Shelter Island Conference

The 1st Shelter Island Conference on physics was held from the 2nd to the 4th of June 1947 in Shelter Island, New York. The conference dealt with the foundations of quantum theory and gained importance in the history of science. As follow-ups the Pocono Conference occurred in 1948 and the Oldstone Conference occurred in 1949. The 2nd Shelter Island conference was held in 1983 as a retrospective on the 1st conference and reunited many of the participants in the 1st conference, together with some new, emerging leaders of the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. Quotes In this issue, Silvan S. Schweber Silvan Schweber puts in historical context two notable events in twentieth-century physics, both held at Shelter Island, New York Shelter Island. The first was the fabled Shelter Island conference of 1947, attended by most leading US physicists of the day, including Oppenheimer, Rabi, Feynman, Schwinger, and Bethe. These scientists, many of them fresh from the triumph of the Manhattan Project, were treated like royalty; several arrived by police escort arranged by a veteran of World War II, grateful to the men he thought had saved his life. Over the course of three days, these physicists learned of several startling new results, including the discovery of the Lamb shift, the measurement of the hyperfine structure of hydrogen and deuterium, and of results on meson absorption by the atmosphere—all results that appeared to shake the foundations of the prevailing quantum theory. The conference inspired the physicists to go back and carefully reexamine that theory, resulting in modern quantum electrodynamics and the developments in quantum field theory that eventually led to the Standard Model. Editors Do Physics Conferences Still Matter? Physics in Perspective 18 1 15 March 2016 1–2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-016-0179-y 10.1007/s00016-016-0179-y In early June of 1947, a group of 24 physicists gathered at the Ram's Head Inn on Shelter Island, New York Shelter Island, a remote, sparsely populated island located about 100 miles east of Manhattan near the end of Long Island. Their 2½-day meeting was the postwar theoretical physics conference in the United States. Its purpose was to bring together leading researchers to discuss some of the outstanding problems in quantum theory. (The list of participants reads like a Who's Who in Physics.) The impact of that meeting is now part of history. Indeed, as a direct consequence, Hans Bethe produced his famous Lamb shift Lamb-shift calculation and Robert Marshak proposed the two-meson hypothesis. Even more important, the seeds were sown for Richard Feynman’s and Julian Schwinger’s classic works on quantum electrodynamics and later more formal developments in renormalization theory. Those breakthroughs laid the foundation for our present-day theories of elementary particles. William Marciano William J. Marciano, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.232.4753.1035.a Science 232 4753 23 May 1986 1035 A Reunion in Physics: Shelter Island II. Proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics, edited by Roman Jackiw, Nicola N. Khuri, Steven Weinberg, and Edward Witten The Shelter Island Conference was a watershed. The first in a series of three small post-World War II conferences on theoretical physics sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), it took place on 2–4 June 1947 at Ram's Head Inn on Shelter Island, New York Shelter Island, at the tip of Long Island. The initial impetus for the conference came from Duncan A. MacInnes Duncan MacInnes, a distinguished physical chemist at the Rockefeller University Rockefeller Institute, who had suggested to Frank Jewett, then president of the NAS, that the academy sponsor a series of small conferences. MacInnes enlisted the help of Karl K. Darrow, the secretary of the American Physical Society, and John A. Wheeler, a young professor of theoretical physics at Princeton, in organizing a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics. The Shelter Island conference grew out of theses initial efforts. The participants were primarily theoretical physicists, most of whom had been leaders at the highly successful wartime laboratories: the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory, the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos. ... Also in attendance were several experimentalists: Willis Lamb and Isidor Rabi, who reported on experiments on the spectrum of hydrogen recently performed at Columbia University, and Bruno Rossi, who reported on the results of research carried out in Rome on the absorption of cosmic rays in the atmosphere. The discussions at Shelter Island were primarily concerned with the interpretation of these experiments. Silvan S. Schweber, Osiris 2 1 265–302 Shelter Island, Pocono, and Oldstone: The Emergence of American Quantum Electrodynamics after World War II https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/368658 10.1086/368658 External links Shelter Island II: Proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics Dover Books on Physics illustrated, reprint Courier Dover Publications 2016 9780486797366 https://books.google.com/books?id=rABYCwAAQBAJ (432 pages; 1st edition 1985; edited by Roman Jackiw, Nicola N. Khuri, Steven Weinberg, & Edward Witten; with an introduction to the Dover edition by Silvan S. Schweber) Category:20th century in science Category:History of science Category:Quantum mechanics