American Physical Society Honors Jefferson Lab

Yesterday afternoon, the American Physical Society designated Harvard’s Jefferson Laboratory as a Historic Site, citing the special role that it and the Harvard Physics department have played in encouraging physical sciences education.

In a crowded Jefferson 250, Harvard President Drew G. Faust was presented with a rectangular plaque by APS President Cherry A. Murray, who is also the incoming dean of the newly-minted School for Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The decision to choose Jefferson Laboratory was made by the APS nominating committee. Murray said the committee saw Jefferson as an obvious pick thanks to its deep history.

Opening its doors in 1884, Jefferson was not only one of the oldest physics buildings in the nation, but also one of the first buildings to be created for both research and education.

“This was really the beginning of the research institution,” Murray said. “That is pretty impressive.”

In Faust’s acceptance speech, she quoted laboratory founder Professor John Trowbridge, who said in 1877, “The department of physics in a university must embrace both teaching and investigation. If it is given up entirely to teaching, the cause of science suffers, and the object of a University which is founded both to teach and increase the sum of human knowledge is defeated.”

Faust explained that because the faculty of the physics department has continued to hold this idea close, the plaque really belongs to the inhabitants of the Jefferson building, not just the structure.

“Today’s ceremony honors a building,” she said. “But what matters most is the people who inhabit the building.”

And those denizens have made great strides in the field over the years, including Wallace C. Sabine, who pioneered the field of architectural acoustics, and Theodore Lyman, who discovered the Lyman series, which characterizes hydrogen electron transitions between different energy states.

“[We are] hoping that these plaques will help students walking by the building to think of physics and the history of physics.”