s discomfort.

219.

And which for the first time challenges the Society’s and the professions’s long held conviction that “physicists are necessary so that physics gets done, and not that physics is necessary so that physicists have something to do” (Halsted, op. cit.).

220.

Representative George E. Brown, until his death in July of 1999, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, the former chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and unarguably, until the election of Vernon Ehlers, science’s greatest friend and supporter in Congress, said this in a recent interview: “…[scientists], generally speaking, have too great a faith in the power of common sense and reason. That’s not what drives most political figures, who are concerned about emotions… . You have to talk to them realistically. It does very little good to talk to them on high principle…” (Claudia Dreifus, “The Congressman Who Loved Science,” The New York Times, Science Section, March 9, 1999).

221.

There were exceptions to arguing for programs and projects on the basis of their anticipated contributions to the cold war. When Robert R. Wilson, the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (and President of the APS in 1985) was asked at a Congressional hearing what the Lab would contribute to the security of the country and to being competitive with the Russians in the arms race, he replied: “This new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”

222.

George Brown (Claudia Dreifus, “The Congressman Who Loved Science,” The New York Times, Science Section, March 9, 1999), in response to a question about whether it was a mistake for scientists to have asked for funding as a part of the cold war: “Well, I wouldn’t describe it as a big mistake. But to build the funding of science for the next generation on the basis of the cold war was not well advised. That implied that science was not important enough to survive without a cold war.”

223.

The earlier belief, by Rowland (Ref. 20) and by some more contemporary physicists, that it is more important and more worthy of support is no longer held or at least no longer voiced. In a post-SSC article on the problems facing science, Steven Weinberg now says, with disarming modesty: “The problem is that some people, including some scientists, deny that the search for the final laws of nature has its own special sort of value, a value that also should be taken into account in deciding how to fund research (“Reductionism Redux,” The New York Review of Books, 5 October 1995, pp. 39–42).

224.

Albeit at the cost of having money and effort spent on a manned space station and other diversions of little scientific interest and even dubious practical benefit. The success of the astronomers is, in good part, due to the superb and sustained work by their gifted communicators in explaining their fascinating science and its findings to the media and the public.

225.

As quoted by Charles M. Vest in “A wondrous and poetic spectrum” (a review of the book “Unwinding the Rainbow—Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder,” by the biologist Richard Dawkins), Science 283 (5398), 38–39 (1999).

226.

Phys. Today 52 (3), 25 (1999).

227.

And is still recognized by contemporary statesmen of science, albeit expressed in more modern language: Charles M. Vest, the president of MIT, in Science (op. cit.): “…the patrons of modern science, primarily governments, appropriately feel an obligation to show that public investment in science produces improvements in economics and quality of life. So, as we discuss science with the public and our patrons, we face an inherent dilemma: We must demonstrate science’s utilitarian returns, but we know that science often thrives while advancing along circuitous pathways toward unpredictable destinations, propelled by human curiosity.” Vest also approvingly cites Dawkins’ warning of the danger, in selling science to the public, of “dumbing [it] down,” and of the trend to present it as “fun, fun, fun.”

228.

229.

Center for History of Physics, Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics.