Recently by Matin Durrani

By Matin Durrani

All eyes are on the great Italian thinker Galileo Galilei in 2009, in what has been dubbed the International Year of Astronomy.

It is, as you must surely have noticed, exactly 400 years ago since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens. As part of our contribution to the IYA, Physics World published a special issue on astronomy in March, which can still be downloaded for free here in case you missed it.

I’ve just come back from holiday in Italy and, although I sadly was not able to make a meeting held in Florence re-examining the ramifications of Galileo’s tiff with the Catholic Church, I did manage to fit in an afternoon in pursuit of that other great Italian polymath — Leonardo da Vinci.

I hadn’t realised that the “Vinci” in his name refers to the place where the great Leonardo was born — a small town in the Tuscan hills roughly equidistant between Florence and Pisa.

The medieval old town contains a fascinating museum, in which some of da Vinci’s famous sketches — including a cycle, an olive-press and a spring-powered cart — have been turned into real objects.

Sadly photography was not permitted inside the building, but you can get some idea of what’s on show by visiting the museum’s website .

What I found perhaps most interesting were some of da Vinci’s ideas for scientific instruments, including a device for measuring the humidity of air. It consisted of a balance with a candle on one side and a ball of cotton wool on the other. As the ball absorbs moisture, it tips the balance in proportion to the amount of water absorbed.

A few miles out of town lies the house where, it is believed, da Vinci was born and where, as a boy, he used to sit and sketch the rolling Tuscan countryside.

Galileo, of course, was born not far off in Pisa in 1564, some 45 years after da Vinci died. What was it about those Tuscan hills that led to two such great minds?

Weird stuff: a model of the Wendelstein 7-X outer magnet

By Matin Durrani

It’s amazing who you can meet at a conference.

At a sumptuous four-course dinner at Prague’s Kaiserstenjsky Palac last night - held as part of Europe’s Research Connection conference — I sat next to an Italian architect called Pietro Laureano, who researches the ancient tradition of digging tunnels in the Saraha desert.

Sounds a bit mad, but as he explained to me through mouthfuls of “saffron risotto with smoked salmon and red parmesan pancakes”, the water condenses underground, creating pools from which you can drink or use to irrigate crops. He’s funded by UNESCO and has written a book all about it.

On my right was another Italian architect and anthropologist, who has written, among other things, a book on the history of pasta. He reckons that pasta was never a tradiational Italian dish but has only became so after being eaten by Italians who left for new lives in other countries. Pasta came to embody what it meant to be Italian, apparently.

Anyway, back to physics.

Out in the exhibition at the conference, I caught up with physicists from a couple of projects we’ve been following on Physics World over the last few years. One is ASPERA - a European group seeking to improve the continent’s work in astroparticle physics.

As Thomas Berghöfer from the DESY lab in Hamburg explained, they’ve been funded through cash from the European Commission to form what is known in the jargon as a European Research Area Network (ERA-NET). With seven big new facilities on the drawing board, it’s a concrete example of what the European Research Area is all about - enhancing Europe’s strengths in science through co-ordinated action.

Meanwhile, Patrizio Antici was on hand to talk about Europe’s plans for a European Light Infrastructure - a planned exawatt laser that would be a thousand times more powerful than Megajoule in France or the National Ignition Facility in the US. (Memo to Physics World’s news editor: this is something we need to keep readers updated on.)

I also bumped into Chris Ibbott, a mechanical engineer who, working closely with physicists, helped to design one part of the ITER fusion reactor that’s currently being built in France. In front of a scale-model of the experiment, he explained just how complex this facility will be, not least trying to keep the plasma stable.

That’s why the Wendelstein 7-X reactor in Greifswald, Germany, is interesting: it can keep a plasma stable without needing a central solenoid. The snag is it’s got an outer magnet bent into a really weird shape, as the model in the photo above shows.

Like digging water-gathering tunnels in the Sahara or trying to get 27 separate European nations to collaborate, the Wendelstein 7-X reactor seems weird, but it might just work.

Revolutionary thinker: Jeremy Rifkin (right) with European research commission Janez Potocnik

By Matin Durrani

I can’t say I was hugely inspired by the opening address here in Prague at the Research Connection conference by European Commission science and research commissioner Janez Potocnik.

There was lots of hot air about “synergy leading to new quality”, “capacity building”, “structural and cohesion funds” and “community instruments”. I almost fell asleep.

To be fair to the Slovenian former economist, he admitted that while the conference features some top speakers, he wasn’t sure “it is polite to include myself in this category”. Refreshing honesty from a politician.

Much more interesting was the main plenary address on sustainable energy by Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and advisor to the European Union. He’s also head of a group of 100 industrial bosses committed to “address the triple challenge of global economic recovery, energy security and climate change”.

So clearly a guy with fairly small ambitions.

In a doom-laden first half of his talk, Rifkin warned how too many politicians have completely underestimated how bad climate change will be — his talk was of anything up to 70% of species going extinct, oil supplies peaking within the next decade, and plenty of floods, storms and disaster.

Thankfully Rifkin has a solution — distributed energy.

