During the third quarter of our century there have come into use the principal discoveries of science and engineering of the modern age. In this brief time, the energy of the nucleus, the pattern macromolecule of the gene, the electrons and holes and waves of the crystal, the radio signals of the universe, and human exploration of outer space have all come into the business of our society. The basic discovery of new interactions of holes and electrons, of charges and waves in very perfect crystals, called the transistor effect, is indeed 25 years old. So is communication theory, in the form of Shannon’s historic synthesis of the ideas of encoding and processing knowledge in digital form, which was foreshadowed by some of the concepts of Nyquist, Brillouin and perhaps even Samuel F. B. Morse. Already in 1938, however, Dr. George Stibitz at Bell Laboratories had also shown that all kinds of computation could result from electrical digital signal processing. Thus, after Professor Howard Aiken, Drs. Eckert and Mauchly, and Dr. von Neumann had demonstrated that these effects might be pursued better electronically, rather than electromechanically as Stibitz had done, the transistor and other solid state electronics enabled the rise of the Computer Era.

Since communications and computers have become major elements of economic growth and national position in world markets, as well as in international security affairs, it is wise as well as interesting, on this welcome occasion of celebrating innovation and the creative vitality of our industrial research and development community, to see how broad is the base for technical growth for new discovery. Also, we should view its influence on other areas of progress, of what has come to be categorized as solid state science and technology, or materials science and engineering, as reflected in electromagnetic properties, digital signals, and binary states. For the evidence keeps coming that there is the capability in the solid state of matter to relate to, and to augment, the mental efforts of mankind, just as it was found in the creation of machines—the wheel, the pulley, the gear, the engine—that the muscles of man and the animals could be augmented.

Now, of course, we do not know the mechanisms of thought any more than we understand, despite the Krebs cycle and some other phenomenological insights, the mechanism of muscle energy. But that has not limited the analogies unduly, for functionally we have built a civilization on relief of the exertions of muscle—and energy supplements. And as Shannon has pointed out, we ought to work similarly on the entropy aspects of society, which are especially reflected in its information processes and its development of what we called knowledge, or even facts. Among these concepts, you will remember that Shannon has derived that the information content of an event is roughly inversely proportional to the probability of its occurrence, an entropy parameter. Insofar as we can estimate these matters, his concept is amply established in the last 25 years.

So with such central ideas of the human condition as the extension of mental processes through entropy machines, like the extension of muscles through energy machines (which unfortunately always in their free energy have their entropy factor too), we should try to estimate what we should expect from further research and engineering on matter as a signaling, information storing and processing medium. This is all in addition to its load-bearing, energy-carrying qualities.

What we see so far looks hopeful indeed. These are heroic additions to the well-established findings that efficient communications and computers, missile guidance and control, hi-fi and video entertainment can be obtained from assemblies of relatively cheap and simple substances, as in printed circuits, along with domestic refrigerators and other electronic and electrical appliances. For we are seeing, with integrated circuitry, single crystal functions for amplifying, regulating, oscillating, converting, memorizing electrically and magnetically the essence of human knowledge and other wise thought. This is happening by synthesis and modification of matter, rather than only by putting together various kinds and shapes and sizes of material, such as was done up until recently.

Now industry and Government alike, serving our society in its multitude of needs, are presently captivated by these integrated subsystems and microelectronics for everything, so that we are even seeing a scarcity of products, a backlog of manufacturing demand, that was unimaginable two or three years ago. That, however, aside from its serious economic implications, should only serve to remind us that we must look ahead and see whether these many functions of microelectronics and signaling through materials are really being fully served by our present efforts, and especially by our present ways of working at progress.

Namely, we have found that matter seems to fit, on atomic and molecular scale, the mind-working, thought-helping aspects of digital binary processes. How are we relating that knowledge, and the potential of vastly deeper knowledge that can be drawn from it, to the other functions of materials in meeting man's needs? On an exceedingly exquisite scale, solid matter responds to external fields, especially in binary states, often in nearly instant time. Immediately, it is either magnetized or demagnetized, oriented or disoriented, made conducting or nonconducting, superconducting, or not, one color or another radiating from its atomic or molecular oscillations in one way or another, by laser or other mode.

