Arima has long been a keen advocate for reforming Japanese science. Previously he helped shape the 1996 Basic Law for Science and Technology, which aimed to increase Japan’s spending on science. He also proposed educational and administrative reforms during the last government. Monbusho has an annual budget of 5819 billion yen (£24.6 billion) and accounts […]
Zeilinger had invited the Dalai Lama to his laboratory following a meeting at Dharamsala in Northern India last October at which he and four other physicists had, over the course of five days, discussed physics and cosmology with the Buddhist leader. In Dharamsala, Zeilinger had demonstrated some basic quantum phenomena – such as wave-particle duality […]
The interferometer was built by Mark Kasevich and colleagues at Yale University in the US and used individual atoms, rather than macroscopic man-made objects, to measure the gradient. By observing the phase and frequency shifts of laser light passed through two cooled ensembles of atoms, they believe that the interferometer has the potential to be […]
Physics, chemistry and physical chemistry have undergone tremendous changes over the course of this century. In physics, the focus has shifted from atoms to subatomic particles, namely nuclear physics and particle physics. Meanwhile, the physics of collections of atoms in the liquid and solid states have slowly emerged as separate, independent fields. After the Second […]
Fears over climate change and the increasing problem of pollution have put public concerns about the environment at an all-time high. Governments have responded to public pressure by introducing legislation to reduce pollution, and at the Kyoto summit last year they agreed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2%. Europe has […]
Physics-based companies in the UK can find it difficult to raise venture capital. Michael Kenward finds out why
Every few years the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean warms up around the equator and plays havoc with the climate on several continents. Why does this happen?
Read article: The physics of El Niño
The problem is that the features made by conventional optical lithography cannot be shrunk indefinitely. The laws of diffraction dictate that the only way to make feature sizes smaller is to shorten the wavelength of the light. Yet the materials needed for lenses and other optical components are not effective at shorter wavelengths, and so […]
The government plans to invest an extra £400m in new projects through the research councils, £300m in universities through a new Infrastructure Fund and another £300m for research in universities through the regional funding councils. The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, is contributing £300m to the Infrastructure Fund and a further £100m towards the […]
PEP-II consists of two independent storage rings in the tunnel that housed the original PEP collider. The high-energy ring, which stores a 9 GeV electron beam, is an upgrade of the existing PEP collider, while the low-energy ring, in which the 3.1 GeV positrons are stored, is completely new. Matter and anti-matter are thought to […]
