Physics World, October 2008
This month’s cover image is a “tag cloud”, which we created by feeding the text
of every single Physics World headline into a Web-based program called Wordle.
The size of each word is proportional to the number of times it has appeared in
our headlines, although commonly used words, such as “the”, “is” and “of”, are
omitted. We also did some fine-tuning of our own — for example, substituting
“atoms” for “atom” to avoid singular and plural forms of the same word from appearing
twice. The image, like physics itself, is endlessly fascinating.