Now we report at this National Conference, convened by Industrial Research, that there has indeed emerged a remarkable epoch of economic and social progress. This has been closely related to these findings that solid matter, and not just electrons and waves as long thought, can act to extend the functions of the mind and of the sensing of mankind. This includes the transmission of language and coding of knowledge, the exercise of memory and logic, affecting the entropy of human affairs. Our particular message is that, because of these qualities, related to the practical needs and uses of society, as met by our industry with the sometimes benign presence of Government, our national engineering, and science, in educational and industrial laboratories alike, have come to a new scale of understanding matter. This seems to have happened as follows: Because of the principles and. inventions in communications, computers, and electronics, as we have noted, there have been both large funding and, more importantly, bold visions and intellectual challenge, to seek very detailed, very fine structure effects among the atoms and molecules of crystals and solids. It turns out that the dimensions of action in processing knowledge, in making signals which relate to human thought and cognition, can often compare with lattice spacings, or at least with distances of a few tens or hundreds of that size. Thus the transistor and other semiconductor effects are associated with free paths of the charges in the crystal, which require exceedingly closely controlled perfection and composition.

The consequence of this has been the preparation of matter of higher purity than ever before imagined, such as by the use of Pfann's method of zone refining when there is less than one foreign atom in ten billion atoms in silicon. Further, such studies have permitted the experimental assessment of the imperfections such as dislocations in solids as expected by Taylor, Orowan and others and treated by the comprehensive theory of Read. These in turn are found to control much of the flow, fracture, fatigue, and other limitations of materials forming the basis of our modern civilization. The strength of aircraft, bridges, motors, automobiles, and wires is strongly determined by these features which we are now learning to recognize and regulate. So here we have a first and fundamental example of our theme—of which we shall not have time to give the hosts of other examples already established. But it is, that the study of the exquisitely particular formation of the solid state of crystals from disordered atoms and molecules was made economic by industrial research on the influence of fields, waves, signals, and charges in extending the mind and expressions of humanity. Then this work now comes back to give access to a new Age of Technology based on the substance of our planet and its universe.

Of course this is not to imply that, on the one hand, the basic concepts permitting this advance came from industrial research, for most did not. Mostly, they arose from the genius of brave pioneers in science—Faraday's electricity, Maxwell's wave equations, Einstein's identity between energy and matter, Debye's insight into electrical insulation, Bohr's atom, Rutherford's nucleus, Thompson's electron, and so on. But there were already hints of how our theme this evening might work, when Davisson and Germer experimentally showed how particles could be waves. This was in their early search for practical and widely used improvements in thermionic tubes, and the interaction between metal crystals and electron beams. In the last decades, we have tried to heed that indicator. And now we know that the search for effects of signaling by electromagnetism in solids and for generalizing these meanings, including of course primarily electrical energy conversion, also has been richly rewarding in the overall industrial and economic progress.

Now what of the future, for the course to the present has been slow enough and long enough so that we should be carefully expectant. However, we are beginning to be able to model the formation of a crystal in some of the detail that has enabled our knowledge of atoms and molecules earlier in the Twentieth Century. This is all based, of course, on physical theory. Such has recently been dramaticated by the graphics from computers, as you see from these examples of how my associate, Dr. Kenneth Jackson, has analyzed nucleation—the very birth of the solid state. You can see where the dislocations and vacancies can arise, where impurities can segregate. Ultimately as a result of these processes is formed the ultimate size and shape of the crystallite itself, which vitally affects the use of every piece of metal, of wood, and increasingly of plastics which we use today. Ceramics, one of the oldest kinds of matter manipulated by man, are even more challenging examples. They foreshadowed what we found in plastics, about the values of controlled mixtures of highly ordered and disordered states in solids.

