Living and working at Harwell

NOV 01, 1960

The following observations are those of an American who has spent the past year in England as a visiting physicist in the laboratories of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell). An undertaking of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, the AERE is located near the village of Harwell in rural Berkshire, fifteen miles south of Oxford and fifty‐five miles west of London. The author, who returned to the United States in September, is a senior physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3056704

Alexander Langsdorf

The giant but youthful research laboratories in England and Europe are much less well known to Americans than the great foreign universities. This situation is changing as an increasing number of American physicists are making extended visits to laboratories such as Harwell, in England. The movement is made possible by the world‐wide relaxation of security restrictions in the “basic” sciences, reactor engineering, and thermonuclear research as well as by the removal of classified work to separate sites. Today Harwell, for one, directly employs non‐Commonwealth scientists including Americans while other visitors are “attached”, meaning on leave from their regular posts and not paid by Harwell. And I should say at once that the enthusiasm of Egon Bretscher, head of Nuclear Physics, has sparked many visits to Harwell by American physicists.

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More about the authors

Alexander Langsdorf, Argonne National Laboratory.