How the Jefferson Physical Laboratory came to be

Abstract

A hundred years ago, the first building in the western hemisphere designed for research and teaching in physics opened its doors. The consequences of such an event are of very different interest to different groups. The physicist will ask about the advances made in Jefferson Lab, and in nearby structures added later, by its faculty, students and collaborators: Lyman lines and broken symmetries; dimensional analysis and nuclear magnetic resonance; the muon and the 21‐cm line; tests of the equivalence principle and of quantum electrodynamics; the acoustics of buildings and of violins; precise mass spectra, and the phase diagrams of hundreds of substances; the theory of magnetism and quadrupole moments; medical uses of particle beams and determinations of the structure of the ionosphere; the Duane–Hunt law of x‐ray emission, and Russell–Saunders coupling; the research and teaching of Edwin C. Kemble, America's first quantum theorist; and the latest in mathematical physics, condensed‐matter theory or elementary‐particle interactions