Physics Roundtable: Reinventing Our Future

Lubkin: In the 1990s physics is under strong pressure to change. Federal policies that have guided America’s science and technology enterprise almost continuously since the end of World War II have come under increasingly close scrutiny in Congress, and once more, as in the 1960s, an attempt is being made to direct basic research supported by the government to more relevant and practical ends. American industry, at the same time, has virtually abdicated its support of basic research, thereby leaving the Federal government as the sole guardian of one of the nation’s most important responsibilities—that of assuring the benefits of basic research. All this has happened in a period of unexpected and unsettling political, social and economic changes brought about by the end of the cold war and by the country’s technological malaise. At a time like this we physicists ought to be wondering how we should reinvent ourselves to remain as robust, creative and productive as we have been in the past half‐century. So I begin with a question: How can universities respond to the changing demands on physicists and the changing market for physicists?