These sorts of revealing models we must have for effective design and engineering, and the path to them is often torturous. It seems so to observers who must necessarily judge it in terms of each individual's life experience. For instance, it was three-and-a-half decades ago, in Professor Smyth's laboratory in Princeton, in foreshadowing research of what is now known as solid state science, that we discovered classes of polar molecules whose motion we could track continuously in liquid and solid. We found that the entropy of fusion of many was about two units, typical of that of the figure for metals. But only recently has Jackson shown that these dielectrics, easily examined optically, crystallize in habits highly correlated with more complex metal behavior, such as in forming solid solutions and aggregates whose analogy to alloys and metal phases is strikingly visible. Yet right today we are just learning how to control the inner crystallization and phase distribution needed for metals and alloys actually to enhance their strength and performance. This is just in time to aid their conservation, in an ominous period of scarcity and ecological duress.

Copper is nearing crisis in cost and supply, and yet has been technologically developed since the Bronze Age. Hence, we are heartened to find in recent work of Schwartz, Plewes, and their associates, as well as elsewhere, remarkable new possibilities from exploitation of the phase relations in such alloys as copper-nickel-tin. Improvements of two- to threefold in yield strength at comparable ductility are a good measure of gain in engineering design capability for a myriad of mechanical and electrical uses. Of course you know that no motor, no generator, no automobile, no electric utility, and indeed no telephone would now work without large quantities. of some copper material. Now, based on the phase theories of the last century from J. Willard Gibbs and the new ideas of crystal nucleation, it is found that the composition of a supersaturated solid solution of Cu₉Ni₆Sn  at 350º C will move the yield strength from a value of 50 to 150 through spinoidal precipitates dispersed throughout the polycrystalline solid. We do not yet understand why this dramatic improvement occurs, but we understand, in the dimensions we cited in our theme, how it happens and how it can be controlled.

Again, in the work of Chin and associates deriving from the crystal physics of the orientation of crystallites proposed by Professor G. I. Taylor at Cambridge many decades ago, texture control has been induced in copper and many of its alloys in wires such as copper-5 tin which is phosphor bronze, copper-12 nickel-28 zinc which is nickel silver, copper-1.7 beryllium which is copper-beryllium. This texture in each roughly doubles yield strength and thus the opportunity for thrifty designs, miniaturization, and efficiency in industrial use, marking steps, which in earlier times of empirical advance took a century or more to achieve. With phosphor bronze, the typical product has a yield strength of 70, which is easily textured to give 110, and in nickel silver the figure of 65 converts to 125.

The notion of atom-by-atom construction of solids whose qualities are judged on the basis of electronic states we have invoked becomes especially attractive in the new domain of thin film science and engineering. Many of the distinguished prize winners of the I. R-100 of this and earlier years have been based on this surface and film knowledge, as recognized by Langmuir in the laboratories of the General Electric Company—your  all-time prize winner. Our point then today is that we are but at the threshold of insight and utilization of films, for almost everything. Pursuing these on the theme of seeking again refined structures, whose electronics can serve the. signaling and wave-handling functions of our business, Ryder, Testardi, Wernick, and their associates at Bell Laboratories found that the alloys molybdenum₅, ruthenium₃, and tungsten₃ ruthenium₂ made by sputtering on hot sapphire substrates, were among the hardest known metals, with acid resistance unexcelled. Their hardness is, of course, vastly greater than that of nitrided high-speed steel, and the possibilities of improving and conserving refractory metal functions are evident. Interestingly the electrical resistivity can have a temperature coefficient either negative, zero, or positive by controlling conditions of formation of these films. In the case of Sinclair's recent invention of iron oxide masks for integrated circuitry, the electronic bonding controlling solubility is regulated by internal valence shifts from the same electron beam which also applies the integrated circuit pattern, But in this case of the new films one does not yet know the reasons for unique behavior, but they are clearly based on the same sort of atom-by-atom controls of such practical import in all of the solid state technology we have cited today.

