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01 Jan 1997

This is the 100th issue of Physics World. The occasion is marked by a small section that starts with an article by Philip Campbell, who edited the first 85 issues of Physics World before leaving to become editor of Nature, and ends with my own efforts to predict the future. In that item I make a promise that articles in future issues of the magazine will be easier to understand. Quite by coincidence, the 12 December issue of Nature contains an editorial entitled ‘In pursuit of comprehension’ which outlines plans to inject ‘increased effort into the readability of its papers’. It is almost as if, after ten years of fretting about the need for better public understanding of science (and engineering and technology), there has been belated and sudden recognition of the need for improved understanding among scientists themselves. For Physics World, this involves reporting developments throughout physics to all sorts of physicists in as accessible, authoritative and timely a manner as possible. The need for accessibility is most acute in the “features” and “physics in action” sections of the magazine. To ensure authority, these articles are always written by acknowledged experts in the field who can put the work in context by highlighting what is new and why it is important. Physics World staff work closely with the authors during the editing stage to ensure that the article is accessible. (Timeliness can be difficult in a monthly magazine in which many of the articles are written by busy researchers but, I feel, we all do our best).

Spelling out acronyms and explaining jargon can aid accessibility, but there is one unavoidable, and difficult to answer, question: what can we assume our readers know or remember? It would be impossible to compile a list that answers this question but we assume, for example, that there is no need to explain what a crystal lattice is, that it does no harm to add that phonons are vibrations of the lattice, and that is it absolutely essential to explain what a Brillouin zone is every time one is mentioned. Ionization is well known but variants like auto-ionization and above-threshold ionization are always explained. And we try not to patronize you by calling colliders “atom smashers” or saying that something is “thinner than a human hair”.

Despite these efforts, this issue contains several articles that are not for the faint hearted. The “physics in action” section, for example, contains articles that report on the observation of glass-like behaviour in proteins, and the first experiment to measure the decoherence of quantum wavefunctions induced by the environment. However, if the protein article, for example, gives the reader some inkling of the amount of difficult physics currently being studied in proteins, and if the definitions of proximal and distal haemopockets are enough to get you through the article, then that is a start.

The Physics World editorial staff have felt the need for improved accessibility for some time, although the response to our recent reader survey suggests that fine tuning rather than wholesale change is needed. But we do not underestimate the improvements that need to be made if we are to meet the challenge of making the latest breakthroughs in biophysics, quantum theory and other specialities accessible to readers outside these fields.

In the 1960s Bob Dylan sang “don’t criticize what you can’t understand”. The fact that so many of the readers who replied to the survey did not feel the need to criticize the magazine could mean that they are Dylan fans who do not understand the magazine, or that they understand it perfectly. Of course this is an exaggeration, but it is comforting to us to know that the truth is closer to the latter than the former, and comforting to readers, I hope, that the magazine will continue to move in this direction.

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