Shelter Island Conference

The first Shelter Island Conference on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics was held from June 2-4, 1947 at the Ram's Head Inn in Shelter Island, New York. The most famous participant, J. Robert Oppenheimer, deemed it the most successful scientific meeting he had ever attended. A relatively young Richard Feynman would later observe, "There have been many conferences in the world since, but I've never felt any to be as important as this." The conference cost $850.

Shelter Island was the first major opportunity since Pearl Harbor and the Manhattan Project for the leaders of the American physics community to escape the paranoia of war. As Julian Schwinger would later recall, "It was the first time that people who had all this physics pent up in them for five years could talk to each other without somebody peering over their shoulders and saying, 'Is this cleared?' "

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Organization

The conference was conceived by Duncan MacInnes, a scientist studying electrochemistry at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Once the president of the New York Academy of Sciences, MacInnes had already organized a number of small scientific conferences. However, he believed that the later conferences had suffered from a bloated attendance, and over this issue, he resigned from the Academy in January 1945. That fall, he approached the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with the idea of a series of 2–3 day conferences limited to 20–25 people. Frank Jewett, the head of the NAS, liked the idea; he envisioned a "meeting at some quiet place where the men could live together intimately", possibly "at an inn somewhere", and suggested that MacInnes focus on a couple of pilot programs. MacInnes' first choice was "The Nature of Biopotentials", a subject close to his own heart; the second would be "The Postulates of Quantum Mechanics", which later became "Foundations of Quantum Mechanics".

K. K. Darrow, a theoetical physicist at Bell Labs and secretary of the American Physical Society, offered his help in organizing the quantum mechanics conference. The two decided to emulate the success of the early Solvay Congresses, and they consulted with Léon Brillouin, who had some experience in that area. In turn, Brillouin suggested consulting Wolfgang Pauli, the recent Nobel medalist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

In January 1946, MacInnes, Darrow, Brillouin, and Pauli met in New York and exchanged letters. Pauli was enthusiastic about the topic, but he was primarily interested in bringing together the international physics community after the ordeal of the war. He suggested a large conference, including many older, foreign physicists, much to MacInnes' chagrin. With Jewett's encouragement, MacInnes asked Pauli for suggestions of "younger men" such as John Archibald Wheeler, explaining that the Rockefeller Foundation would support only a small conference. Pauli and Wheeler replied that MacInnes' conference might be merged with Niels Bohr's conference on Wave Mechanics in Denmark in 1947; they pointed out that the Niels Bohr Institute had close ties with the Rockefeller Foundation anyway. Darrow wrote to Wheeler that Bohr's conference was a poor replacement because it would draw few Americans. Finally, Shelter Island was explicitly an American conference.

Lamb shift

The muon

Participants

See also

• Solvay Conference

References

Primary sources

• Bethe, Hans (August 15, 1947). "The Electromagnetic Shift of Energy Levels". Phys. Rev. 72 (4): 339–341.
• Lamb and Retherford (August 1, 1947). "Fine Structure of the Hydrogen Atom by a Microwave Method". Phys. Rev. 72 (3): 241–243.
• Marshak and Bethe (September 15, 1947). "On the Two-Meson Hypothesis". Phys. Rev. 72 (6): 506–509.
• Weisskopf, Victor (September 15, 1947). "On the Production Process of Mesons". Phys. Rev. 72 (6): 510.

Reviews

• Robert Crease and Charles Mann (1996). The second creation: Makers of the revolution in twentieth-century physics. Rutgers UP. ISBN 0-8135-2177-7. 
• Schweber, Silvan (1985). "A Short History of Shelter Island I". R. Jackiw, N. Khuri, S. Weinberg, E. Witten Shelter Island II: Proceedings of the 1983 Shelter Island Conference on Quantum Field Theory and the Fundamental Problems of Physics: 301–343, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-10031-2. 
• Schweber, Silvan (1986). "Feynman and the visualization of space-time processes". Rev. Mod. Phys. 58 (2): 449–508.
• Schweber, Silvan (1994). QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-03685-3. 
• Smith, Richard (1996). Notes on the 1947 Shelter Island Conference and Its Participants. Retrieved on January 17, 2006.