Now in this context we should also ask whether the progress in the deeper understanding of the atom-by-atom nature of solids in terms of these remarkable practical functions that it provides is still going forward, with an even greater promise of applications to come. A few current cases give us large hope. Especially promising is the work of Hagstrum and his associates, on a new spectroscopy of solids represented by their interaction with a slowly approaching ion or excited atom to the surface; this is showing us in new ways how the long elusive conditions of the solid where it meets space at its surface are determined and are related to its internal features, which we have already so heavily called upon. Beginning with the classic studies of the Auger neutralization of an ion to its atomic ground state, through charge transfer from the surface, we have built upon Hagstrum's science methods of characterization in some of the critical thin film electronic engineering already found in the production by the Western Electric Company of integrated circuitry.

By the use of Rentzepis' picosecond pulses in optical studies from the laser, various workers, including von der Linde, Auston, Glass and Rodgers in our laboratories, have measured directly the times of motion intrinsic to both solid state and even to chemical complexes governing reaction of individual molecules. Once more our theme is illustrated by their studies of Cu²⁺, the impurity ion in single crystals of lithium tantalate. (This is the second major single crystal in manufacture, succeeding quartz for communications filter systems and of high future import for optical rectification.) The times of energy redistribution of the nonradiative relaxation of this important ion crucial for the processing of optical signals in this crystal range from 450 x 10^-12 seconds at 22º above absolute zero to 10 x 10^-12 seconds at temperatures of 150º C. Thus the elemental process of energy exchange is being timed in a form of high value for a forthcoming era of optical communication and information processing, about which this Assembly will doubtless hear much more in the years to come.

But also on a somewhat larger scale and longer time, other new basic effects are being revealed in solids, including their surfaces and films which will in due time apply widely not only to electronic engineering and enhancement of mental range through signaling and coding, but also, as in the past, to other roots of our industrial life. For instance, it has been known that electrical fields, and also more recently, mechanical stress fields, cause considerable movement of matter inside crystals, so that films, without evident deformation of the tangible body, become defective. Thus, in films of metals basic to the whole new electronics, the long-time presence of an electromagnetic field causes an agglomeration of vacancies into voids, which ultimately will affect even the mechanical integrity and continuity of the film. If this electrolysis sounds like black magic, I can agree that indeed it was regarded that way for a long time, but Turner, Suhl, and their associates now have a fairly thorough understanding of the incubation time and the sizes. These are of the order of hundreds and even thousands of atomic distances, which conglomerate into a steady-state buildup in about ten to a thousand seconds. It is exciting to speculate on what sort of properties including the special formation and stabilization of films, that may sometime result from this electromigration of empty space inside the lattice.

There is, of course, also other kinds of empty space inside the lattice, namely between the atoms held so elegantly in their equilibrium or other balances of fields and nuclei. This the particle physicists brought out in the course of concerns which also have high practical import for our nation today. For the bombardment of crystals in nuclear reactors is one of their most troubling and demanding features to balance radiation damage with the desired nuclear effects. But then at Harwell, in England, the Atomic Energy Establishment, in our own laboratories and at laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission, this evening's theme of realizing the meanings of modifying solids by introduction of ever so few foreign atoms was seized on with high advantage. Ion implantation is now a commercial process in the making  of semiconductors and integrated circuits, but it is also leading to studies of particle channeling in crystals. Here, perfection is sufficient so that high-speed ions often radioactively induced can go down the spaces between rows of atoms in a lattice creating new structures and properties. One aspect of this study by Gibson and his associates at Bell Laboratories has led to the measurement of time approaching 10^-18 seconds, as was theoretically anticipated might be done some time ago by appropriate estimates of nuclear state relaxation. So now even our old Nemesis, Time, has been further subdivided, and processes may yet derive practically from that.

Also the basic properties of matter which permit, or prevent to some degree, the conduction of electricity are being strongly illuminated by new findings. Here I pay continuing tribute to my friend and colleague, Dr. Bernd T. Matthias, the I. R Man-of-the-Year just half a decade ago. His predictions on that occasion about superconductivity and the quintessence of electrical conduction have been strongly validated. By then, Matthias with the family of structures represented by niobium₃ tin and niobium zirconium had raised the superconducting temperature to 21º K. A week or so ago, you may have read that at a conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the workers at the Westinghouse laboratory had reached with derivative compounds, specifically niobium. germanium, up to 22.3º K, a worthy uplift. It is of the general magnitude that Matthias was also reporting some time ago. We have also reported at Gatlinburg, using the preparation methods for crystal formations of the Westinghouse group, a temperature of 23. 2º K, so the world's records are of shorter life these days (about 10 min. in the last case). All stem, however, from Matthias’ opening of those new classes and from his unique conceptions of the basis for superconductivity.