Just as the computing Grid can carry out massive calculations by farming out chunks of processing to individual computers around the world, so distributed energy would involve individual houses and factories generating electricity using solar panels and wind turbines.

It’s revolutionary stuff — gone would be big, centralized oil-, gas-, or nuclear-powered stations. In would be small scale production, distributed around the world.

Better still, if it works, the idea is that people would sell unused energy to other people connected to the Grid.

It’s what Rifkin calls the “third industrial revolution”.

I was interested that Rifkin reckons the European Union is at the forefront of this idea — he hopes the EU will champion it at this year’s Copenhagen climate-change conference — whereas the US is still more resistant to it.

But as he pointed out at a later press conference, Obama has twigged what he’s on about and once the US sets itself a challenge, it could end up implementing distributed energy much faster than Europe’s fragmented nation states could.

Rifkin’s a polished performer and a man for the soundbite. Potocnik - take note. It might get you noticed.

Right, where’s that solar cell…

Fusion followers: the COMPASS reactor in Prague with delegates to the Research Connection conference

By Matin Durrani

When they reach retirement age, physicists in many countries are simply told to pack their bags and go.

Not so for Jan Stoeckel, former head of tokamaks at the Insitutute for Plasma Physics in Prague. When he turned 65, he simply stepped down from the hotseat, found a successor in Radomir Panek, and carried on working.

At least that’s what he told me yesterday on a fascinating guided tour of the institute’s COMPASS reactor, organized as part of the European Commission’s massive 2009 Research Connection conference Connection conference here in Prague.

In a sort of parallel with Stoeckel’s career, the COMPASS reactor, which used to be based at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s based in Culham, was all set to be mothballed until the IPP stepped in with an offer to rebuild it in Prague.

As Stoeckel explained to me as he took me round the brand new building in which COMPASS is housed, the reactor was originally built in the late 1980s, but was sold to the IPP for one pound in 2007, shipped to Prague and rebuilt over the last 18 months.

What makes COMPASS still useful is it that it is essentially a scaled down, one-tenth version of the ITER fusion reactor being built in Cadarache in southern France.

Although COMPASS initially won’t actually fuse nuclei together - deuterium-tritium reactions can be dangerous and expensive - the reactor will still be useful to study turbulence in hydrogen plasmas. And because it’s basically a tiny version of ITER, that work should give invaluable insights into how to keep ITER’s plasma stable.

No expense spared: the Janacek Chamber Orchestra

By Matin Durrani

To adapt the immortal words of the singer Billy Bragg, if you’ve got a gravy train, I want to be on it.

It was in that spirit — and the quest for journalistic truth of course — that I accepted an offer from the European Commission for Physics World to go on an all-expenses trip to its 2009 Research Connection conference in Prague in the Czech Republic. The country currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

The offer looked too good to refuse with over 1500 European researchers convening on the Prague Congress Centre for an event designed to showcase the best of European research funded by the Commission’s massive €50bn, seven-year Seventh Framework research programme.

Two nights in the luxury Corinthia Towers hotel didn’t sound too bad either.

Clearly the Commission is not short of cash - it has invited about 100 other journalists from across Europe to attend as well - and laid on a concert by the Janacek Chamber Orchestra at Prague’s Municipal House last night, followed by a lavish “cocktail dinner”, which was a kind of topnotch buffet.

I was taken to the venue by the very kind physicist Jan Stoeckel, former head of the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He had shown me round the COMPASS fusion reactor earlier in the day, which I’ll say more about in my next posting.

By Matin Durrani

When Tim Berners-Lee dreamt up the World Wide Web 20 years ago last month, the former physicist-turned-CERN-software-engineer could not possibly have envisaged what his invention would unleash - from iTunes to Google StreetView and from Spotify to Ebay.

There’s no way either that he could have ever envisaged the idea of Twitter — the website that invites people to answer the question “What are you doing?” in fewer than 156 characters.

Twitter’s been all the rage this year with everyone from BBC Radio Five Live presenter Richard Bacon to actor Stephen Fry signing up, boring everyone who chooses to “follow” their “twitterings” about their every move. Even Barack Obama is on Twitter, except that he doesn’t write his entries - he has minions to do it for him.

But whether Twitter turns out to be a short-lived phenomenon or something that proves truly durable and lasting, the fact is it’s here and we on Physics World couldn’t resist joining in. You can find us here

You’ll be delighted to hear though that we won’t be letting you know every time one of us goes to the kitchen to make tea or has another chew on one of the Physics World pens.

What we are doing though is letting you know via Twitter every time something new is posted on our site physicsworld.com - be it  a news story, blog entry or longer feature.

So now you’ve got even less excuse not to keep coming back! Apparently you can even follow Twitter via your mobile phone.

Athene Donald, as not seen on a desert island (Credit: University of Cambridge)

By Matin Durrani

Sadly I missed the appearance of my former PhD supervisor Athene Donald on the legendary BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs last Sunday.

The show, which has been running for over 65 years, features a celebrity or noted figure who picks their eight top records that they’d like to take with them as a castaway on a desert island. They also get to pick a luxury and a book.

