A Forum of The American Physical Society
Volume X No 3 Fall 2007
HISTORY OF PHYSICS NEWSLETTER
| The Forum on History of Physics of the American Physical Society publishes this Newsletter semiannually. Nonmembers who wish to receive the Newsletter should make a donation to the Forum of $5 per year (+ $3 additional for airmail). Each 3-year volume consists of six issues. Editor
Michael Riordan
Institute of Particle Physics
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
mriordan@ucsc.edu
(831) 459 5687 Associate Editor
Robert H. Romer
Physics Department
Amherst College
Amherst, MA 01002
rhromer@amherst.edu |
In This Issue...
Report from the Chair
General Forum Affairs
Pais Prize Lecture
March Meeting Reports
April Meeting Reports
Seven Pines Symposium
New Books of Note
We Hear That . . .
Officers & Committees 2007-2008
Report from the Chair: Meeting Challenges to Science
By Bill Evenson, Forum Chair
While retaining high credibility with the public in general, science faces challenges to its authority and reliability on particular issues on many fronts today. These include attempts to subordinate science to political or economic interests, questions about the validity of cosmological and biological evolution, and conflicts over global warming and climate change. A common thread running through all these challenges is that the findings of science have produced a picture of reality that conflicts with preconceptions that support a sense of individual identity or with an existing worldview that is intertwined with economic or political or religious interests.
It is not the role of science—much less the history of physics—to challenge or undermine economic or political or religious commitments. Nevertheless, when these are inconsistent with the findings of science, the foundations on which we build both our identity and the lenses through which we see the world need to be adjusted. This is not to challenge beliefs, but to ask that the interpretations underpinning these beliefs be understood as “interpretations” and hence subject to adjustment in their applications to scientific issues.
So what can history of physics do in the face of these challenges? Non-scientists need exposure to good history of science so they can understand that while scientific conclusions are not final or absolute, nonetheless science is far from arbitrary; it is supported by careful experiments and argument. Real science always includes false starts, errors, and misleading experimental results, and scientific conclusions are uncertain to some degree. But we need to teach students and the general public that not all uncertain knowledge is unreliable or dismissible. There are widely varying degrees of uncertainty in different kinds of knowledge. The strength and breadth of evidence for a theory must be weighed. And many scientific theories, including Big Bang cosmology and neo-Darwinian evolution, are on very firm ground indeed. In short, science needs to be judged on the basis of the strength of the evidence and arguments for its claims. And careful histories of science as it is actually carried out can contribute importantly to the understanding of these issues by non-scientists and scientists alike.
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Forum Chair Bill Evenson, Utah Valley State College
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I therefore urge that we bring our interest in history of physics to strengthen the understanding of science among our students and the general public at every opportunity.
Meanwhile, most of the regular Forum activity takes place among physicists, much of it at physics meetings. You will read later in this newsletter about many splendid sessions organized by FHP at the 2007 March and April APS meetings. More excellent sessions are planned for 2008. Please plan to attend the 2008 March meeting (New Orleans, March 10–14) or April meeting (St. Louis, April 12–15) and to contribute to our sessions.
I am especially pleased to report that many more contributed papers in history of physics than ever before were submitted in 2007 for the March and April meetings, enabling us to have two contributed sessions at each one. I urge you to continue this trend and report on your history projects through contributed talks again next year. Any APS member can give a history talk at the March or April meeting in addition to a technical paper. Most of the history talks had to be scheduled for the usual 12-minute APS meeting length in 2007, but we will continue to schedule 24-minute talks whenever possible, depending on the number of talks and the meeting rooms available.
In an innovation this year, we reached beyond the March and April meetings and cosponsored a session at the Frontiers in Optics 2007/Laser Science XXIII meeting on the “history of Bell’s Theorem and its experimental verification.” This was the APS Division of Laser Science’s annual meeting, September 16–20, in San Jose.
Two activities initiated by Virginia Trimble have become very important for the Forum: donated support for students giving contributed talks in memory of a significant colleague who has passed on (John Bardeen and Rolfe Glover Studentships in 2007, thanks to the Bardeen family and to Richard Prange) and donated sponsorships for invited lectures at APS meetings (Franco Rasetti lecture in March 2007, thanks to Bob Resnick, and Samuel K. Allison lecture in April, thanks to Jim Cronin). The donors can choose who is to be honored (among deceased physicists), and the Forum program committee selects the speaker.
