Having just scooped this year’s Aventis Prize for Science Books, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe shot back to the top of the best-seller list of physics books for the month of May at Amazon.co.uk, the on-line bookstore. First published over a year ago, Greene’s masterful introduction to string theory was praised by the chairman of […]
Thomas Kuhn is famous for writing the surprise best-seller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Who would have thought that a book published in 1962 on the history of science would turn out to be what Steve Fuller claims is the best-known academic book of the second half of the 20th century? So well known is […]
In his original thought experiment, Schrodinger imagined that a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing a deadly poison. If the atom decays, it causes the vial to smash and the cat to be killed. When the box is closed we do not know […]
Read article: UK loses ground in optics boom
Optics is widely seen as a key technology for the 21st century
Spectroscopy – the measurement of the properties of light emitted or absorbed by matter – is one of our most powerful tools to study nature. When a prism is used to separate the light from a flame in which salt has been sprinkled, distinct yellow lines become visible in addition to the usual colours of […]
Read article: A new framework for Europe
Philippe Busquin, the European Union’s commissioner for research, has moved with remarkable speed since he was appointed last September. By January he had published a consultation paper on his big idea, the “European research area” – an initiative that was welcomed by science organizations across Europe – and by last month his plans had received […]
Read article: How to survive the 21st century
What is happening to the subject that we have loved and served? More than any other discipline, physics has transformed the face of civilization, particularly during the last century. It has developed techniques and insights that have propelled chemistry, biology and medicine to new heights. It has led to the genesis of modern engineering and […]
Read article: Optical data storage enters a new dimension
Holographic data storage promises increased storage densities and improved access times that could lead to a new range of novel memory devices
The origin of gamma-ray bursts is one of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics. Some 3000 of these short-lived bursts of intense gamma-rays have been detected in the last three decades, but it is only recently that astrophysicists have confirmed that they originate outside our galaxy. The burst of 25 April 1998 surprised astronomers because […]
In a Bose-Einstein condensate a gas of atoms is cooled until the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms exceeds the inter-atom spacing. If the atoms are bosons – that is, if they have a “spin” of 0, h/2p, 2(h/2p), 3(h/2p) and so on, where h is the Planck constant – they all collapse into the […]
