Visiting Physicists Program

I have a letter from a graduate student who writes “Many of us [students] are very ignorant as to the structure of research in industry.” Another graduate student writes, about industrial research in physics, “I [had] suspected that there is greater pressure to produce and a generally less interesting environment than in an academic setting.” It was to help counter these very prevalent attitudes that The American Physical Society set up its Visiting Physicists Program in 1973. In its current form the program arranges visits by physicists from industrial and national laboratories to university physics departments and visits by professors and their students to R&D laboratories, to improve the interaction between these two worlds. The success of this four‐year‐old program can be judged by its steady growth and by comments from those who have participated in visits, such as the two students quoted above. The first student's letter continues by praising the program for being both informative and interesting, and the second student, who had been suspicious of the R&D laboratories before his visit to one, writes “These feelings have been allayed by my visit… I am now much more favorably disposed toward the research environment at such institutions.”