American physics comes of age.

Abstract

Before the 1930s, physics was mostly a European enterprise. To be sure, there were many substantial contributions from this side of the Atlantic, but most of these came from a few isolated contributors, such as Joseph Henry, Josiah Willard Gibbs and Henry Rowland. Albert Michelson, one of the last of this breed of American physicists, died in 1931. Beginning in the 1930s, American physics began to rival—and in later decades to dominate—European physics. To illustrate the growth, we have selected a few photographs for each of the past five decades. Our selection, clearly, cannot be complete or objective. We merely mean to appeal to the collective nostalgia of physicists and to suggest how things have changed.