Dedication week at General Atomic

DEC 01, 1959

The John Jay Hopkins Laboratory for Pure and Applied Science, home of the General Atomic Division of General Dynamics Corp., was formally dedicated on Thursday, June 25, 1959. Three years ago the late John Jay Hopkins broke the first ground on the site, located at the northern end of the city of San Diego, and a year and a half later construction was sufficiently advanced to permit moving into the new quarters. Since that time the laboratory’s projects concerned with reactors, fusion and thermoelectric power, space ships, nuclear, atomic, and solid‐state physics, radiation chemistry, and metallurgy have multiplied so greatly that it has become necessary to begin construction of additional buildings. The dedication ceremonies were followed by a week of talks and symposia attended by guest scientists from the US and abroad.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3060601

Martin O. Stern

Some random impressions of the week‐long dedication program at General Atomic include the following: The talks had only the scientific approach as their unifying aspect; except for this, they had considerable range and diversity. There was the counterpoint of several different fields—physics, chemistry, metallurgy, even philosophy—and the harmony of different motivations, from the “purest” (philosophy of science and epistemology) to the immediately applicable (reactor engineering). This was appropriate, since the laboratory tries to encourage free interchange between disciplines and has the words “pure and applied” in its title. Further, the extremes of speakers’ ages were striking, spanning, I believe, 28 to 75. There seemed to be little correlation between age and type of subject matter, the latter ranging from thoughts distilled over a period of many years to controversial theories on phenomena much discussed at this very moment.

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Martin O. Stern, John Jay Hopkins Laboratory.