I was reminded by the recent death of Ralph Alpher that not all contributions to physics are adequately appreciated and rewarded during the physicist’s life. A named lecture or studentship in honor of someone you respect can be appropriate for those who made important contributions, with or without adequate attention during their career. Please consider whether you can make a full ($1,200 to $1,500 for named lectures) or partial contribution and contact me or one of the Forum officers.
The Pais Prize for History of Physics has been even more successful than hoped in calling attention to outstanding career-long work in physics history. The 2007 Prize recipient was Max Jammer, well known “for his groundbreaking historical studies of fundamental concepts in physics, including his comprehensive account of the development of quantum mechanics.” He is the author of Concepts of Space (Harvard University Press, 1954), Concepts of Force (Harvard University Press, 1957), Concepts of Mass in Classical Mechanics and Modern Physics (Harvard University Press, 1964), The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (McGraw-Hill, 1966), The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (Wiley, 1974), Einstein and Religion (Harvard University Press, 1999), Concepts of Mass in Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Concepts of Simultaneity: From Antiquity to Einstein and Beyond (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Truly an outstanding record of achievement.
A Few Reminders: Please remind students interested in the history of physics that the Forum can offer limited travel support to a few of them who wish to present talks at the March or April APS meetings. They should apply be email to me, Bill Evenson, at bill@evenson.ch after submitting their abstracts to APS. Also remember to send a short record of the work of retiring scientists (yourself or colleagues) to the Center for History of Physics, as explained by Virginia Trimble in the last issue of this newsletter. Likewise, continue to send department histories to the Center for History of Physics and JDJackson@lbl.gov. And please nominate your deserving colleagues for APS fellowship.
Special thanks are due to now Past Chair Virginia Trimble for her significant leadership as well as financial contributions to the Forum these last three years. And welcome to those who were elected to the Forum Executive Committee in 2007, who took office after the April APS meeting: the new Vice Chair Gloria Lubkin (American Institute of Physics); and Gordon L. Kane (University of Michigan) and George O. Zimmerman (Boston University), both elected to three-year terms as Committee Members-at-Large.
General Forum Affairs
Special Manhattan Project Session
By David C. Cassidy
The Forum on History of Physics and the Forum on Physics and Society are co-sponsoring an invited session on the Manhattan Project, to be held during the next APS April Meeting, in St. Louis, MO, on 12–15 April 2008. The speakers will be:
- Cynthia C. Kelly, President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Ms. Kelly has been an outstanding leader in recent years of an effort to preserve important Manhattan Project sites. She has organized a number of symposia on various aspects of the Project.
- Val Fitch, Princeton University, who served as an SED (or Special Engineering Detachment, US Army) soldier, one of many who actively participated in Los Alamos projects. He will speak on life at Los Alamos in 1942–1945.
- David C. Cassidy, Hofstra University, a historian of science, who will speak on historical aspects of the Manhattan Project and its impacts on society.
We also invite contributed papers on the Project, which will be included in the contributed papers session to be held during the meeting.
We therefore offer a special invitation to all Manhattan Project physicists who served during the war years to come to this session, as well as to an evening reception to be held in their honor during the meeting. We expect to invite Project veterans to participate in a round-table discussion, which will take place the evening of the reception. Some travel support may be available for such individuals. We ask any interested Manhattan Project veterans to contact the organizers:
Call for Fellowship Nominations
By Gloria Lubkin
The FHP Committee on Fellows is seeking suitable candidates to be named APS Fellows through the Forum on the History of Physics. These nominations should be based on achievements in the history of physics and must be sent directly to the APS office in College Park, Maryland. The criteria for fellowship and complete instructions for submitting nominations are given at: http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/fellowships.
The FHP unit deadline for the receipt of all materials at APS is 15 May 2008. All nominations submitted to APS will be forwarded to the FHP Fellowship Committee for review. This committee will make its recommendations to the Forum Executive Committee; if approved, the nominations will then go to the APS Council for final approval.
