Someone pulled a cord and yellow fabric billowed down, revealing a three-story-tall statue of my grandmother.

It was May 2012, in a city just north of Shanghai. And there she loomed, a sculptor’s rendition of Chien-Shiung Wu, the pioneering, internationally renowned nuclear physicist, who left China in 1936 to pursue her education in the United States, and, in a lot of ways, resisted looking back. She disproved what was thought to be a fundamental law of nature and raised my dad in Manhattan and taught me how to use chopsticks as a kid.

In life, she stood maybe all of 5 feet, and shrinking with age. Now she was preserved as a young version of herself, seated atop an actual pedestal, draped in academic robes like the ones I’d only seen in photographs of her winning 16 honorary doctorates of science, including the first given to a woman at Princeton University. It took me a moment to comprehend that the statue was supposed to be her. So big, and so green — the same minty hue as the Statue of Liberty.

An interview in two sessions, July 1997, with Murray Gell-Mann, Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus. Dr. Gell-Mann was on the faculty of Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy from 1955 until 1993.

In this anecdotal interview tracing his career to 1960, he begins by recalling his Manhattan childhood during the Depression, family background, early education at Columbia Grammar School. Discusses his undergraduate years at Yale, graduate work at MIT with Victor Weisskopf, courses at Harvard with Norman Ramsey and Julian Schwinger—followed in 1951 by two terms at Institute for Advanced Study, working with Francis Low on a problem in quantum field theory. Summer 1951, University of Illinois, works on complex systems with Keith Brueckner; interaction with John von Neumann.

Joins University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies, headed by Enrico Fermi; recalls such colleagues as M. L. Goldberger, Leo Szilard, Harold Urey, Gerald Wasserburg; works on dispersion relations and pseudoscalar meson theory with Goldberger. At University of Illinois, summer 1953, works with Low on elementary-particle field theory, invents the renormalization group; comments on later contributions of Petermann & Stueckelberg, his student Kenneth Wilson. His early work at Caltech on what was later called S-matrix theory; comments on contribution to superstring theory. Meets future wife, Margaret Dow; travels in
Scotland with her, 1954; their marriage. Recruited to Caltech by R. P. Feynman; life in Pasadena; visits Bohr Institute, Copenhagen, summer 1955; Spain, France, and the U.K. Back at Caltech fall 1956, teaches quantum mechanics course. Recollections of Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer, Stewart Harrison. Comments on undergraduate education at Caltech and vain efforts to promote behavioral and social sciences there.

Work at RAND, 1956; paper with Brueckner; objections by Brueckner and Tatsuro Sawada; contributions of Bill Karzas, Don DuBois, Jeffrey Goldstone. Annual Review of Nuclear Science article on “last stand of the universal Fermi Interaction” with Arthur Rosenfeld; related work by Marshak & Sudarshan; Feynman’s approach; their collaboration; later work by Yang & Lee. Comments on origins of the Eightfold Way. Preoccupation with symmetry, supermultiplets, weak and strong interactions, Yang-Mills theory. Collaboration with Maurice Lévy et al., in France, 1959, on the axial vector current in beta decay.

The development of Mossbauer spectroscopy has proceeded rapidly since the discovery in 1957 of recoil-free gamma radiation. The history of the technique is not unlike that of other discoveries in physics, particularly that of nuclear magnetic resonance. The initial discovery was in nuclear physics, and it rested quietly for a time. There followed a swift, even hysterical surge of interest in and exploitation of the phenomenon until, by 1962, it had been utilized in many different areas of physics, and the groundwork for the elaboration of the technique had been laid. The history of this period along with the early experimental and theoretical developments was well summarized by Hans Frauenfelder in his lecture-note and preprint volume published at that time. Since then the development of the technique has proceeded at a calmer, but still vigorous, pace. One still finds an occasional conference given over in its entirety to Mossbauer spectroscopy and indeed there continue to be developments that warrant such conferences. On the whole, however, the results of experiments using the technique are more likely to be discussed at conferences on the subject under investigation than in special technique-centered sessions.

Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories The first privately-financed research organization devoted primarily to the development of atomic power for industrial purposes, the Walter Kidde Nuclear Laboratories, has begun research operations at its recently constructed laboratory near Garden City, on Long Island. The new laboratory, housed in a brick structure of modern design, with laboratory area for work in physics, chemistry, metallurgy, radiochemistry, and materials testing, is expected to be in full operation by the latter part of 1953, by which time it is expected that a minimum staff of one hundred will be employed. The stated objectives of the organization are (1) the development of commercial atomic power, with particular emphasis on original research and development in the field of low-cost nuclear reactors, (2) cooperation on a contract basis with government agencies and their contractors in the development and design of atomic facilities, and (3) collaboration with private industrial organizations, laboratories, and others interested in the application of the nuclear sciences to specific problems.

