Science is a truly international activity: indeed, Einstein told us that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, not just everywhere on Earth. Mobility between nations has always been a trademark of the physics community, first between the historic university centres of Europe, and later back and forth across the Atlantic. […]
Read article: Brain drains and gains
When the formalism of quantum mechanics is applied to experiments involving microscopic objects such as electrons, we often find that the resulting description assigns finite probability amplitudes to two, or more, possibilities that appear to be mutually exclusive. In the classic Young’s double-slit experiment, for example, these possibilities are the passage of an electron through […]
Read article: New life for Schrödinger’s cat
The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: “When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.” I agree with Whitehead’s assessment, but would add that […]
Thomas Baumgarte did not plan to stay in the United States. “It happened in several stages,” says the German-born astrophysics post-doc at the University of Illinois. A one-year undergraduate visit to Cornell University in New York State led to a PhD at Cornell, and then an offer to stay on as a post-doctoral researcher in […]
China swept the board at a recent international competition for physics students. Edwin Cartlidge went along to find out more
In a ‘scale-free’ network of many interconnected nodes, like the Internet, most of the nodes are connected to a relatively small number of other nodes. Only a very small minority have a large number of connections. It is therefore extremely unlikely that randomly failing links would have a catastrophic effect on the whole network. In […]
The DONUT team fired an intense beam of neutrinos, which they expected to contain tau neutrinos, at a target consisting of iron plates with layers of emulsion sandwiched between them. One in a million million tau neutrinos interacted with an iron nucleus to produce a tau lepton, which subsequently decayed leaving a characteristic track in […]
Oliphant was born in Adelaide in 1901 and attended the local university before going to Cambridge University in 1927, where he worked on nuclear physics experiments with Ernest Rutherford. In 1937 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and moved to Birmingham University to be head of department. During his time at Birmingham […]
Stefan Hell and co-workers at Gottingen have adapted a technique known as fluorescence microscopy. In this form of microscopy the specimen is irradiated at a wavelength which excites either natural or artificially introduced fluorescent molecules known as fluorochromes. The sample is then studied through a filter that transmits at the fluorescence wavelength, but absorbs light […]
Special relativity prevents any object with mass travelling at the speed of light, and the principle of causality – the notion that the cause comes before the effect – is used to rule out the possibility of superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by light itself. However, a pulse of light can have more than one speed because […]
