Special Issue: The Physics Community and the Wider World

The APS centennial celebration being held in Atlanta this month celebrates both a century of the American Physical Society and a century of remarkable advances in physics. The Physical Review, in which many of these advances were first reported, celebrated its centenary in 1993. As part of that 1993 anniversary, APS and the American Institute of Physics published a 1266‐page book, The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years, and an accompanying CD‐ROM, which together contain over 1000 seminal papers. This collection, which provides a compendium of some of the great physics achievements of the century, could properly serve as a prelude to the APS centennial celebration because the society has been publishing the Physical Review since 1913, when it took the publication over from Cornell University.