Now at that time and since then, the theory of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer has also been widely recognized, leading to a second Nobel Prize for Bardeen. This theory has vastly extended the ideas of how superconduction occurs. Nevertheless, as we mobilize the national community to meet the vast R&D challenge of new energy sources and efficiencies, Matthias’ views on superconductivity, including the difficulties of finding an organic superconductor, appear to be fully warranted, despite several flurries in between. This research also accents our theme, for many new interesting properties of matter are being discovered through the impetus of these studies.

Indeed, in reminiscence, it was semiconducting properties and the curiosity about the dielectric or super conducting properties of linear polyenes that led Winslow and me to the work on polymer carbon more than two decades ago. This in turn was the origin, through the extraordinary electrical rearrangements that occur in the pyrosis of carbon chain and network polymers, of the proposal from the panel of Garns Slayter, Hans Thurnauer, and myself in the National Research Council to use ablating polymer composites for the heat shields on the nose cones of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and for the protection of space vehicles in their return to earth. This technique, advanced and made practical by many of the groups represented in the I. R-100 roster, has protected all the astronauts and all other recovered satellites in our space ventures. This was through the extraordinary thermal endurance of a reacting system which passes through the polyene and solid state radical phases to semiconducting and highly refractory polymer carbon. This endures the 7500 degrees of flaming passage through our planet's atmosphere. But the relationship to electrical qualities is shown not only in the electronics of the bond rearrangements during ablation, but in the physical properties of the polymer carbon itself. These we measured and reported as representing the highest modulus of elasticity and among the highest tensile strengths of any synthetic structure, short of diamonds. From this has come the still just emerging era of composites of polymer carbon fibers and fabrics. These serve not only novel consumer uses, such as golf club shafts and fishing poles, but in the blades of gas turbines and many other yet unseen functions. Now all this relates closely to its original stimulus by work on new kinds of conductivity. Recent news in this pursuit has included the work at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania (Heeger and associates) on the tetracyanoquinodimethane salts, which had earlier been studied at the du Pont laboratories in Wilmington. While the controversy about fluctuation superconductivity, or paraconductivity, reflected through Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer pairing of electrons, is still unsettled, the notion of linear or one-dimensional superconduction is being freshly examined, as it was for the linear polyenes years ago.

 In still a different area of conduction, new findings are coming from Wilson and Shockley's physics of holes and electrons in crystals. Here we have for years studied excitons, the pairing of holes and electrons. The late Richard Haynes identified combinations suggesting atomic analogues and even molecular complexes. But we now believe there a re larger assemblies, being called droplets, which are truly metallic ingredients conceptually, inside semiconductor crystals. So we expect the cycle to go on, with engineering application and manufacture itself, ceaselessly stimulating and giving support to new explorations of solid matter, which in turn, like the exciton condensates, will lead to yet new technical capabilities.

 We could report similar developments for magnetic properties, such as the microdomains, or so-called bubbles, which Bobeck and Shockley have created and applied in the last few years. Let us finish, however, our technical scene by coming back to humankind and its mind. Organically, we know we are barely beginning to use the knowledge of solids in probing the most mysterious substance of all—that  of living tissue and of the nervous system which truly animates it. All sorts of interesting methods are appearing, such as the recent studies of Dr. David Cohen of the National Magnet Laboratory at MIT. He has been able to track the behavior of microparticles of magnetic iron oxide in the lungs by measuring, with the sensitive magnetometer, a residual magnetic field resulting from the whole person being placed in another modest field of about 500 gauss. He has found a continuous rotation in unexpected ways of dust particles breathed into the lungs. He has identified also a viscous medium affecting alignment of the magnets in the particles as they respond to the external field. These studies may begin to tell of the workings and perturbations of respiration, a crucial aspect of life in our environment.

