URSI Conference

Dartmouth College last month was host to the fall meeting of the United States National Committee of the International Scientific Radio Union. More than 350 electrical scientists and engineers from this country and Canada were here for the three-day conference at Hopkins Center. Chairman was Millett G. Morgan, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the Radiophysics Laboratory at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering.

This Union, known as URSI from the acronym formed from the French translation of its title, is one of the Unions of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). URSI was founded in 1919 as were Unions on Astronomy, Geodesy and Geophysics, and Pure and Applied Chemistry. These four were the first of the 14 Unions which now adhere to ICSU. The National Committee participates in international assemblies of URSI every three years. In 1963 an assembly was held in Tokyo and the next will meet in Munich in 1966.

One hundred scientific papers were presented during the three-day meeting. Two of them at a general session on opening day dealt with the recent Mariner-4 probe of Mars. Professor Morgan and Agnar Pytte, Associate Professor of Physics at Dartmouth, were session chairmen; and two Dartmouth scientists, Prof. Leif Owren and his student, John D. Jacobs, gave a paper on observations at the geomagnetic poles.