This volume, sixth in an ongoing series of works by Princeton University Press, contains some of Albert Einstein’s more important papers on quantum theory and general relativity. Early versions of some of these papers had numerous inaccuracies in the text. This was because of the “publish or be damned” attitude prevalent at the time. Many […]
Luckily the literature is not like a barrel of apples and one bad paper will not ruin all of the others. There are also different types of mistakes with different consequences. Deliberate mistakes are the most damaging and, on the basis of recent high-profile cases, such scientific fraud is largely a problem for life scientists […]
In The Crystal Egg, a short story written in 1897, HG Wells describes how a remarkable object in Mr Cave’s Curiosity Shop allows its owner to gaze at a real-time image from the surface of Mars while sitting in a darkened room on Earth. A century later, we can all do much the same thing, […]
Read article: Paul Dirac: the purest soul in physics
Paul Dirac published the first of his papers on "The Quantum Theory of the Electron" 70 years ago this month. The Dirac equation, derived in those papers, is one of the most important equations in physics
Read article: Light emission moves into the blue
Shuji Nakamura describes the advances that enabled his group to develop blue light-emitting diodes and lasers
A report claims that the European Space Agency is considering joint programmes with the military in space
Frank Marshall, Will Zhang and Eric Gotthelf from the Goddard Space Flight Center, and John Middleditch of Los Alamos National Laboratory found the star by studying data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray satellite. They have calculated that the star is spinning over 60 times per second, twice as fast as any previously known pulsar. The pulsar […]
France's newest nuclear physics facility - the SPIRAL facility for radioactive nuclear beams in Caen - has accelerated its first beams
Despite the popularity of cheap plastic lenses, glass lenses are still essential for many applications. To make a glass lens, a gob of molten glass is dropped onto a catching tool, which compresses it into the desired shape. This glass blank is then polished to the correct magnification. However, the compression method used to manufacture […]
The analyses were commissioned by Sir John Cadogan, director general of the research councils, who chairs a panel that is reviewing the UK science budget. He is using the SWOT analyses to help him judge the impact of publicly-funded research on the government’s long-term objectives. Cadogan is also consulting professional bodies and learned societies to […]
