AIP Forum Focuses on Energy and Defense

The annual Industrial Physics Forum, sponsored by the American Institute of Physics’ Corporate Associates, was hosted by General Atomics (GA) in San Diego on 6–7 November. Some attendees opted to arrive a day early to participate in an academia–industry outreach workshop, which focused on training students for industry, designing a professional master’s degree program, and forming collaborations between universities and industry. The forum was held in cooperation with The Industrial Physicist and the APS Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics. Additional sponsors of the workshop included several corporations and professional coalitions.

The theme of the forum was “Physics, Energy, and Defense: Synergistic Interactions.” To reinforce the theme topics, the roughly 150 industrial and academic physicists in attendance toured two GA facilities. One was the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, housing GA’s experimental tokamak, which has a D-shaped plasma. The other facility toured was the GA Aeronautical Systems, Inc, production facility for the Predator (see photo) and other remotely operated aircraft that are used for surveillance in combat operations.

At the banquet, held on Monday night at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the crowd was addressed by Robert Dynes, chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, and by two local Congressional representatives: Randall “Duke” Cunningham and Robert Filner. AIP then presented its 2000 Award for Science Writing by a Scientist to Charles H. Townes of the University of California, Berkeley, for How the Laser Happened (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Next year’s forum is slated for 22–23 October 2001, at the Xerox Wilson Center for Research and Technology in Webster, New York. The theme will be “Color Documents in the Internet Era.”