By Hamish Johnston
After too much turkey and water shortages in Ireland, December 20th seems like an eternity ago. That’s when we published our top 10 breakthroughs of 2010, with two research groups at CERN sharing the number one slot with their work on antihydrogen.
To create the top 10, I first went through the 360 or so news stories that we published in 2010 and came up with a shortlist of about 25. Then James, Michael, Matin and I locked ourselves in a meeting room until we could agree on a list of 10.
I won’t pretend that we were 100% objective – we all have our favourite topics and physicists – but I think we caught the essence of what went well in the world of physics last year.
Over on his blog Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel has put our list to the test by asking his readers to vote on their favourite breakthough.
You can vote here, and you can also view the results.
I’m pleased to see that Chad’s readers agree with our number one and number two choices – and a few others as well. Folks seem less keen on the holograms, invisibility cloaks and phonon lasers.
