Physicists, more than most people, are accustomed to dealing with gases. Yet even physicists often treat gases as something to be taken for granted, a sort of Platonic ideal with interesting or useful properties but with little connection to the world outside the laboratory. Whether as natural resources or something to be delivered in cylinders, […]
Planets are thought to form from the debris surrounding young stars. As material rotates around the star, gravitational attraction causes the debris to clump together into planets. Gradually the planets sweep up the debris and dust in their orbit, decreasing the amount of material in the star’s rotational axis. For example, if our solar system […]
Search engines such as Hotbot and AltaVista record a list of pages with keywords in them, but cannot interpret how relevant the information is on the page. For example the word ‘quantum’ returns 778, 930 references through AltaVista, but doesn’t state how many are physics related. Kleinberg’s program analyzes the links between Web sites by […]
Financial institutions already employ physicists because they are uniquely familiar with the mathematical and conceptual thinking needed to understand financial risk in, for example, currencies and property. Previously these physicists have had to learn about finance on the job. Andrew Hirsch, head of the physics department at Purdue, hopes that the new course will change […]
The meeting was due to be held in Belgium at the end of June. However, Yvan Ylieff, Belgium’s minister for scientific policy and organizer of the meeting, has announced that disagreements over the future direction of the agency, and the forthcoming national elections in Germany, have caused the meeting to be abandoned. The election is […]
Three companies are investing in the project. Qwest Communications, one of the world’s fastest growing telecommunications companies, is donating 16000 miles of fibre optic cabling to the project, while Cisco Systems and Nortel have offered equipment ‘in kind’. All three companies see Internet-2 as an ideal test bed for the next generation of high-speed switching […]
Registration is free for members of the Institute of Physics and individual Physics World subscribers. A standalone subscription to PhysicsWeb costs £25. Free trial registrations are also available. The main change that users will notice is that they will have to give a username and password to access some parts of the site. The alerting […]
The report also found that the PhD unemployment rate varies with the age at which people received their PhD. The rate varies from 0.6 per cent for those receiving PhDs before the age of 26, to 5.8 per cent for those above 40. The report also finds that unemployment rates are lower for male PhDs […]
The commission hopes that by making capital accessible to companies, Europe can help reduce the high level of unemployment affecting the continent. Unlike the US, where a large number of venture capital firms promote and support a number of small high-technology companies, obtaining finance for similar ventures in Europe is exceedingly difficult. Few companies provide […]
The European Science Foundation is an association of 62 major national funding agencies devoted to scientific research in 21 countries. The ESF assists its member organizations in two main ways: by bringing scientists together in its scientific programmes; and through the joint study of issues of strategic importance in European science policy. The plan splits […]
