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Home   |   Programs   |   Physics for All   |   Physics History   |   Historic Sites Initiative

Historic Sites Initiative


Suggest an Historic Site!

Gray arrow  Eligibility Requirements
Gray arrow  Historic Sites Nominating Form

Hughes Lab
Unveiling the plaque commemorating the operation of the world’s first working laser.
Hughes Research Laboratories
Malibu, California

Historic Sites Mission

The APS Historic Sites Initiative was created by the APS Executive Board in October 2004 with the following mission:

"The purpose of the Historic Sites initiative is to raise public awareness of physics. Unexpected encounters with an attractive plaque that identifies an important and interesting event in the history of physics will be an effective way of getting physics before the general public. The initiative will also benefit physicists by increasing their own awareness of important past scientific advances, hence of their membership in the historic evolution of their profession."

In pursuit of this mission, the Society has established the Historic Sites selection committee to evaluate potential historic physics sites in the United States. When a site is chosen, a ceremony is arranged at which a plaque is presented, often by a member of the APS Presidential line (the vice-President, President-elect, President, and past President are the members of the APS Presidential line).

Commemorated Historic Sites

 
Alfred O. C. Nier
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Arthur Compton
Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Benjamin Franklin
The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA
Bronx High School of Science
Bronx, NY
Brookhaven National Lab
Upton, NY
C-S Wu, E. Ambler, R.W. Hayward, D.D. Hoppes, and R.P. Hudson
National Bureau of Standards, Washington, DC
C.J. Davisson and L.H. Germer
Bell Labs, West Village, New York City, NY
Carl Anderson
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA
Charles David Keeling
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA
E.F. Nichols and G.F. Hull
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Ernest Lawrence and M. Stanley Livingston
University of California, Berkeley
Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy
McGill University, Montréal, Québec
Founding of JILA - CU-Boulder and NIST
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
Founding of the Physical Review
Cornell University, Ithaca New York
George Stranahan, Michael Cohen, and Robert Craig
Aspen Center for Physics, Aspen, CO
Henry Augustus Rowland
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Columbia University, New York, NY
J. Willard Gibbs
Yale University, New Haven, CT
Jefferson Laboratory
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL
John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain
Bell Laboratories, New York, NY
Joseph Henry
The Albany Academy, Albany, NY
MIT Radiation Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Michelson and Morley
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Robert Millikan
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Menlo Park, CA
Shelter Island Conference
Shelter Island, NY
Summer Symposium in Theoretical Physics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Theodore Maiman
Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, CA

Featured Physicists

 
Carl Anderson - California Institute of Technology, Discovery of the Positron
Carl Anderson - California Institute of Technology, Discovery of the Positron
 
 
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