 An ultimate use of our learning about matter in understanding the nature of life and of organic function is in the nervous system itself, and the substance of the mind. Here, as recently reviewed by Horn, Rose, and Bateson of Cambridge, we are beginning to see some of the biochemical changes related to learning, such as the change in the S-100 proteins, the brain's specific protein, during the training of rats reaching for food with non-preferred forepaws. Further, however, the effects of light exposure in imprinting experience on chicks following careful hatching control showed changes in the forebrain, by tracer-identified proteins. These and a host of similar biochemical studies must be supplemented by knowledge of the actual semi-solid configuration of the neuron systems themselves. The organization of cells may yet yield to the sort of information-signal stimulus that has activated so much of the modern era of materials science and engineering.

 Now we have spoken of the future in terms of what the mind and matter may make of it. There is, however, a vastly larger component of the future which is social and psychological and perhaps even emotional. That is what our free society, and specifically our Government, will permit industrial research and development to achieve. In a time apparently obsessed with negativism, we are seeing the agencies of Government remote from the direct expression of the electorate affecting change and innovation on an unprecedented scale. The Federal commissions, such as the FTC in respect to new consumer products and necessarily speculative assertions about what they may do for people, the FDA in its approach to trials of new scientific therapies for disease, the ICC in its relations to railroad systems, the FPC in reference to sponsorship of nuclear power plants and allowance of rate bases for electric utilities to support R&D, the FCC in a decade of discussion on communications satellite development and mobile telephony for a hundred million vehicles in the nation, the CAB in the economic and technical policies for airlines—all represent the most ominous and potentially obstructive patterns for industrial innovation in our nation's history. These agencies’ responsibility is  diffused among the Legislative and Executive Branches, with confusion in politics of personnel, budgets and missions that may deal mortal blows to what the public wants and deserves from industrial science and engineering.

 Other groups more directly controlled by the Executive Branch have shown in recent times somewhat greater flexibility, such as the EPA's gradual recognition of the realities of auto emissions and general air and water quality control, the AEC’s growing courage in dealing with nuclear energy resources, and possibly, just possibly, even the Justice Department's attitude toward the necessary flux of technical information and cooperation among industries. One of the essential features of the Nixon Administration's recasting of the Federal science and technology structure is the wider distribution of responsibility for R&D policy among the whole community of operating agencies. By this means, each will at least be obliged to recognize that science and engineering are fundamental resources that it must sponsor, whether in Commerce, Interior, Defense, Education, Health, Housing, Transportation, Agriculture, Treasury, State, or wherever. It can no longer be assumed that some central science body, in the White House or not, will alone have the political or professional abilities to assure suitable representation and advance of the national community in industry and universities, in a fiercely competitive world of both hostile ideologies and scarce resources and fragile ecologies. With respect to antitrust, and an apparent political passion for fragmentation and diminution of all our private institutions (while Government itself grows larger and more monolithic), it is one thing to believe, whether valid or not, that an oil company, or a metals or a lumber enterprise should not control all the natural materials to be used in trade. It is quite another to assume that research and development of the difficulty and magnitude required now to meet public needs and support viable economy, (including world trade where the attitudes are very different), should be cut back so that subdivided, duplicating, and often subcritical-sized laboratories will be expected to make the inventions, the discoveries, the I. R-100 products and processes both possible and demanded in the years to come. Yet the current hearings of the Hart Subcommittee of the Senate imply just this. It is exceedingly unlikely to work that way.

 As we come to the bicentennial of our free society, it has to face the issues of whether it will permit the kind of research and engineering that has made the daily life of every citizen more human and more spiritual, to be carried on. It is not guesswork that alleviation of a condition in which two hundred million people in India have an income of less than $40 per year apiece can be achieved by progress in science and technology, spearheaded by industrial research, without significant damage to ecology. We know it can be done, given a chance. But we are operating dangerously close to throwing away the chance, when we have such attitudes as expressed in the beginning of a New York Times editorial of August 24, 1973. This, in referring to some medical progress, nevertheless, says, “Current disillusionment with science progress ...“ What are we talking about in such reckless attitudes? Look around you, in this Museum, in this city, state, country, world, and see what any rational person would prefer in what has been done with Twentieth Century science and engineering.

