Physical Review Letters Celebrates 50 Years
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Physical Review Letters, started by Editor Sam Goudsmit as an experiment, reaches its 50th anniversary in July 2008. We are marking this occasion in several ways (see the editorial). This page will be updated frequently with historical highlights and personal reminiscences as well as information on celebratory events taking place throughout the year. Feedback to prl50th@ridge.aps.org is welcome.
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August 25, 2008 Edited by Martin Blume
Letters from the Past — A PRL Retrospective: This week's Milestone Letter was originally published in 1985. Milestone Letter: Three-Dimensional Viscous Confinement and Cooling of Atoms by Resonance Radiation Pressure Milestone Letters >
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July 31, 2008 During my tenure as APS Editor-in-Chief Physical Review Letters changed from a journal whose authors were mostly from the U.S. to one whose authors were mostly from abroad. I encouraged authors to publicize their work even before their papers were accepted for publication. And I sought to raise the quality of the papers that were published even higher than before.
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June 30, 2008 When Sam Goudsmit was 23, he and George Uhlenbeck hypothesized that the electron had spin. Sam was a well-known atomic physicist working at the University of Michigan when World War II began. During the war he first worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Lab, and then in the waning days of the war in Europe he led a mission to determine how far the Nazis had gotten in developing an atomic bomb. After chairing the Physics Department at Brookhaven, in 1950 APS named Goudsmit Managing Editor of Physical Review and Reviews of Modern Physics; in 1966 he was named Editor-in-Chief. He founded Physical Review Letters in 1958.
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Edited by Sonja Grondalski |
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The timeline features events related to the Physical Review and PRL, as well as seminal developments in physics after 1893. We also list a few important papers published by the journals. Papers published in PRL will be added to the timeline periodically.
Complete Timeline >
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