Physics is fun, or so the science popularizers like to claim. Anyone who is up all night writing a PhD thesis is likely to disagree, as will final-year undergraduates with exams on quantum mechanics looming on the horizon. But a new page in Physics World – entitled Quanta – is our attempt to root out the lighter side of physics. It consists of amusing, noteworthy or memorable things people have recently said, as well as short items about physics that are entertaining or just quirky.

Some physicists certainly know how to have fun, as our article about Ernest Rutherford and his Cambridge colleagues in the 1920s makes clear (see p48; print version only). Known as the Trinity Circus, the group would meet up on Sundays on the Gog Magog golf course near Cambridge, where – by all accounts – they played terrible golf, talked non-stop and laughed. Of course, there was less pressure on physicists in those bygone days, but even today physics ought to be fun, at least sometimes.