California dreamin'

The Cold War decisively shifted the US physics community's center of gravity west, from the elite universities, corporate research laboratories, and high- tech firms in the Northeast and Midwest industrial corridors to the emerging centers of aerospace and defense electronics on the West Coast, particularly in Southern California. Even though universities in New England and mid- Atlantic states continued to award far more PhDs in physics than schools on the Pacific coast, those new physicists increasingly went west to work. (See the article by L. R. Harmon, PHYSICS TODAY, October 1962, page 21.) By 1960, the tipping point, California already employed more physicists than New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey combined. Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties alone employed nearly as many physicists as New York, the leader among the other states.