Here are some specific instructions about the nomination process, taken from the APS website. Before submitting your nomination, make sure that the nominee is a member of the Society in good standing. Obtain supporting letters from two sponsors, who do not have to be APS members. Submit a complete original nomination packet (nomination form and supporting letters) and one copy of the entire packet prior to the unit deadline, 15 May 2008. The nomination form may be downloaded from the above website. The nomination materials should be sent to:
Executive Officer
ATTN: Fellowship Program
The American Physical Society
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740-3844.
Fellowship nominations may be submitted at any time, but must be received by the deadline for the next review.
Student Travel Grants
The Forum on History of Physics announces the availability of a small number of travel grants for students presenting contributed or invited papers in Forum-sponsored sessions during the March or April 2008 APS meetings. For more information, contact David C. Cassidy, chmdcc@optonline.net.
Editors’ Corner
When I began serving as program chair several years ago, our contributed sessions at the annual APS meetings were embarrassing. There were none at the March meeting, in fact, and only a few forgettable papers were delivered in a lightly attended session in April.
How things have changed. Now, thanks to the efforts of our program chairs, the Forum offers contributed sessions at both meetings—and they attract excellent papers and large, engaged audiences. I experienced this personally last April when I gave the first paper in a contributed session. To my surprise and pleasure, the room was packed with more than 50 listeners!
These sessions are a venue where—in keeping with APS traditions—any APS member who wishes can stand up and give a brief talk on a topic in the history of physics. Participatory democracy in action, it helps bring to light subjects that science historians may have overlooked. I experienced this process myself when the next speaker, Ramanth Cowsik of Washington University, lectured about Homi J. Bhabha (well known for calculations of electron-positron scattering) and his 1930s work anticipating the discovery of the muon. I had no prior awareness of it.
The contributed-paper sessions have also become a venue for students interested in the history of physics to air some of their nascent ideas before receptive audiences. Aiding them financially are named “studentships,” funded by donations from our members to help cover travel costs. We look forward to continuing this worthy practice.
Brief accounts of these 25 contributed papers are included in this newsletter, written by the chairs of the sessions. In this manner we bring this new work to the attention of all Forum members and perhaps help connect the authors to others with similar historical interests. This is a valuable service the Forum can render its members, fostering further communications on the history of physics.
—Michael Riordan, Editor
The 2007 Abraham Pais Prize Lecture: The Historical Development of the Physical Concept of Time
By Max Jammer
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2007 Pais Prize recipient Max Jammer
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The Irish physicist and mathematician John Lighton Synge proclaimed in 1959 that of all physical measurements that of time is the most fundamental and its theory “the most basic theory of all.” Twenty years later the Belgian physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine declared that “the concept of time is much more complex than we thought.” Indeed, having studied the basic notions in physics such as space, mass, force, simultaneity and written on each of them a detailed monograph, I postponed a similar treatment of the concept of time because I realized that just by being the “most basic” it is also the most complex of all notions in physics and therefore a rather complicated subject of research. In fact, time, as perceived by us, is both “flowing” and “enduring,” and its passing always lasts.
If I venture nevertheless to offer a survey of the conceptual development of the notion of time, I do so because I limit myself to the role of time only in physics and ignore as far as possible any general metaphysical, psychological or biological issues. The presentation thus ignores the history of the notion of time as conceived in the myths and religions of ancient civilizations and begins, after some brief remarks about the Pythagoreans, with the theories of time as proposed by the Pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. After a critical discourse on the early proponents of an idealistic interpretation of the notion of time such as that of St. Augustine, medieval theories of time (such as those that proposed the atomicity of time) are discussed. After a presentation of sixteenth century discussions of time (e.g., by Bruno or Gassendi), Barrow’s and Newton’s theories of physical time are critically analyzed. This is followed by a brief study of the conceptions of time by Locke and Berkeley and subsequently by Leibniz, who is often regarded as the first proponent of a relational or causal theory of time. Following some brief remarks about Hume’s conception of time, Kant’s critical investigation of the notion of time is analyzed.
