‘t Hooft and Veltman were both born in the Netherlands. In 1966 Veltman was appointed as professor of physics at the University of Utrecht, and ‘t Hooft became his PhD student in 1969. By 1971 ‘t Hooft had made several important breakthroughs in the theoretical effort to renormalize the electroweak interaction. Then using a computer […]
Prior to Zewail’s work chemists had thought that chemical reactions occurred on the same time scale as molecular vibrations — that is, on the femtosecond scale. In the late 1980s, Zewail developed a technique that could follow the motion of atoms and molecules on these time scales. A strong laser pulse was used to start […]
Global warming – sometimes called the greenhouse effect – is caused by gases in the atmosphere that absorb and then re-emit infrared radiation, thereby ‘trapping’ the heat on the Earth instead of allowing it to escape into space. The three most common greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, water vapour, and ozone. However, some greenhouse gases […]
The material – 1,3,5-trithia-2,4,6-triazapentalenyl (TTTA) – is non-magnetic at very low temperatures. The paramagnetic effect is strong at room temperature, but as the compound is cooled, it becomes diamagnetic below 230 K. However, it is heated again, it does not become paramagnetic until the temperature reaches is 305K. This is an unusually wide hysteresis loop […]
Every year the Foundation asks 3000 physicists to nominate individuals for the prize, and compiles a short-list of 250 candidates. These names are then whittled down to a list of 30, from which the winners are chosen. Last year’s prize was awarded for the experimental discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect, and its theoretical […]
Scargle argues that there already exists a bias in individual scientific papers because researchers usually only publish statistical summaries of their data – not the raw data itself. But his main concern is how negative results are automatically refused publication in some fields. This is likely to tilt any future survey of the literature in […]
The standard story about the development of physics as a separate discipline runs more or less as follows. After the Newtonian revolution of the 17th century, natural science divided into two parts: mechanics on the one hand and experimental science on the other. The latter investigated nature in a mostly qualitative way, whereas mechanics – […]
When the astronomers – Rodrigo Ibata from the European Southern Observatory, Harvey Richer and Douglas Scott from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Ronald Gilliland from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore – compared the two Hubble images, they noticed that five objects appeared to have moved, indicating that they are local […]
Physics teaching is being transformed in the UK and the Institute of Physics is leading the way with a forward-looking initiative designed to revitalize the subject and attract more students
Read article: New hope for physics education
The name magic number comes from the shell model of the nucleus. The combined quantum mechanical effects of protons and neutrons in the nucleus can create energy shells similar to the electron energy levels found in atoms. The number of protons or neutrons required to fill each shell is called a magic number. The GANIL […]
