Germany is thought to have some of the most highly trained and productive workers in the world. However, new data from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) in London show that workers in the US are even more productive and British workers come third. “The main reason for taking an interest in […]
Organic lasers are attractive for optical applications because they are inexpensive to manufacture, can be grown as thin films and have good temperature stability. Results from the Princeton team suggest that they can be made to operate at wavelengths between 460 and 510 nm, making them ideal for use in optical storage devices. The Princeton […]
Leo Esaki, the physicist who is president of the University of Tsukuba, is one of the joint winners of this year's Japan Prize
The chairman of the US House Science Committee, James Sensenbrenner, has criticised the Shuttle-Mir space missions as "an especially bad example of an international agreement"
Over 300 guests gathered at the Savoy Hotel in London last night for the presentation of the 1998 Institute of Physics awards and medals
The UK science budget for 1998-99 was announced by John Battle, the science, industry and energy minister, last week
To do this Levy adapted a technique used by solar astronomers in which a black disk is placed in the focal plane of the telescope. The size of the disk is chosen so that it exactly matches the Sun’s image in the focal plane, allowing astronomers to observe the delicate structure of the corona. Levy […]
A more detailed review by Bernard Pagel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) appears in the January 1998 issue of Physics World Some 30 years ago, the hot big-bang paradigm was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of the microwave background radiation and its precise black-body nature. Since then, cosmology has advanced at a […]
Reviewed by Matin Durrani Felice Frankel, the renowned landscape photographer, was hosing her driveway one Sunday afternoon when she decided to search for one of the more interesting puddles. After dropping some oil onto the water, she waited half an hour until the diffraction colours caught her eye, and then captured a stunning image of […]
Reviewed by John Maddox If war is too important to be left to the generals, then surely the research community should be on its guard against leaving the history of discovery to the historians of science who have recently captured their eponymous field. That must surely be the reasonable person’s first reading of this well […]
