Perspectives and contributions over the past 75 years

For his insightful review of the changes in physics during the first 75 years of the American Institute of Physics ( Physics Today, June 2006, page 32), Spencer Weart began with a hypothetical physicist who, at age 100 now, surveys what has happened since his graduate student days in 1931. But it was not necessary to be hypothetical. There is a real example of a living physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, who was a 19-year-old physics graduate student in June 1931, two years before receiving his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Wheeler detailed most of the changes in his 1998 autobiography, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics , with Kenneth Ford (Norton, 1998), and has been actively engaged in physics for the entire history of the American Institute of Physics, including a year (1966) as president of the American Physical Society.