1959 International Plasma‐Physics Institute

From August 31 through September 5, 1959, an international conference on basic plasma physics, microwave plasma physics, and the general many‐body problem as related to plasmas was held at the University of Washington in Seattle. The sponsors of this Institute were the Boeing Airplane Company, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Washington. Its purpose, as established by the committees which consisted of H. Dreicer (Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory), J. Drummond (Boeing Airplane Company), W. Elsasser (University of California), R. Geballe (University of Washington), R. Gould (California Institute of Technology), D. Kerst (General Atomic), E. Meeron (Boeing), M. Rosenbluth (General Atomic), and L. Wilets (University of Washington), was to provide reviews of recent developments in these related specialties. For this reason, all except four of the formal talks were one‐half hour long with ten minutes additional for discussions. The time was monitored by a clock which started Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (with cannon) in a gradual crescendo after two warning lights had flashed on the podium. This was effective for most of the speakers, but one, Buneman, proved a match for all of the devices: he arranged his talk so that he could show a series of surrealistic type slides of electron trajectories to the accompaniment of the overture.