The show’s website lists Athene’s choices, which unfortunately do not include any physics-related material that I could have made an amusingly weak comment about.

So there is nothing by astrophysicist-turned-rock-legend Brian May from Queen or by the former D:REAM keyboardist Brian Cox, who is now a particle physicst at Manchester University.

Donald, a polymer physicist at Cambridge University in the UK, also didn’t pick anything by Canadian band The Nylons or new Glasgow indie outfit We Are the Physics. Nor was there anything from Olivia Newton-John, whose grandfather was Max Born.

What she did pick though are pieces by mainstream composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Vaughan-Williams, with three left-field choices from Irving Berlin, Enrique Grandos and Paul Hindemith (no I’d never heard of him either).

The closest I can get to a physics pun is that the Irving Berlin piece she picked was “Blue Skies”, which perhaps reflects the kind of basic research she does.

You can catch up with a repeat of the show on Friday 27 March at 9.00-9.45 a.m. GMT.

The Sun’s so-called scoop

By Matin Durrani

Scientists have a habit of complaining that there’s not enough science in the mainstream press. So I suppose they should be glad that Britain’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun, had a story on their front page last Thursday (15 January) emblazoned with the headline “Life on Mars”.

The story was refering to a paper in Science by a team of NASA scientists that reported the finding of methane in the Martian atmosphere. And as the Sun (the real one that is) destroys methane, could it be that living organsims are constantly regenerating the gas?

Turns out that the story is not the scoop it seems: scientists already had evidence for methane on Mars, so this latest research only confirms those findings.

Moreover, according to Paul Sutherland - the journalist who wrote the story - Science was not happy that The Sun had broken the embargo on the story, which was set at 7 p.m. UK time on Thursday 15 January. Indeed, he says that Science staff rang The Sun at 3 a.m. local time, demanding the story be removed from the paper’s website.

But Sutherland denies that he ever broke an embargo. As he explains on his blog, he simply put two and two together based on NASA’s original press release, along with a couple of Google searches and a chat with an astronomer friend.

Now when a newspaper or website reports on a story before an embargo deadline, what normally happens is that the organisation that imposed the deadline lifts the embargo so that other media outlets can report the story too. But Science maintained the embargo because, it said, this “unfortunate tabloid teaser” contained nothing from the research paper and was “a purely speculative narrative”.

Which says it all about The Sun’s coverage of science I guess. Still, fair play to them: they got planetary science on the front page and it seems churlish to complain.

But the final twist in the tale is that Nature, which each week sets embargoes of its own, reported the story back in October last year

What goes around comes around.

By Matin Durrani

What’s the biggest challenge in physics? What was the biggest breakthrough in the subject over the last 20 years? And do you like the fact that physicists are unpopular parties? Those were just three of the serious and not-so-serious questions in our special survey that we launched in October on this website to mark the 20th anniversary of Physics World.

The survey was just meant to be a bit of fun and we had no idea how many people would reply. But in the end 522 people had their say before we closed the survey in early December. We reckon those numbers are high enough to draw some reasonably secure conclusions. Even if not, here are the results anyway and you can draw your own.

1. What was the most important discovery in physics over the past 20 years?
From the ten choices made by the Physics World team, the clear winner — with over a quarter (26.6%) of the vote — was evidence for dark energy, discovered in 1997/8 by two teams of researchers looking at the properties of certain exploding stars called type 1a supernova. In second, was the discovery of nanotubes — rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms, the discovery of which is often (controversially) attributed to Sumio Iijima from NEC in 1991. In third, with 11.9% was Bose—Einstein condensation — the long-sought-after low-temperature state in which a cloud of atoms all fall into the same quantum state. Its discovery in 1995 led to Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman sharing a Nobel Prize for Physics six years later.

2. What was the most significant popular-science book over the last 20 years?
No surprises here, with Stephen Hawking’s seminal A Brief History of Time scooping 42.7% of the vote. His book was published in April 1988, just six months before Physics World magazine started life. In second was Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe (12.3%) followed by the late Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think? in third (11.2%). Bad news though for Britain’s Astronomer Royal and head of the Royal Society Martin Rees — his Just Six Numbers came tenth, picked by only two people.

Ebb and Flow by P Mininni et al

By Matin Durrani

Two silent round flashes on a dark screen. That was the image witnessed by researchers crowded into the control room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva on 10 September that heralded the successful passage of the first beam of protons around the 27 km collider. Later that day physicists watched as one of the LHC’s main experiments - the Compact Muon Solenoid - generated its first images from the debris of particles produced when the proton beam was deliberately steered into a tungsten collimator block.

Particle physics has long been a rich source of iconic images - from the tracks in the bubble chambers of the 1950s to the particle collisions that signalled the detection of everything from the W-boson to the top quark. But visualization has a proud history in other areas of science too. Ever since Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609 and saw mountains on the Moon and spots on the Sun, researchers have sought to see beyond what is possible with the naked eye. Indeed, astronomers now claim to have directly observed extrasolar planets for the first time.