The importance of physics to the UK economy has increased significantly over the past 10 years, according to a report published by the Institute of Physics last month. The report shows that the total number of companies in physics-based industries (PBI) increased by 165% between 1989 and 2000. However, investment in these companies is not keeping pace with other manufacturing sectors and there is “overwhelming evidence” of an increasing shortfall of trained physicists to meet the demands of industry, especially as about half of all new physics graduates find jobs outside the so-called traditional PBI sector. The challenges identified by the report are familiar: the low levels of investment in PBI companies; the “indiscriminate shunning” of technology companies by the investment community since 2000; the low rate of commercialization of academic physics research; the shortage of physics graduates; and the poor image of science- and engineering-based industry.
It will not be easy to solve any of these problems, although efforts to address the shortage of physics graduates are in hand following the publication last year of the increasingly influential Roberts report on the supply of scientists and engineers (Physics World June 2002 pp58-59 print version only). The problem of under-investment has also been the subject of many government reports, but little seems to change: survey after survey has confirmed that UK companies invest significantly less in R&D than their international competitors. This situation is unlikely to change without major incentives from the government.
To encourage the commercialization of academic physics research, the report calls on university physics departments to teach entrepreneurship to students and to exploit more of their research in industry. There is much to be said for equipping physics students with as wide a range of skills as possible, but with courses already overloaded and other reports calling for improved communication and team-working skills, additional non-physics modules would have to be optional. Moreover, although the Institute’s report estimates that physics-based industries account for 43% of employment in manufacturing in the UK, there is not really a physics industry in the sense that there is a chemical or a biotechnology industry. This significantly reduces the opportunities for physics departments to take part in university-industry collaborations. However, it is imperative that UK industry starts to invest seriously in the key technologies of the 21st century, be these nanotechnology or renewable energy, and that the academic physics community backs up this investment with a supply of well prepared graduates and innovative ideas.
• See industry.iop.org/pbi.html and p 44 (print version only).
Physics around the world
This issue contains four articles about science in parts of the globe that Physics World does not often cover, starting with a report (p11, print version only) on a recent meeting that explored why the Islamic world seems to be turning its back on science. On page 15 (print version only) Katepalli Sreenivasan of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) describes how the level of scientific literacy has fallen in many countries since the centre was founded almost 40 years ago. Habatwa Mweene was at the sharp end of that illiteracy recently. As a semi-official spokesman on the 2001 solar eclipse, Mweene had to convince a sceptical – and largely fundamentalist Christian – public in Zambia that the eclipse did not signal the end of the world (p56, print version only). But there are ways that scientists from developed nations can help. They can support the ICTP and – as Paul Prentice describes on page 47 (print version only) – go and teach in the developing world. His experience in Ethiopia was certainly hard but shows what can be achieved.
