This event was recorded on July 8, 2026 at Flug Forum, produced by Aspen Center for Physics, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.
In 1962, a pair of enterprising young scientists with a passion for the outdoors founded a summer retreat for theoretical physicists in the small town of Aspen, Colorado in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains. From modest beginnings, the Aspen Center for Physics has grown over the last sixty-four years into one of the most significant organizations in all of American science. This lecture traces the history of the Aspen Center for Physics and its broader impact through more than half a century of upheavals and changes in both science and society. It follows the Center from its early days as a utopian refuge from the strictly regimented environment of the Cold War-era research university, through turbulent years of federal funding cuts and political crises for American physics, and into years of growth and expanding influence during which the Center has come to serve as a prominent and internationally-imitated model for a new kind of scientific institution.
About Julia Menzel
Julia Menzel is a historian of science and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She has a PhD in the history of science from MIT, an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BS in Physics from Yale University. She has written about the history of modern physics, the history of scientific institutions, and the politics of science funding in the United States. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Physics, and the American Philosophical Society, among other organizations. She is a first-time visitor to Aspen this summer, where she is conducting research in the ACP’s historical archives as part of a book about the history of theoretical physics since the 1970s.