There follows a discussion of theories of an “arrow if time” as a result of the existence of irreversible thermodynamic processes. After a brief discussion of Poincaré’s thesis of the conventional status of a temporal metric, Einstein’s interpretation of distant simultaneity and consequently his definition of time via simultaneity (as presented in his famous 1905 paper on relativity) are discussed. This is followed by some remarks on the concept of time in the general theory of relativity. A brief outline of the role of the concept of time in modern cosmology—in particular, Hawking’s notion of “imaginary time”—conclude this essay. n
Editor’s Note: This is the abstract of Max Jammer’s Pais Prize Lecture, which was delivered on his behalf by Pais Prize Committee Chair Michael Nauenberg at the APS April Meeting in Jacksonville. The full paper is being published as “Concepts of Time in Physics: A Synopsis,” Physics in Perspective 9 (2007), pp. 266–280.
Reports from the March APS Meeting
Denver, CO, 5-9 March 2007
Read March Meeting Reports
April Meeting Reports
Jacksonville, FL 14-17 April 2007
Read April Meeting Reports
The Seven Pines Symposium
By Roger Stuewer
The eleventh Seven Pines Symposium was held May 2–6 on the subject of “Emergence: From Physics to Biology.” This annual gathering is dedicated to bringing prominent historians, philosophers, and scientists together in a collaborative effort to probe and clarify significant foundational issues in science, as they have arisen in the past and continue to challenge our understanding today. The meetings occurred at the Outing Lodge at Pine Point near Stillwater, Minnesota, a beautiful facility surrounded by spacious grounds with many trails for hiking and birding. This idyllic setting and the superb cuisine available make the Lodge an ideal location for small meetings. Lee Gohlike, its owner and the founder of the Seven Pines Symposium, outlined its goals in his opening remarks.
Unlike in typical conferences, the talks are limited to 30 minutes, with twice as much time devoted to discussions following the talks and long midday breaks to permit small groups to assemble at will. As preparation for the talks and discussions, the speakers prepare summarizing statements and background reading materials that are distributed in advance to all participants. This year 22 leading historians, philosophers, and scientists were invited to participate in the symposium.
Each day the speakers set the stage for the discussions by addressing major historical, philosophical, and scientific issues pertaining to the central subject of the symposium. Thus, the morning of Thursday, May 3, was devoted to the general topic of “Conceptual Framework: Concepts of Emergence,” with Jeremy Butterfield (Cambridge University) speaking on “Illustrations from Physics” and Kenneth Schaffner (University of Pittsburgh) talking about “Illustrations from Biology.” That afternoon the general topic was “History of Concepts of Emergence,” with Michael Silberstein (Elizabethtown College) concentrating on physics and Manfred Laubichler (Arizona State University) on biology. On the morning of Friday, May 4, speakers addressed the question “Can Chemistry be Fully Reduced to Physics?” with Jeffrey Ramsey (Smith College) and Eric Scerri (UCLA) offering two different perspectives. That afternoon Kenneth Waters (University of Minnesota) examined the question “Can Biology be Reduced to Physics and Chemistry?” while Lee Gohlike gave a fascinating talk on “The Evolution of the Mercedes Racing Car, 1901–1914.” The morning of Saturday, May 5, was devoted to the topic of “Emergence and Reductionism,” with Leo Kadanoff (University of Chicago) concentrating on physics and Ricardo Azevedo (University of Houston) on biology. That afternoon the topic was “Complex Networks,” with Stuart Kauffman (University of Calgary) focusing on physics and Michael Travisano (University of Minnesota) on biology. Roger H. Stuewer (University of Minnesota) chaired the closing discussion on Sunday morning, May 6.
The twelth annual symposium founder Gohlike has had a lifelong interest in the history and philosophy of science. To plan the annual symposia, he established an advisory board consisting of Stuewer, Chair; Michel Janssen (University of Minnesota), Vice Chair; John Earman (University
of Pittsburgh); Geoffrey Hellman (University of Minnesota); Don Howard (University of Notre Dame); and Robert M. Wald (University of Chicago). Also participating in the eleventh annual Seven Pines Symposium were Mark Borrello, Alan Love, Antigone Nounou, and Serge Rudaz from the University of Minnesota, and Philip Stamp and William Unruh from the University of British Columbia. The twelfth annual Seven Pines Symposium will occur May 7–11, 2008, on the subject, “The Known and Unknown Universe.”
New Books of Note
Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics
Edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams
Cambridge University Press, 2006, 471 pages, illustrated, $35.00.