 So we close this Eleventh Assembly, convened by Industrial Research Journal, in this sober way. We shall shortly submit to the National Academy of Sciences the last of its noted series of reports, sponsored by its Committee on Science and Public Policy. It is, however, the first of such reports that includes technology and science together in the study. The report is on the status and future of materials science and engineering, the COSMAT Study. It will offer this specific choice: That we see in materials research and development ways to achieve unprecedented gains in the condition of life on earth, and in meeting man’s needs. If we are willing, to maintain and augment the policies of free enterprise and public support of education, research and development, this can happen.

 If, however, we allow any element of this system to degrade, such as the industrial practices which have led to the innovations of the first three-quarters of the century, the momentum will be lost. The Energy Program will languish. On a materials base, prosthetic devices for the relief of human suffering will not come. The precious matter of our planet will be wasted and degraded. This, as all other systems of science and engineering, must be maintained as a whole, and the careless tinkering of short-time politics and casual public passions will fatally lead us to stagnation or regression which, as Santayana pointed out, has been the fate of science and technology over most of human history—save  only a small period in the glory of Greece and the present century or so of the Industrial Revolution. Let us resolve to carry it forward, not only for its elegant intellectual satisfaction and enrichment of human understanding, but also for the vast service which the industrial research or private enterprise can bring to the betterment of human life. We know very well the judgments by other systems of what we do. Thus, Peter Kapitsa, the senior Soviet physicist, in his book on “Theory, Experiment, Practice,” published a few years ago, says, “They (Americans) now produce about one-third of world science. We produce one -sixth of world science, that is twice less than they. …it appears that with approximately the same number of scientific workers we produce half of the scientific work which the Americans produce… The productivity of our scientists is approximately two times lower than the productivity of the scientists of the U.S.A. … If in the near future we will not increase this labor productivity of our scientists, will not improve the conditions for assimilating by industry the achievements of science and technology, then the problem of catching, up with America, of course, cannot be, solved. If we decisively and capably utilize the great advantages our Socialist system provides in organizing our science and industry, then this lag in growth will be only a temporary hitch…” Also, a recent speech by A. P. Kirilenko, member of the Polit Bureau and Party Secretary, says, “Scientific progress today is the most important source of economic development and has an evermore varying influence on the whole progress of Socialist life. It is now one of the decisive factors in the competition between Socialism and Capitalism—the historical antagonism of two systems.” Our Government deserves strong support where it is seeking to enlist the national community of science and engineering in a new federalism to carry on the compelling challenges of energy resources, health care, defense, and similar public issues. The President must be helped in guiding our bureaucracy to take advantage of our methods of innovation and economic vigor, so that the succeeding Assemblies recognizing the I. R-100 Winners will have the excellence so far achieved.

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 In summary, the theme is that human expression, the extension of the mind in communicating by voice and vision, has been found to fit a form of coding and signaling electromagnetically. Increasingly this is in digital form, but analog signals, such as Dr. Bell used for the telephone, are also adapted to the principle. Further, it has turned out that these electromagnetic communications can be handled in solid state matter in a vast diversity of modes, each of which leads directly to control of the atomic, molecular, and electronic structure of the solid. Accordingly, the whole economic and social value of communications and computers for extending the effects of the mind has been suitably turned to an intense practical study of matter, which has warranted a deep theoretical and conceptual understanding of the solid state.

 Thus we have the classic example of how industrial laboratories can react on, as well as benefit from, the advance of learning. The present situation, involving industrial laboratories in electrical power and device product companies, computer firms, and communications and electronics, is especially timely. This is because the depth of study and invention relating electrical signals and their processing in solid state matter is of such character that the human knowledge and use of all matter substance is being dramatically enhanced, at the time when conservation of materials and attention to ecology are of overwhelming urgency.

 We shall try to illustrate quickly a few cases embodying this theme and of its import for the future of industry, research and development.