One clear result from the reader survey distributed with the July issue of Physics World was the large number of you who want more articles on the history and philosophy of physics. This came as a big surprise to us. We thought that we had responded to a similar message in our 1996 survey by publishing major articles on J J Thomson, Cecil Powell, Paul Dirac, Patrick Blackett, Ernest Rutherford, John Bell and Marie Curie; Forum articles about philosophical topics such as the “science wars“; and a large number of books reviews in these areas. But it appears that this was not enough, so in the November issue you will find articles about the late II Rabi, who received the Nobel prize for his work on magnetic resonance and nuclear physics, and Frederick Guthrie, the outspoken chemist-turned-physicist who founded the Physical Society of London, which later became the Institute of Physics.
It is often said that history is written by the winners, and this is true of popular accounts of the history of physics, with the winners normally being chosen by the Nobel selection committees. Magazines such as Physics World are guilty in this respect too: we prefer to write that “professor X discovered this and professor Y explained that”, rather than to go into the details. This “heroic” view is particularly unpopular with professional historians of science.
Some of the most interesting episodes in the history of physics have occurred when physicists played a key role in “real” history, most notably with the development of radar and the atomic bomb during the Second World War. The bomb brought physicists into direct contact with ethical and moral questions that they had not faced previously. Rabi was a prime example of this. The whole question of ethics and the related area of misconduct – or, less euphemistically, fraud – continue to loom large. In this month’s issue Gérard Toulouse argues that it is the responsibility of both individual scientists and scientific societies to maintain ethical standards in science. Toulouse also describes systems that have been set up in Germany to monitor misconduct in science. Meanwhile, the US government has just started a 60-day consultation to agree a definition of scientific misconduct.
Genetics is undoubtedly the area of science in which the debates about ethics are currently most vigorous, although public opposition to genetically modified foods is growing while the food companies, scientists and government advisors debate the topic. But there are still ethical dilemmas for physicists too. It is to the credit of the US physics community that 32 Nobel prize winning physicists so publicly supported the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) last month. And it is a disgrace that the US senate, having refused to discuss the treaty for more than two years, decided to vote on it – and reject it – with a minimum of debate. (Indeed, it has taken the senate so long to get around to the CTBT that two of the laureates who signed the original draft of the letter have since died.)
US ratification of the treaty would not, of course, end the dilemma of nuclear weapons for the physicist. Although President Clinton’s nuclear policy is based on a $5bn per year programme of computer simulation and experimentation that would replace the need for test explosions, the US would still retain an enormous stockpile of nuclear weapons that could be exploded for real. That said, the elimination of nuclear testing worldwide would be a big step in the right direction, and one can only hope that the treaty survives long enough to be voted on by a senate that can see beyond its own partisan short-sightedness.
Marking the millennium
In December Physics World will take a break from its normal format to celebrate the millennium. Instead of our usual sections we will publish a series of articles that will cover everything from physics before Galileo to the future of information technology, the findings of a survey of more than 100 leading physicists, and progress reports on ten of the outstanding challenges in physics. Watch this space.
