ICRC (International Cosmic Ray Conference)

Pic du Midi tour during ICRC
1953 ICRC in Bagneres-de-Bigorre, France conference photo.

Michael is in the front row (far left), with MGK Menon next to him.
Cecil Powell is front row, 4th from left, holding papers.

The International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC) takes place every other year, in a different city around the world. Michael attended this conference many times, and collaborated on papers presented (by others) in numerous other years.

3rd ICRC Bagnères-de-Bigorre, France, 1953

The first one he attended was less than a year after arriving at Bristol, for the 3rd ICRC, held in July 1953 at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, at the base of the Pyrenees in France. This has subsequently become a famous conference, as multiple commentators have deemed it to be the birth of particle physics as a discipline, and the attendant changeover from cosmic ray particle research to earth-based particle accelerators.

In a presentation in 2011, James Cronin compared the 1953 ICRC to the 1927 Solvay Conference (famous photo of 17 Nobel Prize winners of 29 people in the photo) and the 1948 Shelter Island Conference.

Citation and link: The Passage From Cosmic Rays to Subatomic Physics
by James Cronin, part of RosnerFest, in honor of retirement of Jonathan Rosner, University of Chicago, April 2011.

Pic du Midi tour during ICRC
During the 1953 ICRC, a group toured the Pic du Midi site in the Pyrenees.

Included in the group are (from right MGK Menon, Michael, John Mulvey.

In a talk at the Centenary of Cosmic Rays meeting at the University of Denver in 2012, Oliver Ravel said in conclusion:

The Bagnères de Bigorre conference (Fig 7), organized by Leprince-Ringuet and Blackett, was held in the small town located at the foot of the Pic. It is certainly one of the major conferences of modern physics for the richness of presented results. This congress is considered today as the starting point of the particles physics. The conference was concluded by Cecil Powell who said: "Gentlemen, we are now invaded, we are submerged, these are the accelerators". He has predicted in some way, the transformation of high energy particle physics research using the cosmic ray beam to research using more controlled beams of particles produced by man-made accelerators. Nevertheless, one century later, the vitality of cosmic ray research is always as in the pioneer’s time and the story continues...

Citation and link: Early Cosmic Ray Research in France
by Oliver Ravel: CENTENARYSYMPOSIUM2012:DISCOVERY OF COSMICRAYS, Jun2012, Denver, UnitedStates. pp.67-71, 10.1000/ISBN978-0-7354-1137-1 . hal-00841758

7th ICRC Kyoto, Japan, 1961

Michael shot a home movie during his time in Kyoto for the ICRC.

1961-Aug-Sep Friedlander Japan, 7th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC)
Length: 15:31 (no sound). Professionally digitized in 2018. Not a masterpiece, but interesting, nonetheless.

11th ICRC in Budapest, Hungary, 1969

Michael and Erwin Friedlander
Michael and Erwin Friedlander (no relation) in Budapest, Hungary for the 1969 ICRC.

At that time, Erwin was at the Cosmic Rays Laboratory, Institute for Atomic Physics,
Bucharest, Romania (before he defected in 1975).

Another photo from the Hungary ICRC appears on the memorial site to Michael's Wash U physics colleague and friend, Professor Joe Klarmann.

Michael wrote an article for the Washingon University Magazine in the Winter 1970 issue called "Is This Trip Necessary?", an explanation and defense of scientific conferences (which discusses this 1969 ICRC from which he had recently returned).

36th ICRC in Madison, Wisconsin, 2019

Michael did not attend this one, but in an interesting bit of symmtery, his grandson, Noah Friedlander did. Noah, an undergraduate physics/politcal science major at the University of Chicago at the time, was working in the lab of Dr. Stephan Meyer, working on a cosmic ray balloon experiment, UCIRC (University of Chicago Infrared Camera). Noah was a co-author on a paper presented at the conference, "UCIRC2: An Infrared Cloud Monitor for EUSO-SPB2."

This was only the fourth time that ICRC had ever been held in the United States (since its founding in 1947), and fortuitously was just a couple of hours drive north from Chicago (where Noah spent the summer working in the lab) !