Two Physics Centennials a week to remember
by John L. Roeder
Since last June I was involved in planning two centennial celebrations. Two organizations pertinent to my field of physics were founded in 1899: the American Physical Society (APS) and the Physics Club of New York.
As Secretary-Treasurer of the Physics Club, I was intimately involved in planning a fitting commemoration of a hundred years of meetings of New York city area physics teachers. I suggested inviting three of our own members who had played significant roles in our history to present some of their favorite physics demonstrations through the years -- Herb Gottlieb, John Johnston, and Bob Neff. That they did a day and a hundred years following the founding of the Club on 18 March 1899. It was a joyous celebration, filled with recollections of how the demonstrations were developed and improved -- and whether they would have been possible in the year of the Club's founding.
My involvement with planning the centennial celebration of the American Physical Society was more peripheral. While the Physics Club began with six members and has yet to exceed 100 in membership, the original 36 members of the American Physical Society have grown into a worldwide membership of more than 40,000. Over a quarter of them came to their centennial meeting in Atlanta, more than the Society's total membership half a century ago. As Stephen Hawking quipped at his Wednesday evening lecture, "I didn't know there could be 11,000 physicists in one place!"
I was fortunate to be part of a quartet of physics teachers invited to develop a Teachers Resource guide for the Society's wall chart, "A Century of Physics," which would be unveiled at the Atlanta meeting, beginning the very day after the Physics Club's centennial meeting. I was even more fortunate to be invited to come to Atlanta for the unveiling and all the other festivities the Society had planned to "celebrate a century of physics."
The festivities were already in full swing when I arrived on Saturday. Nobel laureates in physics and related sciences were honored at a luncheon which also honored physics teachers and students. We were welcomed by APS President Jerome Friedman and Coca-Cola Vice President Anton Amon. We were then addressed by National Academy of Sciences President Bruce Alberts about the Academy's activities, particularly the National Science Education Standards and other programs to improve science education. At the end each student was presented a certificate by the Nobel laureate who had been sitting at the same table.
Sunday evening was another event that comes only once in a century -- a Gala at the Fernbank Natural History Museum, featuring buffets of three different types of local cuisine, physics chanteuse Lynda Williams, physics magician Bob Friedhoffer, and showings of the IMAX film Cosmic Voyage. Set among the curved balconies and winding staircases of Fernbank, with a crescent moon in the western sky, it seemed to be an evening of sheer magic.
Nor was that the end. Indeed, things were just beginning. For the next five days there would be continuous meetings on every aspect of physics imaginable. Special sessions were designated as centennial symposia, at which the past century of physics was reviewed, in many cases by the people responsible for key developments, many of them the Nobel laureates attending Saturday's luncheon.
There was also a significant outreach to the public and the city of Atlanta, whose Georgia World Congress Center provided an excellent setting. There was a series of public lectures and presentations, some held at the Congress Center and others at various locations throughout the city. I had the pleasure of introducing the speaker at several of these: Lawrence Krauss, author of The Physics of Star Trek, addressed that topic on Monday night at the Rialto Theatre; Richard Voss presented an illustrated lecture on fractals on Tuesday afternoon at the Woodruff Arts Center, followed by the opening there of "Microscapes," an exhibit sponsored by Lucent Technologies; and Kenneth Laws and Amy Kohler demonstrated the physics of dance on Wednesday evening at the Fox Theatre, after which the audience was invited to the Altanta Ballet's dress rehearsal (complete with chorus and symphony orchestra). The Fox and the ballet were so breathtaking that I hated to have to leave for the Hawking lecture. Earlier that day I had also introduce Brian Holmes' performance on the physics of brass instruments and Richard Brandt's lecture on the physics of baseball; and the night before I enjoyed a staged reading of Matthew Wells' Schršdinger's Girlfriend.
The public lectures were well attended not only by APS attendees but also by members of the Atlanta community, many of them students. Although a centennial happens only once a century, this kind of outreach to the public is the kind of example that needs to be followed more often in order for them to enjoy physics rather than regard it as something too hard to understand. This outreach program and many special centennial events were organized by Brian Schwartz, and I hope he is empowered to continue the outreach program in future years. He certainly made the third week of March a centennial week I will always remember.
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