I don’t know where the time went, but my first Critical Point was published 15 years ago this month. Inviting me to write the column, Matin Durrani – who is now editor of Physics World – counselled me to be “robust, pithy, with plenty of anecdotes and an eye for detail”, which were traits he said he liked in my other writings. He also advised me to be “humorous, where appropriate”. I tried to follow this advice in the ensuing columns, in which I sought to write something new about a historical, philosophical, social or biographical aspect of physics in just 950 words.

I particularly like writing about exceptional people involved in extraordinary tasks: Frank Sinden, who built a mock-up of a boat that can sail faster than the wind powering it (June 2008); Guangming Qiu, who studies ancient Chinese metrology (July 2011); and Jane Richardson, whose work at the intersection of art and science changed the way we depict proteins (August 2004).

Several columns landed me on the radio and even onstage. “So you think physics is funny?” (September 2003) got me mocked on BBC Radio Five Live, very late one night New York time, by host Dotun Adebayo, and I promptly wrote about that humiliating experience (“The best physics humour ever”, December 2003). “Lost art of the letter” (January 2007) got me invited on a Valentine’s day talk show on the Washington, DC, radio station WAMU alongside the author of a book on love letters. Another column, “Why don’t they listen?” (May 2014), got me an invitation to speak at TEDxCERN. I also blogged about the event for Physics World and wrote a syndicated article.

While having dinner at a London pub one evening, I asked Matin which subjects generate the most feedback from Physics World readers. Two, he said: religion and measurement units. I understood the reasons for the former but not the latter. After a few columns on units (September 2009, February 2010, December 2010), I did, and had the nucleus of material for a book: World in the Balance: the Historical Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement (Norton 2011).

In several “interactive” columns I invited readers to respond to questions on topics including reality (October 2001), physics legends (November 2006), science bloopers (April 2007) and laboratory literature (December 2014). Some of these – on beautiful experiments (May 2002) and great equations (May 2004) – also provided material for books: The Prism and the Pendulum: the Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (Random House 2003), and The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg (Norton 2009).

A few columns coined words or expressions. A doxoid is an opinion or belief that has not been independently thought out – such as that accelerators are dangerous – but is produced by other beliefs and opinions (May 2005); anosognosia names the disease that afflicts humanities scholars ignorant of how science affects modern life (September 2005). The Farley effect refers to the way scientific ideas emerge in dialogue (November 2003); the Treiman effect to the way that each new result affects our assessment of the path by which we got to it (July 2013). These expressions, however, are not yet in the dictionary.

Despite many interesting and informed comments from readers, there have also been the inevitable hecklers, blowhards and Internet stalkers convinced that science is much simpler than I have presented it. The most menacing was the person who reacted to a column on the ambiguities of the discovery process with the adamant conviction that discovery is solely a matter of publication date. He even threatened to sue me, pointing out that the “British system is much more favourable to the plaintiff in a libel suit than the system in the US”. In the end, he didn’t. Damn! I’d have loved to concoct a legal brief exposing his vacuous, self-interested reasoning. The court scene alone would have made a terrific column.

I had a humbling experience after the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. I tried to find something appropriate for a column, thought for days, but could not. I was therefore awed to open the pages of Natural History to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s meditation on the Twin Towers, which approached them as if they were a laboratory, their mere structure and appearance able to reveal nature’s secrets. The piece was clear, discerning and written with a sense of (in this case terrible) occasion – a magnificent piece of column-writing that I can only hope to emulate.

As a US author writing for an international magazine published in the UK, there have been occasional confusions over spelling, punctuation and cultural references. I was baffled to find that the name “Rube Goldberg” is not well known in the UK; the British equivalent is Heath Robinson, which gave me material for a column (June 2005). And despite discovering that a Physics World article from 1998 on the “physics of football” is one of the most popular on this magazine’s website, I haven’t yet figured how to make a column out of the difference between what Americans and the rest of the world understand as “football”.

The critical point

Every so often Physics World would inform me there would be no “Critical Point” because of a special issue. Each time I’d get hot under the collar, feeling sure that I – and the Institute of Physics, which publishes this magazine – would be inundated by protest letters. None ever arrived. This taught me the most important critical point: a column is just another article and has no moment of its own. What matters is to write on an interesting topic in a way that connects with readers, and to do so again and again.

• Enjoy the rest of the May 2015 issue of Physics World in our digital magazine or via the Physics World app for any iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. Membership of the Institute of Physics required