On August 22, 1950 the Brookhaven reactor became critical. The work of scientists is notable for its lack of drama. It is usually difficult to say when a piece of apparatus starts to work, and it is even more difficult to decide when an experiment is complete. The uranium chain reaction is outstanding, therefore, since the change from an inert subcritical assembly of fissionable material to a supercritical chain reactor is sudden and, to all intents and purposes, discontinuous.

A small lump of uranium undergoes spontaneous fission of U 238 with a half-life at least a million times that for alpha decay. The rate is so slow as to render measurement difficult. By assembling quantities of uranium in a moderator such as heavy water or graphite, the rate of fission is found to vary with the amounts of material used. Upon adding additional materials, the neutron level at a given position and, of course, the fission rate (partly now in U235 ) increase rapidly at first, then slowly, approaching a new constant level. The steady level may be two, ten, or a million times that to be expected from the spontaneous fission rate.

THE American Physical Society was founded on May 20, 1899 by a group of about forty physicists who met in a small lecture room in Columbia University's Fayerweather Hall in New York City. The first regular meeting of the Society was held five months later. Before that time, physicists had customarily joined in the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, its Section B being concerned primarily with physics. The formation of an independent Society for the "advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics" was only one of a series of events marking the swift development of physics in the history of American science.

When the newly formed American Physical Society joined in the 49th meeting of the AAAS in New York in June, 1900, the Society and the Association's Section B met on alternate days. It was remarked in a contemporary report of the event that although the two programs were kept separate, there was little else to distinguish the groups. The difference, eloquently enough stated by the action of the charter members in forming the new Society, was their conviction that the time had come for a separate professional scientific organization devoted to the advancement of physics. A cooperative and close relationship has nevertheless been maintained between the two organizations, and the Physical Society for many years met frequently in joint session with Section B of the AAAS. At the end of its first year, the Physical Society had a total membership of only fifty-nine; the present membership is nearly ten thousand.

The research effort here in Oak Ridge bears in some measure on almost every phase of the country's atomic energy program. For the laboratory hereunlike the national laboratories at Argonne, Brookhaven, Berkeley, Ames, and Los Alamos—has no single primary function but has many different areas in which it contributes, with about equal emphasis, to the development of atomic energy technology.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is large; since the recent merger of the research activities at the electromagnetic plant with those of the original Oak Ridge National Laboratory, nearly 2800 technical and nontechnical people are associated with it. Its activities include, on the applied side, radioactive chemical technology; Oak Ridge National Laboratory was the chemical pilot plant for the Hanford plutonium process. It includes reactor technology; the laboratory is engaged in three separate reactor projects, among which are the materials testing reactor to be built at Arco as a joint project of Argonne and Oak Ridge, and the nuclear powered aircraft in cooperation with NEPA and NACA. It includes electromagnetic isotope separation research and production of America's isotopes, both radioactive and stable.

In the year 1914 a young (at that time) British physicist, James Chadwick, w h o was sent to Germany to study the phenomena of radioactive decay, came across a rather interesting but, as it looked then, not very important discovery. H e found that electrons emitted by radioactive substances in the process called beta transformation do not all possess the same velocity. In fact their velocities vary over a rather wide range.

This discovery did not at first attract much attention. It "was believed that the difference in velocity between one emitted electron and another occurs simply because the slower electron loses some energy in escaping from a deeper layer within the radioactive material. It was only thirteen years later that this seemingly natural assumption was questioned and disproved by two other British physicists, C. D. Ellis and W . A. Wooster. They took some radium E, a beta-active element, and arranged to measure the heat liberated by radioactive decay both inside and outside the parent body. They chose radium E because it has no appreciable gamma radiation, which would confuse the issue. They were also careful to subtract from the total heat measured the part supplied by alpha particles given off by the polonium into which radium E decays.

In physics, as in every other branch of human endeavor, there comes a time when each individual must consider for himself the future of his personal relationship with the science he is attempting to master. At the present moment, with the war years over, large numbers of students propose to join the ranks of the 10,000 or 12,000 of us in this country who have been educated in physics. While it is true that the colleges of the country, because of their increased enrollments, will be in a position to absorb an increased number of these younger people, many more of them will go into the industrial and government laboratories of the country.

THE urge and the interest to find those ultimate elements in terms of which everything else is made of are almost as old as the human civilization. However, as our knowledge increases what were thought to be elementary may turn out to be composites. Consequently, the class of these supposedly fundamental elements changes with time. Such was, for example, the periodic table of atoms in the last century. Today we know that all different molecules, atoms, and nuclei are complexes resulting from the existence and the interactions of some thirty particles which are called "elementary particles".