…of Shell Models, Model T’s, Mesons, and Thunderbirds

It is for me a source of great pleasure to speak at a Chicago meeting. The Chicago meeting is today one of our last remaining links with physics and physicists of the past. Our other big meetings have for the most part shifted their base from the natural habitat of the physicist—the informal, intellectual, and cultural atmosphere of the academic campus—to the cold, forbidding, business‐like bustle of a large hotel. Gone are the pleasant chats in the quadrangle, the equations carved in the soft earth of the Bureau of Standards, the chalk marks on the sidewalks, the blackboard bull‐sessions of Pupin Hall, or an evening theoretical session on the Institute grounds in Princeton with a young graduate student named Feynman heckling Einstein. These are being replaced by market tips—both stock and flesh—and the slave auction of the fourth and fifth floors of the New Yorker. This is why it’s all the more refreshing to be back in Chicago where the meeting still centers itself about the University of Chicago, where the spirit of Fermi, Compton, and Michaelson still permeate the air of the meetings, and science takes precedence over job security. In a way, Chicago may be held responsible for all these changes because the turning point of our profession came about here under the West Stands not 300 yards from this very spot. But the University has fortunately not allowed itself to become tainted with other pressures and even today in its walls are originated the newer ideas and concepts in what we used to know before the war as physics but today have to refer to almost apologetically as fundamental physics. It is here at the University of Chicago that so much of the important physics of this century was fathered and where one still has the feeling that physics is an integrated whole and not an assembly of separate noninteracting orthogonal subjects. Here also was born the shell model which in effect brings me to the title of my remarks of this evening: Of Shell Models, Model T’s, Mesons, and Thunderbirds.

This article is only available in PDF format