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
First published November 1997 in Physics World As the sixth director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, John Browne faces broad challenges at a critical time in the laboratory’s history. After a lifetime of secrecy – the first atomic weapons were built there in 1945 – public concerns are forcing the lab to become more […]
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 […]
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 […]
