American Physical Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Physical Society was born on the 20th of May, 1899, when thirty-six physicists gathered at Columbia University and declared they would advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics. That founding phrase has never changed. More than a century later, those same words still serve as the organization's official mission. What began as a small circle of scientists holding four meetings a year has grown into a body with nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units, publishing seventeen international research journals and convening more than twenty scientific meetings annually. How did a society founded by three dozen people become the central hub of American physics? And what does it actually do for the hundreds of thousands of researchers, students, and enthusiasts whose careers orbit around it?

• 2. From Meetings to Journals

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  For its first decade and a half, the APS did essentially one thing: it held meetings. Four times a year, physicists would gather to share their findings. Then, in 1913, the society took over operation of the Physical Review, a journal that had been founded in 1893 at Cornell University. That acquisition gave the APS its second major activity and set it on a path toward becoming the foremost publisher of physics research in the country. Reviews of Modern Physics followed in 1929, and Physical Review Letters launched in 1958. As the fields of physics multiplied and the volume of submitted papers grew, the flagship Physical Review split into five separate specialized sections. By the time the APS reached the modern era, it was publishing seventeen distinct journals, spanning everything from fluid dynamics to quantum information to physics education research. Several of those journals, including Physical Review X and Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, operate as fully open-access publications, making their findings freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

• 3. A Centennial and Einstein's Year

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  In 1999, the APS marked a hundred years of existence by hosting what was billed as the biggest physics meeting ever held, convened in Atlanta. Six years later, the society took on a different kind of milestone. In 2005, the APS led United States participation in the World Year of Physics, a global celebration marking the centennial of Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis, the extraordinary year in which Einstein published papers that reshaped our understanding of light, matter, and time. The APS initiated several programs during that year aimed at bringing physics to a broad public audience. One of those projects, Einstein@Home, outlasted the anniversary. It is a distributed computing initiative that allows ordinary computer users to contribute their machines' idle processing power to physics research, and it continues to run today.

• 4. The Name That Almost Changed

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  During the summer of 2005, the APS quietly asked its members a direct question: what should we be called? In an electronic poll, the majority of respondents said they preferred the name American Physics Society over the existing American Physical Society. The poll created enough momentum that a name change became part of that year's leadership election platform. The APS Executive Board examined the prospect and then stepped back from it entirely, citing legal reasons as the barrier to completing the switch. The organization resolved the tension with a practical compromise. It kept its legal name but adopted a new logo that incorporated the phrase "APS Physics," positioning that phrase as a clearer public signal that the society represented the physics community. That particular logo did not last indefinitely. On the 1st of November, 2022, the APS introduced a replacement logo, retiring the APS Physics branding while keeping the underlying name intact.

• 5. Divisions and the Shape of Physics

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  The Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics division, known as DAMOP, holds the distinction of being the oldest division of the American Physical Society, created in 1943. It administers awards including the Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics and the Rabi Prize in AMO Physics. The Biological Physics division, DBIO, claims more than two thousand members and ranks as the second largest learned society in the world devoted to biological physics, trailing only the Biophysical Society. It supports more than six hundred presentations at the annual March Meeting of the APS, covering topics from protein biophysics to neuroscience. The Computational Physics division, also with more than two thousand members, focuses on the intersection of computers and physical research, encompassing experiments, theory, education, and the application of physics to the development of computer technology. Alongside seventeen divisions, the APS also maintains nine topical groups covering areas such as data science, plasma astrophysics, and shock compression of condensed matter.

• 6. Inclusion, Education, and Outreach

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  A scholarship now known simply as the Scholarship for Minority Undergraduate Physics Majors was established in 1980 with the explicit goal of increasing the number of underrepresented minorities earning bachelor's degrees in physics. The APS Bridge Program builds on that by targeting a later stage in the academic pipeline: it names doctoral and master's degree-granting institutions as Bridge Sites and funds them through the National Science Foundation to prepare post-baccalaureate students for doctoral studies, offering coursework, mentoring, research opportunities, application coaching, and GRE preparation. For undergraduate women and gender minorities, the society runs regional three-day conferences that expose attendees to professional conference culture, information about graduate school, and networks of physicists at all career stages. On the faculty side, the APS co-sponsors workshops with the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Astronomical Society. Those workshops reach nearly half of all new physics and astronomy faculty in the country. The Physics Teacher Education Coalition, a joint project with the American Association of Physics Teachers, works with universities to transform their teacher preparation programs. The APS physics outreach program, framed around communicating the excitement and importance of physics to everyone, maintains an educational website called PhysicsCentral and runs the Historic Physics Sites Initiative, which identifies and commemorates important physics locations across the United States.

• 7. Leadership and Membership Today

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  Since January 2021, the APS has been led by chief executive officer Jonathan Bagger. The society is a member of the American Institute of Physics, and all APS members receive the monthly publication Physics Today, which the American Institute of Physics produces. The APS organizes its community into forty-seven units total, grouped into divisions, forums, topical groups, and geographically organized sections spanning regions from New England to the Far West to Texas. Six forums address broader concerns of the membership, including a Forum on Diversity and Inclusion, one for Early Career Scientists, and one for the History and Philosophy of Physics. The Committee on the Status of Women in Physics and the Committee on Minorities both run site visit programs to universities and national laboratories, reflecting a long-standing institutional interest in improving the climate for underrepresented groups within physics departments.