Keynote Address
A Candle, a Bushel Basket, and Physicists
John S. Rigden
Washington University in St. Louis
ABSTRACT
A physics education is a passport to a wide range of careers. Physics alumni and alumnae are successful professionals, well paid, enjoy their work, and are respected by their co-workers. While physics departments would like to increase both their production of physics majors and the number of graduate students, they do little-to-nothing to apprise students of the professional opportunities physics provides and nothing to market a department's products or to expand the market for physicists. Physics is a mature science with a firmly established reputation. If physics is what physicists do, then the reputation of physics is inaccurate and it works against the welfare of academic physicists. If physics were a business, it would be bankrupt. Since fresh ideas can come from thinking about old practices in new ways, it is useful to think of physics in business terms.
Banquet Speech
Einstein: Why the Standard of Greatness?
John S. Rigden
Washington University in St. Louis
ABSTRACT
Albert Einstein occupies a unique place in the modern mind because he was a physicist and because physics has a special mystique. He is the standard of intelligence and, for that reason, he is the standard of greatness. The intellectual outpouring that Einstein exhibited in 1905 with five ground-breaking papers in a seven month period is unequaled in the history of science. He challenged 100 years of confirmed wisdom with his March quantum theory of light (the only 1905 paper Einstein regarded as revolutionary); he established molecular dimensions, verified the statistical nature of thermodynamics, reconstructed space and time, and showed that energy and mass were the same thing (E = mc 2). All this he did by means of pure reason and by so doing, Einstein touched the minds and emotions of Homo sapiens, the thinking animal.