Reviewed by Eugenie V. Mielczarek
Out of the Shadows is a compilation of the scientific contributions made by forty women physicists and of the suffocating discrimination they experienced. Compilations are an important condensed archival source tracing history and providing references. The strength of this book is as a historical record of this discrimination.
It’s all here: nepotism rules or skittering around them, which left women employed but unpaid for as long as thirty years; denial of tenure until elected to the National Academy of Sciences, awarded the National Medal of Science, or recognized with prestigious honors from foreign scientific societies; and exclusion from the Nobel Prize. Even the benign announcement of an impending marriage was enough to bring the Dean of Barnard to request Harriet Brooks, who had worked with Ernest Rutherford and J. J. Thomson, to resign.
More than a record of historical facts, biography is a celebration of human endeavor. For women who dreamed about studying physics, the exemplars of physical scientists were all men. There were few mentors but lots of anti-mentors, men who actively discouraged women. In the 1960s a dean of students confided that “I always try to talk them—prospective women science majors—out of it.” Women reading these stories will experience painful déjà vu.
As a child I was inspired by a biography—of Louis Pasteur. I imagined how wonderful it must be to spend a life deciding what mysteries of science were the most important and solving them. Later as a teenage in the 1940s, I was warned that thinking about physics or even worse attempting to make a living at it, was socially unsuitable for a woman. But my father Theodore Vorburger, who was comptroller of the American Institute of Physics, hired several girlfriends and me as summer employees to straighten out the membership and journal subscription lists. Often a supervisor would announce that someone like Fermi or Oppenheimer was in the building, and I could glimpse these famous men on the grand wooden staircase of the AIP’s New York offices. One morning I met Melba Phillips on these stairs; she was tall and standing very straight. Although we exchanged few words, this chance meeting strengthened my resolve. Here was a woman physicist, and I was thrilled to meet her. Although her life was an inspiration to many physicists like me, she was not included in this volume.
The barriers chronicled in this book seem unbelievable in 2007 but how far are we removed from them? While writing this review, I told a friend how Lise Meitner was required to hide under a seat in the physics lecture hall. She responded with some of her own experiences as a science major at a large public northeastern university during the mid-1950s. Students in a required chemistry course were seated segregated by gender, but her first name was genderless and she found herself among the men. After discovering this, the professor quickly reorganized the class so she was seated among the women. And upon meeting her embarrassed male advisor from the physics department, he at first explained that he did not accept female advisees, but he reluctantly made an exception in her case.
Among the successes of Out of the Shadows are the selection of contributing authors and a seamless editorial transition from chapter to chapter. These forty sketches, each about 3000 words long, are written with obvious endearment by a cross section of colleagues and family members. Each woman’s life and scientific contribution are described, with excellent references to her publications and other biographical material. Compilations can be dry and hurried. Starting with excellent informative introductions, Byers and Williams have produced a lively, important historical record. All scientists will find it useful and fun to read.
However, there are a few surprises, including a curious comment by Freeman Dyson in foreword. He divides women into those who dedicate their lives to science, giving Emmy Noether and Marie Curie as examples, and those “who worry about making a living and raising a family under modern conditions.” Would anyone preface a compilation of biographies of male scientists with these constraints? Dyson partly redeems this gaffe by describing with heart-warming prose several women physicists, including his mentors Mary Cartwright, Vanna Cocconi, and Cecile DeWitt-Morette. But in describing Cocconi he explains that for “any young woman who chooses Vanna as a role model, the first priority should be to find a husband like Giuseppe.”
And for whom is this book intended? Before reading it, I expected it had been written to inspire women age 16 and older—the formative years of learning and career decision-making, an age when such a compilation would have been very important to me, for one. Pioneering can be a lonely and daunting endeavor. I would have loved to study such a record when I was in high school. But for the most part, the level of scientific description in each chapter presupposes a fair knowledge of physics. The scientific contribution of each woman is written for other scientists. A younger audience will come away mystified.
I reluctantly concluded the book was written for working women scientists, as a celebration of women’s contributions to physical science—and not primarily to inspire scientifically unsophisticated youth. Thus I strongly encourage Byers and Williams to consider selecting perhaps twenty of these women and to publish an edition written for high-school level readers. It is important to open this record to them, too. For as Chen-Shing Wu once said, “Never have so few contributed so much under such trying circumstances.” (quoted by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne in Nobel Prize Women in Science, 2nd edition, Citadel Press, 1998, p. 8).
