Issues

Do physicists care for grants in chunks less than a million dollars at a time? This article grew out of correspondence with the author who wrote to the Institute some time ago expressing his puzzlement that the bulk of grants in aid to scientific research made by Research Corporation has shifted within the last four years from nearly equal numbers in physics and chemistry to a marked preponderance for chemistry. The author speculates on the reason for this and on some of the trends of our changing times in regard to foundation support of research.

These remarks on scientific literature and the use of references to obscure the past—which the author is against—were taken from a paper presented before a meeting of the New England Section of the American Physical Society at Williamstown, Massachusetts on October 22, 1949 and repeated at the meeting of the Metropolitan Section of the same Society at Brookhaven National Laboratory on March 31, 1950.

Some new experiments in transistor electronics are described here in which concepts suggested by theory have been verified directly by experiment.

Cervinia, Italy, July 1949

ACS calls for national action

Atomic versus arbitrary definitions

NBS Instrument Research Office

At Argonne and Oak Ridge

Some sessions reported; Noise—any undesired sound (American Standard z‐24); Speech, room acoustics, Impedance measurements; Medical and biological effects.

International Conference on Magnetism at Grenoble

AAAS meeting in Cleveland; Applied mechanics conference in 1951

Research corporation grants