THE ORIGINS

In 1961, two physicists approached The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies with an intriguing idea. The scientists, George Stranahan of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Michael Cohen of the University of Pennsylvania, proposed a unique sort of research center where theoretical physicists might gather in the summer. It would be an unstructured environment, free from distractions, where physicists could work unfettered by their normal responsibilities.

Up to this point, the eleven-year-old Aspen Institute had concentrated primarily on bringing together scholars and business people to study the Great Books. But its original mission inspired by the great humanitarian Goethe called for synthesizing the sciences with the humanities. With this thought in mind, the Institute's executive director Bob Craig received the suggestion with enthusiasm and brought the concept to the Chairman of the Board Robert 0. Anderson.

Anderson immediately formed a committee of eminent physicists to discuss the prospect and the group moved with remarkable speed. Working with the basic concept proposed by Stranahan and Cohen, the committee agreed that the Aspen Institute for Theoretical Physics would be the newest division of the Aspen Institute. The Aspen Institute would set aside part of its Aspen Meadows campus for use by the physicists. In turn, the physicists would be responsible for raising funds for their own buildings and operations and would depend on their own institutions or research grants for their summer salaries and living expenses.

By the summer of 1962, the first building, designed by Herbert Bayer and funded by the Needmor Foundation, was complete. Forty-five American and foreign physicists from twenty-two major institutions arrived to begin work. The Aspen Institute for Theoretical Physics sometimes simply called the Physics Division was a reality.

In 1968, the Physics Division was clearly a success. It had already gained a worldwide reputation as a unique environment for the pursuit of basic scientific knowledge. That year, with the blessings of the Aspen Institute, the Physics Division became an independent non-profit corporation called The Aspen Center for Physics. Today, along with the Aspen Institute, the Music Associates of Aspen and the International Design Conference in. Aspen, it is part of the Aspen Meadows Campus, which exists as a unique and special community of artists, scholars and scientists.

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and in science.... He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as feeble reflexion, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

- Albert Einstein

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