How Aspen Changed the World of Science

In 1962, a pair of enterprising young scientists with a passion for the outdoors founded a summer retreat for theoretical physicists in the small town of Aspen, Colorado in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains. From modest beginnings, the Aspen Center for Physics has grown over the last sixty-four years into one of the most significant organizations in all of American science. This lecture traces the history of the Aspen Center for Physics and its broader impact through more than half a century of upheavals and changes in both science and society. It follows the Center from its early days as a utopian refuge from the strictly regimented environment of the Cold War-era research university, through turbulent years of federal funding cuts and political crises for American physics, and into years of growth and expanding influence during which the Center has come to serve as a prominent and internationally-imitated model for a new kind of scientific institution.