Don't blame me, I voted for Humphrey. So read an anonymous slide put on the projector at the beginning of a session on the employment crisis in physics at the American Physical Society meeting in New York last month. The physics establishment, the men who have been managing the affairs of the physics community, acknowledges that the field is beset by serious problems. The employment and funding situation is the most visible. But the troubles of the physics community are to a degree a reflection of broader social and political concerns that affect many segments of a disaffected public grown weary of war, discouraged by continuing social injustice and distrustful of many aspects of technology. Among the sciences, physics is perhaps buffeted the most by discordant strains. There are several reasons. Physics is the basis for many of the technocratic developments that now look more and more frightening. Physicists played a large part in bringing the world into an era perpetually under the threat of nuclear devastation. And the field attracts highly independent thinkers, many of whom are now questioning values of the system from within. The session on employment at the APS meeting recruited three wellestablished physicists, Drs. Joseph Reynolds of Louisiana State University, Robert H. Dicke of Princeton University and Lee Grodzins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported statistics that sounded like a horror story to a professional group that was used to being in great demand until recently. In terms of constant dollars, says Dr. Reynolds, the Federal science budget is down 30 percent in four years. The raises promised by President Nixon's proposed budget for fiscal year 1972 (SN: 2/6/71, p. 93) bring expenditures for science just back to the levels of 1968 when counted in the same constant dollars. There are about 20,000 Ph.D. physicists in the United States. Of these, says Dr. Grodzins, 3.000 were looking for jobs last year1500 of them newly graduated. Of those who were looking, 30 percent did not find jobs in which they could use their knowledge of physics. Approximately 1,000 could not find positions in this country, and of these most went abroad looking for work, thus reversing a brain drain of many years standing. Yet, points out Dr. Grodzins, physicists make up a small portion of Federal expenditures. An extra $100 million, he contends, could solve the manpower problems, not only of physics but of all science. To get more support for science, the leaders of the physics community propose going to the people and the politicians with the same arguments and tactics they have used successfully in the past. Voting for politicians who favor expenditures for science, like Humphrey, is an example. The establishment would justify the pursuit of physics on the traditional grounds: the intellectual one that it is there to be studied and the practical one that it aids technology and national defedise. An increasingly vociferous corps of radicals in the physics community scorns this as salesmanship. One establishment speaker even urged that the Federal Government support the physics community as a kind of national resource to be stockpiled against emergency. He reminded his listeners that during World War II the physics community was mobilized by the Government and developed means for saving the country. This kind of talk drives the radicals up the wall. To them participation in the making of the atomic bomb is, if not exactly a crime, something to be ashamed of rather than to recall with pride. Many nonestablishment types feel that the establishment's attitude is hypocritical. To adequately summarize his attitude toward the establishment's expressions of concern and its proposals for remedies, Dr. Charles L. Schwartz of the University of California at Berkeley used a colloquial expression for natural fertilizer. Dr. Schwartz, a 39-year-old professor of physics, is one of the most active members of Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action. SESPA was founded at an APS meeting in New York two years ago and has been a