Society Activities

The annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Solid State Physics was held March 10 to 12 in Cleveland at the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University. The division was informally organized in 1943 by six individuals who formed a committee, and acted (in the words of Frederick Seitz, who spoke at the dinner meeting on March 11) “as spokesmen for the field during the somewhat stormy period in which the Society as a whole was attempting to decide whether to remain a one‐celled organism like a Paramecium or to evolve into something more complex like a starfish or a sea anemone.” The division was formulated and authorized in 1947–48. Roman Smoluchowski served as its first chairman during the 1948–49 term. William Shockley is the new chairman, and A. von Hippel (vicechairman) and S. L. Quimby have taken the place of T. A. Read and S. Siegal, the retiring members of the executive committee. The other members of the committee are A. Lawson and R. Smoluchowski.