The Impact of Industrial Physics on the U.S. Economy

Background

The American Physical Society (APS) is the largest physics membership society in the United States and supports physicists in academia, industry, national laboratories, private research organizations, and other institutions. APS serves its members by:

• Serving as the leading voice for physics and an authoritative source of physics information for the advancement of physics and the benefit of humanity;
• Providing effective programs in support of the physics community and the conduct of physics;
• Collaborating with national scientific societies for the advancement of science, science education, and the science community;
• Disseminating the results of physics research through high-quality publications and expert meetings;
• Cooperating with international physics societies to promote physics, support physicists worldwide, and foster international collaboration; and
• Promoting an active, engaged, and diverse membership and supporting activities of its units and members.

In 2014, APS in conjunction with its Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP) held a workshop on National Issues in Industrial Physics: Challenges and Opportunities (1) that explored the issues associated with maintaining U.S. leadership in industrial physics. One of the recommendations of that workshop was to prepare a report on the “Impact of U.S. Industrial Physics.” In response to that request and in partnership with the American Institute of Physics, a federation of physical science societies, APS asked the APS Industrial Physics Advisory Board to organize such a study and to issue its findings in a publicly available report, which is contained herein.

The fascinating findings of the study show that an estimated 12.6% of the U.S. economy can be ascribed directly to the practice of industrial physics.

Economic studies such as this involve a number of assumptions as laid out in the report, but the data confirm what we inherently know from our knowledge of modern physics — that since the end of World War II, physics discoveries of the 20th century have been transformed by industrial physicists into incredible products and services. Examples include consumer electronics, personal computers, cell phones, GPS, MRI scanners, digital everything, and the Information Revolution that makes life today virtually unrecognizable to someone who lived 70 years ago. The flow of physics into industry is neither stopping, nor even slowing down as new disruptive products and services continue to emerge.

This report on the Impact of Industrial Physics on the U.S. Economy clarifies the structure of industrial physics, quantifies the contributions of industrial physics, and helps us understand that the entire physics community—industry, academia, government, and physics societies must continue to support industrial physics so it has a healthy future. We welcome your comments and questions, which should be addressed to the APS Industrial Physics team.