Shelter Island Conference

Shelter Island was the first major opportunity since Pearl Harbor and the Manhattan Project for the leaders of the American physics community to gather after the war.

Later Oppenheimer deemed Shelter Island the most successful scientific meeting he had ever attended; and as Richard Feynman recalled to Jagdish Mehra in April 1970: "There have been many conferences in the world since, but I've never felt any to be as important as this....

Frank Jewett, the head of the NAS, liked the idea; he envisioned a "meeting at some quiet place where the men could live together intimately", possibly "at an inn somewhere", and suggested that MacInnes focus on a couple of pilot programs.

Karl K. Darrow, a theoretical physicist at Bell Labs and secretary of the American Physical Society, offered his help in organizing the quantum mechanics conference.

With Jewett's encouragement, MacInnes asked Pauli for suggestions of "younger men" such as John Archibald Wheeler, explaining that the Rockefeller Foundation would support only a small conference.

[2] Another dramatic discovery was reported at the conference by Isidor Rabi; a precise measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, though this was overshadowed by Lamb's work.