Pure Physics—a costly vitality and a restricted limelight

Abstract

I am delighted to find that someone actually remembers my 20‐year‐old after‐dinner talk, even if Robert Richardson has only exhumed its corpse to comment adversely on its state of preservation. There is much truth in what he says; in particular, when I suggested the possibility that the excitement of physics might run out after 15 or 25 years I did not guess that funds would be found to equip solid‐state laboratories on the scale we now see in dozens of universities. At that time, post‐war austerity in Britain had not yet entirely given way to the temporary euphoria of the sixties. In addition, of course, the astonishing development of integrated circuits and the dramatic reduction in the cost of instrumentation have opened up new fields that otherwise would have remained inaccesible. So there is life in the old dog yet, and we may expect to see a reasonable proportion of our brightest young minds attracted into physics for some time to come.