The idea of creating an international center for theoretical physics was conceived in Rochester at the High‐Energy Physics Conference in September 1960. In his banquet address, John A. McCone, who was then the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, mentioned with approval a suggestion that nations collaborate in setting up a joint high‐energy accelerator. Some of us—Hans Bethe, Robert Sachs, Nicholas Kemmer—who assembled afterwards, wondered whether it might not be more practical to start on a smaller scale with a modest, truly international center for theoretical physics—financed, perhaps, by one of the United Nations family of organizations. No such institutes existed then; a theoretical physics institute possibly might even set a pattern for a future United Nations University.

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