Excerpts from a Russian diary

Luis W. Alvarez, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of that University’s Radiation Laboratory, is one of the most widely‐known American physicists of his generation. He was one of 14 US physicists invited to attend the Moscow Conference on High‐Energy Physics, held May 14–20, 1956, by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Although his frank and revealing personal diary of that period was kept solely for his immediate friends and relatives, the author, whose contributions as a diarist have not gone unnoticed on other historic occasions, has generously offered the document for publication here for the information of physicists everywhere. Concerning the style in which it is written, Alvarez explains: “I wrote at high speed in the midst of a very busy schedule; I could have edited out the rough spots in the prose, but I think it is perhaps better to leave them in, as they emphasize the fact that the diary is a record of my feelings at a particular moment, and not a well thought out story of a trip. Most of the additions and corrections which were put in during the editing (in November 1956) are enclosed in parentheses.” It should be added that space considerations have required a slight abridgement of the text in this published version, the deletions being confined mainly to traveling and sight‐seeing episodes. This is Part I of the Alvarez diary. Part II will appear in a later issue.