Norman Ramsey and ICAP

Abstract

Norman Foster Ramsey, who was born on August 27th, 1917 and died on November 4th, 2011, had an enormous influence on the world of physics during the second half of the 20th century. His scientific ideas underlie much of the research reported at this conference and he played a principal role in the creation of ICAP itself. In 1946 Ramsey became the first head of the physics department at the newly created Brookhaven National Laboratory. He appointed Victor A. Cohen, I.I. Rabi’s first graduate student, to set up a molecular beams laboratory. Interest in molecular beam magnetic resonance grew rapidly and in the early 1950s, Ramsey, who was then at Harvard, inaugurated a summer conference–the Brookhaven Molecular Beams Conference–that was held biannually and supervised by Victor Cohen. Scientific interest flourished and in the mid 1960s Vernon Hughes proposed expanding the Brookhaven Molecular Beams Conference into the International Conference on Atomic Physics, ICAP. The first ICAP was held at New York University in the spring of 1968. Vernon Hughes is justly remembered as the father of ICAP but Norman Ramsey deserves to be remembered as its grandfather. Ramsey’s name is primarily associated with the separated oscillatory field method for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1989, but this was only one of his many scientific contributions. With Edward M. Purcell he launched the search for breakdowns of fundamental symmetries that continues today and he carried out classic studies of magnetic interactions in molecules. He had a deep interest in high precision measurements and atomic clocks. His invention of the hydrogen maser was cited in his Nobel Prize. That Prize was shared with Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul and at the Nobel banquet Ramsey presented what could be a credo for much of the ICAP community: