Patents, patience and quantum ideas
Will the patents taken out on quantum computers expire before such computers are ever built?
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Patents versus patience
Physicists are rightly proud of the way that basic research in the past has paid off in terms of technology that is widely used everyday. We all know the examples: transistors, lasers, optical fibres, magnetic resonance scanners and so on. These inventions have all made lots of money for individuals and companies somewhere in the […]
Arthur Schawlow, laser pioneer, dies
Schawlow was born in New York and educated at the University of Toronto, where he received his first degree in 1941 and his PhD in 1949. After a spell at Columbia University, where he worked with Charles Townes, he moved to Bell Laboratories in 1951, where he worked mostly on superconductivity. However, he continued to […]
New director for Max Planck plasma lab
The IPP runs a tokamak called ASDEX and is also building a stellarator fusion device known as Wendelstein 7-X at it lab in Greifswald. If ITER is built in Japan, Bradshaw says he will lobby for Garching to become the European control room. He also hopes to upgrade ASDEX. “After the Joint European Torus is […]
New observatory to solve cosmic puzzle
Cosmic rays are particles from outer space that continually bombard the Earth. The nature and origin of cosmic rays with energies below 1015 eV are well understood. However, physicists have no idea of what the highest-energy cosmic rays, which have energies of more than 1020 eV, are made of, or how they are accelerated. These […]
Radiation causes hidden DNA damage
Li-Jun Wu from Columbia University and colleagues from Colorado State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences used the radiological research accelerator at Columbia to pass precise quantities of alpha particles through the cytoplasm. They found that it only required eight alpha-particle “hits” in the cytoplasm to increase the normal level of mutations by a […]
Rolf Landauer, a unique physicist, dies
Landauer was born in Stuttgart in 1927 but had to leave Germany because his family was Jewish. He studied physics at Harvard University in the United States and joined IBM after two years at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the body which later became NASA). At IBM Landauer became interested in the fundamental limits […]
Read article: Light plays tricks with nuclei
Light plays tricks with nuclei
Just as electrons can be excited inside an atom, neutrons and protons can be excited from their ground states into higher-energy states inside the nucleus. If these states have long half-lifes then they are called nuclear isomers. In general such long-lived nuclear states are also associated with other unusual properties. In addition to their fundamental […]
Europe losing space race
ESA’s ruling body – the council of ministers – will meet later this month to discuss the agency’s budget for the next four years. Antonio Rodotà, ESA’s director general, will ask ministers for a total of Euro 1.85bn (about £1.2bn) for the science programme and a further Euro 759m for the Earth observation programme during […]
Why cautious people lose
Johnson and colleagues specified “winners and losers” by making the “agents”, as the individuals are called, repeatedly choose between two rooms. Choosing the room denotes a “trader” buying or selling shares, or a car driver picking one out of two routes home. The room which has the fewest traders in it at the end contains […]
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