Theory institute thrives in its third year

Gazing out his office window recently, J. Robert Schrieffer saw a whale blowing. That's just one of the attractions at the NSF Institute for Theoretical Physics, now in its third year of operation at the University of California in Santa Barbara. The climate and scenery are delightful, and the office space looks more like an executive suite than a collection of rooms for physicists to work in. But most important, the institute is attracting good physicists who are producing noteworthy research.