The role and training of the physicist in industry

One measure of industry’s stake in physics is to be found in the study summarized in the preceding article, which indicates that nearly half of the nation’s physicists are employed by industrial firms. The applications of discoveries in physics, moreover, have given rise to new industries and to vast new areas of industrial progress and thus to products and processes and techniques which are becoming increasingly influential forces in the changing world of the twentieth century. These and other factors bearing upon the status of the physicist in industry are discussed in various frames of reference in this issue of Physics Today. The seven articles appearing in the pages that follow are based on invited addresses presented at a symposium on the role and training of the physicist in industry which was organized last fall by the American Institute of Physics as part of a meeting attended by more than one hundred individuals, including representatives of the Corporate Associates of the Institute, officers of the AIP Member Societies, and officers and staff members of the Institute. The symposium was held on October 1, 1959, at Columbia University’s Arden House in Harriman, N.Y. C. Guy Suits, vice president and director of research of the General Electric Company and chairman of the Institute’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Associates, presided at the meeting.