Nuclear structure

The International Conference on Nuclear Structure held at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, began at 8:45 a.m. on August 29th and ended at 12:00 p.m., September 3. The conference was limited in attendance to 400 (the number of seats in the auditorium,) and up to (though, naturally, not including) the last day, the hall was full. The sessions, usually four per day, were consecutive, with four to six rapporteurs giving a summary talk in each session. Judging from the results, the rapporteur system works very well. Each rapporteur culled from the 250 submitted abstracts those relating to his subject—in some cases even discussing them—and presented the present status with a stress on recent work. The conference was overwhelming, alternately confusing and enlightening, and very tiring. (A seldom‐considered virtue of simultaneous sessions of consuming interest is their built‐in excuse for relaxing outside. Nevertheless, the impression carried away and still retained is that this was the most successful conference this reporter has yet attended. It accomplished its task, giving a fairly clear picture of the status of the present understanding of nuclear structure. That such a dynamic and broad subject could be well summarized is a tribute to the organizers of this conference—all but Weisskopf are members of the Chalk River National Laboratory and Queen’s University—as well as to the uniformly high level of the talks.

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