Eugenie Vorburger Mielczarek is emeritus professor of physics at George Mason University. With Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, she has written a popular science book, Iron: Nature’s Universal Element. She has also reviewed four biographies of women scientists for Physics Today and the American Journal of Physics.
We Hear That. . .
Spencer Weart will be stepping down from his position as Director of the AIP Center for History of Physics when someone can be found to replace him, according to reliable sources at AIP. That may take awhile, however. It’s difficult to imagine the Center without him—especially as he’s headed it for more than three decades. As a teacher of the history of physics at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz, I especially appreciate the award-winning web site on the subject that Spencer was instrumental in creating and developing. The best source on the history of physics available on the web, I tell my students. He’s also played a big role as a member of many Forum committees, and we hope he will continue participating after he leaves the Center.
. . .
The long-awaited history of Fermilab, The Ring of the Frontier: The Rise of Megascience at Fermilab, by Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb and Catherine Westfall, has been accepted for publication by University of Chicago Press. But given the pace of university-press publishing, it will probably be another year before the book is in print. Watch for a review in these pages.
. . .
We also suspect that Robert Crease of SUNY Stony Brook is getting close to publishing the second volume in his series on the history of Brookhaven National Laboratory, to accompany his excellent 1999 book, Making Physics, but have not heard anything definite along these lines. Crease has been nominated by the Forum as an APS Fellow.
. . .
Forum member Luisa Bonolis writes to say that her history of the Italian electron-positron collider AdA (Aniello di Accumulazione), “Bruno Touschek versus machine builders: AdA, the first matter-antimatter collider,” was recently published in Rivista del Nuovo Cimento, Vol. 28, No. 11 (2005), pp. 1-60. Conceived by Touschek in the 1950s, AdA was the immediate precursor of the much larger machine ADONE (“big AdA”) at Italy’s Frascati laboratory. Electron- positron colliders have long since become one of the principal workhorses of high-energy physics.
. . .
On the solid-state physics front, watch for my two articles on the central role of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in the development of the silicon microchip and the establishment of Silicon Valley. The first, titled “From Bell Labs to Silicon Valley,” appears in the Fall 2007 issue of INTERFACE magazine, while another will be published in the December 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum on the planar processing technique that made it all possible. Physicists Robert Noyce, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last made crucial contributions to silicon microchip technology, which has had such a tremendous impact on modern society.
. . .
Finally, we sadly note the passing on 12 August 2007 of Ralph Alpher, who with George Gamow and Robert Herman wrote the famous 1948 Physical Review paper, “The Origin of Chemical Elements,” which adumbrated the modern Hot Big Bang theory that dominates cosmology today.
—Michael Riordan, Editor
Officers & Committees 2007-2008
Chair: William Evenson
Chair-Elect: David Cassidy
Vice Chair: Gloria Lubkin
Secretary-Treasurer: Thomas Miller
Forum Councilor
Roger Stuewer
Other Executive Committee Members
Paul Halpern, J. David Jackson, Gordon Kane, Peter Pesic, Virginia Trimble, Catherine Westfall, George Zimmerman, Michael Riordan (non-voting), Spencer Weart (non-voting)
Program Committee
Chair: David Cassidy
Benjamin Bederson, Jeffrey Dunham, Clayton Gearhart, Michel Janssen, Virginia Trimble, George Zimmerman
Nominating Committee
Chair: Virginia Trimble
Danian Hu, Harry Lustig, Ronald Mickens, Peter Pesic, George Zimmerman
Fellowship Committee
Chair: Gloria Lubkin
David Cassidy, Gordon Kane, Noemie Benczer Koller
Editorial Board/Publications Committee
Chair: Michael Riordan
Benjamin Bederson, William Evenson, John Rigden, Robert Romer, Spencer Weart
Membership Committee
Chair: Thomas Miller
Pais Prize Selection Committee
Chair: Daniel Siegel
Vice Chair: Paul Halpern
Max Jammer, Spencer Weart, Catherine Westfall, Laurie Brown (alternate)
Historic Sites Committee
Chair: John Rigden
Gordon Baym, Katharine Gebbie, Gerald Holton, Spencer Weart, Steven Weinberg
