SEVENTY miles from New York, near Patchogue, L.I., is a lonely sign — "Brookhaven National Laboratory" — half hidden by undergrowth. About a mile beyond the sign you come upon a guard. He asks you to identify yourself, to tell whom you want to see. If everything is in order you are admitted to the reservation — in war days Camp Upton.

In 1974, Ruby [27 ] suggested that synchrotron radiation (SR) could be used for exciting nuclei (nuclear resonant fluorescence excited by the bremsstralung X-radiation was first observed by Seppi and Boehem [28]). In 1978, there was an attempt of Cohen et al. [29] to detect the nuclear excitations of 57Fe nuclei created by synchrotron X-rays, and in 1983 Chechin et al. [30] attempted to filter the coherent response of nuclei to SR pulsed excitation using the pure nuclear diffraction, but it was not until 1985 that Gerdau et al. [31] made the first unambiguous observations of synchrotron X-rays resonantly scattered by 57Fe nuclei. Since that pioneering work, many nuclear resonance fluorescence experiments have followed (see the reviews by Gerdau et al. [32], by Arthur et al. [33], by Riiffer [34], by Gerdau and van Biirck [35], see also section 3 of this paper).

This review demonstrates that it is possible to arrive at a unique law of β-decay, consistent with Fermi's essential criteria, from data on β-decay. Fermi's work left the law open to construction out of arbitrary amounts of five types of interaction : S, V, T, A, and P. The data shows that the correct β-coupling must be a combination of S, T, and P, in proportions for which there is only a rough measure so far. Not only are these the only components which the β-interaction may contain but each of the three is necessary.

In the mid-1960s, a new phase began at Argonne when Michael Kalvius was recruited to the Solid State Science Division. By this time, Stan Hanna had left the Physics Division at Argonne and had been replaced by Stan Ruby. Ruby and Kalvius began working together and, during the next few years, their collaboration expanded to include two young solid-state physicists, Bobby Dunlap and Gopal Shenoy. Shenoy would remember later that they measured about 10,000 compounds during the Great Mössbauer Expansion period.

In the mid-60’s Stan Ruby approached Irwin Gruverman of NENC, the New England Nuclear Corporation, suggesting that NENC sponsor a one-day Mössbauer Effect Methodology conference (MEM) in association with the winter meeting of the APS. NENC had become a principal supplier of radionuclides and ME sources and absorbers here and abroad. The series began on January 26, 1965, in New York City with free registration for all 250 participants. The 15 papers were presented in an afternoon/evening format. As needed, NENC paid the expenses of the chosen speakers, who generally were from labs in the USA. A pre-Symposium dinner the night before the presentations became an effective vehicle for the speakers and the organizers to meet each other. Manuscripts were published in Mössbauer Effect Methodology Volume 1 (through Volume 10) by Plenum Press, New York, edited by I. Gruverman.

With the prodding and support of Stan Ruby, the Mössbauer Effect Data Center was established at the University of North Carolina at Asheville with a modest grant of $2,800 from the North Carolina Board of Science and Technology. The resources of Argonne National Laboratory were made available during these early years at the Center. Other funding during this time came from the National Bureau of Standards’s National Standard Reference Data Systems and the National Science Foundation, In 1969, MEDC developed one of the first databases used in the scientific community using IBM Assembler code.