Immediately after humans discovered writing, they must also have discovered that concealing information is almost as important as expressing it. They also learned that there is nothing more fascinating than other people’s secrets. The ancient art of cryptography (code-making) has throughout history been matched against the ingenuity of cryptanalysts (code-breakers), sometimes in very dramatic circumstances. […]
Read article: Coded secrets cracked open
Meanwhile, ESA this week released the first two images from XMM-Newton. One shows the Magellanic Cloud, with hot gas released from supernova explosions and new stars being created in a interstellar nursery. The second image shows the different effects of galactic collisions. “In one collision a black hole shows through a dense cloud of material […]
Read article: X-ray telescope burns-up
In the CERN experiments a 33 TeV lead ion beam was crashed into targets made of lead and gold inside the seven different experimental detectors. The collisions created energy densities twenty times that of ordinary nuclear matter in order to break down the forces that normally confine quarks within protons and neutrons. The collisions produced […]
Ball lightning has only been seen during thunderstorms. The average ball lightning appears as a sphere about 30 cm across and lasts for about 10 seconds. The earliest reports of ball lightning date back to the Middle Ages. Many theories of ball lightning have been proposed, but none can explain all of the observed characteristics. […]
Antarctica is full of submerged lakes that have been trapped under kilometres of ice for millions of years. The most famous – and largest – of these hidden lakes is Lake Vostok. Price has studied samples taken from 100 metres above the lake’s surface and believes that the nutrients trapped in cracks in the ice […]
The conflict between quantum theory and local realism can be traced back to the work of Schrödinger and Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935. It remained a philosophical matter until the 1960s when John Bell suggested experiments that could distinguish between quantum theory and local realistic theories. These experiments typically involved creating pairs of photons […]
Overfishing is a worldwide problem and many of the world’s fish stocks are severely depleted. A fundamental question in light of the current state of affairs is whether it is at all possible to manage fishing grounds so that they remain sustainable? If so, how can the sustainability of fish stocks be best achieved and […]
Read article: Can physics save fish stocks?
One of the challenges facing any physics magazine is to adequately cover the activities and interests of physicists working in industry. For a long time Physics World has followed a policy that the best way to do this is to publish articles written by physicists in industry. Just as we prefer articles about the latest […]
The origin of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprate materials is one of the biggest puzzles in physics, explain Bertram Batlogg and Chandra Varma
Read article: The underdoped phase of cuprate superconductors
White Mars is about a group of men and women who are marooned on Mars at the end of the 21st century. Living in enormous self-perpetuating domes, they produce their own food and oxygen, and extract water from the planet’s core. On this austere Martian world, members of the colony set out to create a […]
