The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics will turn 100 years old in 2022. A series of activities will be carried out to celebrate this Centenary.

The Centennial Symposium has occurred at ICTP, Trieste, on 11, 12 and 13 July 2022. The meeting has been fully hybrid, and the recording can be viewed here. The Symposium has included plenary talks by keynote speakers and other activities, with an emphasis on aspects of the IUPAP history, on developing countries, collaborations among countries, physics education, and many other items consistent with the IUPAP mission. Then, sometime in 2023, the year that marks the 100th anniversary of the First IUPAP General Assembly, we hope to be able to organise a General Assembly at the Science Gateway of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a new scientific education and outreach center that is expected to be finished in 2023.

We also plan to have a book on the history of the IUPAP that will be published as part of the celebration. To this end, the IUPAP Executive Council has launched a project aimed at reconstructing the history from a global perspective. The project called One Hundred Years of IUPAP: A History is directed by  Roberto Lalli as Principal Investigator. Digitization of the relevant documents has already started. The digitized documents will be made available for historical research and will constitute the primary source of information for a scholarly process, which will be concluded by a two-day academic workshop on the history of IUPAP in the last hundred years and the publication of a volume.

Other activities are expected to be organized along the year in various parts of the world, particularly, in some of the thirteen countries that adhered to the creation of the Union in 1922. These countries were: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Holland, Japan, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States of America and the Union of South Africa. The need to create a Physics Union was decided at the 1922 General Assembly of the International Research Council (IRC) that had been established in 1919 to coordinate international efforts in the different branches of science. The first president of the IUPAP was William Henry Bragg, Nobel Prize in Physics 1915. Edmond Van Aubel and Henri Abraham were elected Vice President and Secretary, respectively.  Sir William served a period of nine years from (1922-1931).

The IUPAP has been growing since then both in scope and membership. There are currently 60 country members of the Union from all regions of the world. This is reflected, for example, in the venues where its General Assembly has been taken place over the last 70 years: Copenhagen (1951); London (1954); Rome (1957); Ottawa (1960); Warsaw (1963); Basel (1966); Dubrovnik (1969); Washington (1972); Munich (1975); Stockholm (1978); Paris (1981); Trieste (1984); Washington DC (1987); Dresden (1990); Nara (1993); Uppsala (1996); Atlanta (1999); Berlin (2002); Cape Town (2005); Tsukuba (2008); London (2011); Singapore (2014); Sao Paulo (2017). It was supposed to be held in Beijing in 2020 but it was postponed for one year due to the Covid19 pandemic.

The IUPAP is deeply committed to contribute towards the application of physics and other scientific disciplines to solve the problems of concern to humanity. The Union is firmly in favor of taking actions that will help achieve sustainable development and a more balanced and inclusive world. To advance in this respect, IUPAP is leading fellow scientific unions and other partners to promote and organize an International Year for Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD) in 2022/2023. IYBSSD activities will be combined with the IUPAP’s centennial celebration to have a greater impact.

We have many reasons to celebrate. We have many reasons to gather and discuss ways to join our efforts to help address the many challenges that humanity currently faces.