Last week, my institute had its 60th anniversary party, which like every party in academia takes the form of a conference.

Going in, I knew very little about the history of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, of the CEA it’s part of (Commissariat of Atomic Energy, now Atomic and Alternative Energy), or of French physics in general, so I found the first few talks very interesting. I learned that in France in the early 1950’s, theoretical physics was quite neglected. Key developments, like relativity and statistical mechanics, were seen as “too German” due to their origins with Einstein and Boltzmann (nevermind that this was precisely why the Nazis thought they were “not German enough”), while de Broglie suppressed investigation of quantum mechanics. It took French people educated abroad to come back and jumpstart progress.

The CEA is, in a sense, the French equivalent of the some of the US’s national labs, and like them got its start as part of a national push towards nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

(Unlike the US’s national labs, the CEA is technically a private company. It’s not even a non-profit: there are for-profit components that sell services and technology to the energy industry. Never fear, my work remains strictly useless.)

My official title is Ingénieur Chercheur, research engineer. In the early days, that title was more literal. Most of the CEA’s first permanent employees didn’t have PhDs, but were hired straight out of undergraduate studies. The director, Claude Bloch, was in his 40’s, but most of the others were in their 20’s. There was apparently quite a bit of imposter syndrome back then, with very young people struggling to catch up to the global state of the art.

They did manage to catch up, though, and even excel. In the 60’s and 70’s, researchers at the institute laid the groundwork for a lot of ideas that are popular in my field at the moment. Stora’s work established a new way to think about symmetry that became the textbook approach we all learn in school, while Froissart figured out a consistency condition for high-energy physics whose consequences we’re still teasing out. Pham was another major figure at the institute in that era. With my rudimentary French I started reading his work back in Copenhagen, looking for new insights. I didn’t go nearly as fast as my partner in the reading group though, whose mastery of French and mathematics has seen him use Pham’s work in surprising new ways.

Hearing about my institute’s past, I felt a bit of pride in the physicists of the era, not just for the science they accomplished but for the tools they built to do it. This was the era of preprints, first as physical papers, orange folders mailed to lists around the world, and later online as the arXiv. Physicists here were early adopters of some aspects, though late adopters of others (they were still mailing orange folders a ways into the 90’s). They also adopted computation, with giant punch-card reading, sheets-of-output-producing computers staffed at all hours of the night. A few physicists dove deep into the new machines, and guided the others as capabilities changed and evolved, while others were mostly just annoyed by the noise!

When the institute began, scientific papers were still typed on actual typewriters, with equations handwritten in or typeset in ingenious ways. A pool of secretaries handled much of the typing, many of whom were able to come to the conference! I wonder what they felt, seeing what the institute has become since.

I also got to learn a bit about the institute’s present, and by implication its future. I saw talks covering different areas, from multiple angles on mathematical physics to simulations of large numbers of particles, quantum computing, and machine learning. I even learned a bit from talks on my own area of high-energy physics, highlighting how much one can learn from talking to new people.