The atom

JAN 01, 1952

3000 members and guests of the American Institute of Physics met in the Chicago Civic Opera House last October 25th for the Symposium on Physics Today, during the AIP’s 20th Anniversary meeting. The following article, based on the second of six invited papers presented during the symposium, is the third to appear in this journal. The fourth, by John C. Slater, will be found on page 10. Papers by Drs. Darrow and Fletcher appeared in November and December, 1951, respectively.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3067474

E. U. Condon

One can always tell which part of physics is advancing most rapidly by consulting a few numbers of The Physical Review. Judged by this criterion, the heroic period of the physics of the atom may be taken to be roughly the two decades from 1915 to 1935. (Such dates are never exact.) Prior to 1915 there had been much speculation about the electrical nature of the atom, and Rutherford’s work on alpha particle scattering and Bohr’s first work on a quantum theory of the atom came a little before 1915. By 1915, however, physicists had really caught the scent of an exciting new forward surge of discovery and were preparing to exploit it fully.

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E. U. Condon, Corning Glass Works, Corning, N.Y..