Physics World is ten years old this month. The reason we are not marking this occasion elsewhere in the magazine is that it is less than two years since we celebrated our 100th issue (January 1997), and there will be plenty of opportunities to look back and forward at the trends and breakthroughs in physics over the past 10, 100 and 1000 years around the time of the new millennium. Still, it is difficult to resist the urge to reread the first Physics World with the benefit of hindsight.
The first news story in that first issue was a sneak preview of the Edwards’ report on the future of physics departments in UK universities, which concluded that 20 staff and 200 full-time-equivalent students was the minimum feasible size for a department. Some 20 or so of the 53 departments of the time did not meet the Edwards criteria and, indeed, six had closed or merged with other departments by the time the report was published. Ten years on, the former polytechnics have become universities and there are still more than 40 physics departments in the UK, although small departments continue to close. Plus ça change…
The first issue also included a story that began: “British particle physicists are hoping for a positive sign from the CERN council this month that will encourage the government to continue Britain’s membership of the European laboratory.” Although Britain, later backed by Germany, continued to argue about the cost of its CERN subscription for most of the following decade, the complaints have stopped for the time being, the UK is still a member of CERN and a British physicist is currently director general of the laboratory. CERN itself has managed to bring the LEP collider online and convince its paymasters to build the world’s biggest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. However, the subject of the next news story in the same issue – about the storage of high-level radioactive waste – remains as unresolved and controversial as ever.
Elsewhere in the issue, physicists were trying to find a theory of high-temperature superconductivity, still a good source of copy, while an oil company was advertising vacancies for two semiconductor physicists, a rare sight nowadays. The first issue also contained what is still the best Physics World headline – “Quark soup for starters” was an article about the quark plasma that existed just after the big bang.
Both physics and Physics World have changed since then, but many of the challenges – to explain the fundamental behaviour of energy and matter on all scales, to harness physical processes in useful and safe ways and, for Physics World, to report this work in a reliable and understandable manner – remain the same.
The Richard Feynman Experience
A “new” book by Richard Feynman is published this month: Six Not-so-Easy Pieces contains reprints of six more chapters from the Feynman Lectures on Physics with an introduction by Roger Penrose. The lectures – on relativity, symmetry and space-time – are more difficult than those in Six Easy Pieces, which is released in paperback this month. What can explain the repackaging of an undergraduate physics lecture course, one that was too difficult for all but the best undergraduates, as a popular book?
The answer, as Paul Davies writes in the introduction to Six Easy Pieces , is that Feynman is now an icon alongside Newton and Einstein, and as well known for his exploits outside physics as inside. Indeed, Feynman is fast becoming the Jimi Hendrix of physics. Both were great showmen and revolutionaries who continue to exert enormous influence – witness the constant references to Feynman by researchers working on nanotechnology and quantum information. And just as Hendrix has “released” dozens of albums since he died, compared with just four when he was alive, Feynman seems to be doing the same. What price the first popular book on statistical mechanics or path-integral methods in quantum mechanics?
