AIP Turns 75

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) will observe its 75th anniversary this year.

AIP was established in New York City in 1931 to help facilitate publishing and other services for five scientific organizations: the American Physical Society (APS), the Optical Society of America (OSA), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the Society of Rheology (SOR), and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). Five more Member Societies joined later: the American Crystallographic Association (ACA), the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), the American Vacuum Society (now known simply as AVS), and the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Today, AIP is one of the largest physics journal publishers in the world, and the non-overlapping membership of its 10 member societies numbers more than 100,000 (see the AIP home page). Physics News Update, the weekly summary of physics research you are reading at this moment, is prepared by the AIP Media and Government Relations (MGR) division, operating out of AIP's headquarters in College Park, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.

To mark AIP's 75th anniversary, PNU will run a series of occasional comparisons between noteworthy physics topics from 1931 and 2006. For the first one of these articles, see Sharper Images of Biological Samples in this issue.

Read the AIP's 75th anniversary press release