During his active scientific career, Stanley Ruby always addressed most fundamental aspects of physics without being a "reductionist" - asking questions regarding the fundamental interaction of electromagnetic waves with matter - nucleons, atoms, molecules and the condensed matter, and answering these questions with unique demonstration experiments. This recollection paper is intended to be a brief compilation of Stanley Ruby's selected contributions. They are creation and annihilation of acoustic phonons, chopped gamma-rays, and jump diffusion in condensed matter. In addition, Ruby's nuclear physics background fitted best for him to identify many new candidate nuclear resonant transitions across the nuclear periodic table; and his grasp of chemical physics led to the development of isomer shift systematic among isoelectronic compounds of 5s-5p atoms. Finally, Ruby's most pragmatic suggestion in 1974 to use synchrotron radiation to observe nuclear resonance, and its eventual demonstration, addressed many fundamental aspects of collective nuclear excitation process and gamma-ray coherence. Furthermore it opened many new avenues of application of the tool to a broader area of science which otherwise would have been impossible with the traditional approach of using radioactive sources in performing Mossbauer spectroscopy measurements.

Let us now look at the state of physics, which I find to be healthy and sound. For some fields of physics, certainly for particle physics, the year just past has been exhilarating. But American physics in general seems to hustle along with such enormous vigor and success that it will be difficult to cover all developments in detail. Forgive me if I sound partial to those fields with which I am more familiar—remember the old saying that to a shoemaker, there is nothing like leather.

Nuclear physics: Last June I attended an International Conference on High Energy Physics and Nuclear Structure at Santa Fe and Los Alamos, and was very much impressed by the size of the delegations from various countries. It reminded me of the early 1960's, when large numbers of American physicists often attended conferences abroad. Now the direction of flow appears to be reversed. We listened to many reports of experimental breakthroughs made with the new generation of accelerators here and abroad. Clearly a new era in nuclear physics has just begun: