Issues

The opinions expressed below are those of an individual, theorist M. Moravcsik of the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, and thus should not be construed as being necessarily representative of views held in AIP, APS, LRL, BNL, etc. They do, however, provide a basis for wider discussion of a problem of pressing concern to all physicists, and in that light they are presented here.

The model of a technical information system described here by Dr. Kessler involves a working literature taken from twenty‐one journals in the field of physics. The system, designed and constructed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a prototype operating in a realistic test environment, uses remote consoles having access to a timesharing computer facility. Programs have been developed for a large variety of search and processing techniques in real time as well as for delayed output. The work is supported by the National Science Foundation and in part by Project MAC, the experimental computer facility at MIT which is sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Conference on Nuclear Physics was organized under the sponsorship of UNESCO and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. It was held July 2–8, 1964, in the UNESCO Palace in Paris. Dr. Danos is a physicist in the Radiation Physics Division of the National Bureau of Standards.

The author, a plasma physicist from Princeton University, served as scientific secretary of the four‐week seminar described below. The program was arranged to coincide with the launching of the new International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (see page 52).