The diversity of educational opportunities that now exists at Columbia has grown out of a long and distinguished tradition of physics teaching and research. I.I. Rabi, Polykarp Kusch, Willis Lamb, Charles Townes, T.D. Lee, James Rainwater, Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger all received the Nobel Prize for work done while they were members of the physics faculty. Horst Stormer received the Nobel Prize after joining the Columbia faculty. Rabi, Rainwater, Lederman, and Schwartz also received their doctorates from Columbia, as have six more Nobel laureates: Robert Millikan, Julian Schwinger, Leon Cooper, Val Fitch, Arno Penzias, Norman Ramsey, and Martin Perl. Furthermore, Schwinger, Cooper, Schwartz and Ramsey graduated from Columbia College. Columbia graduates, along with many scientists who spent their formative years here, have gone on to make extraordinary contributions to science as researchers, teachers, and intellectual leaders.
At the beginning of this century, Lorentz's work led to Einstein's theory of relativity and Planck's black-body radiation formula introduced the concept of quantum which culminated in the discovery of quantum mechanics. All of our modern scientific and technological developments - nuclear energy, atomic physics, molecular beams, lasers, x-ray technology, semiconductors, superconductors, supercomputers - can be realized only because we have relativity and quantum mechanics. To humanity and to our understanding of nature, these are all-encompassing.
The Columbia Physics Department has played a significant role in several of these developments.
In May 1899, the American Physical Society was founded at Columbia. The Earnest Kempton Adams Fund was established in 1904 enabling the department of physics to invite distinguished scientists to Morningside. H.A. Lorentz was appointed EKA Lecturer in 1905-1906 and Max Planck in 1909. One of the most important works of Lorentz, The Theory of Electrons, was written during his stay at Columbia.
Theoretical research in the 1940s involving close collaboration with the atomic physics experiments emphasized calculations in quantum electrodynamics.
Although this work continued, it was during the 1950s that the main focus shifted to high energy physics and properties of subatomic particles. T. D. Lee and his collaborators, together with their students, made major strides in understanding the symmetries of subatomic particles which culminated in the prediction and discovery of parity and charge conjugation symmetries in the weak interaction.
The desire to investigate matter on an increasingly fine scale has led to experiments using beams of increasingly high energies. The Nevis cyclotron and the accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory were used in a number of experiments. Rainwater and Fitch explored the structure of nuclei by observing x-ray transitions in muonic atoms; Richard Garwin and Leon Lederman observed parity nonconservation in pion and muon decay; and Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger proved that the muon neutrino was distinct from the electron neutrino. By the 1970s, particle physicists were seeking even higher energies. Columbia experimenters spread out to accelerators in Europe and the new Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory west of Chicago. They carried out work on neutrino interactions, photon and hadron interactions, and production of lepton pairs. To this day, Columbia experimenters remain at the forefront of research in these laboratories.