The Labour government in the UK has certainly moved quickly since it was swept into power at the start of May. At first it was window-dressing – “call me Tony” the new prime minister Tony Blair told the first meeting of the new cabinet. But there has been substance too: Scotland and Wales have already […]
The many achievements and uses of the electron have been widely celebrated this year. Photonics has not yet had the impact of electronics, although the interdisciplinary subject of optoelectronics underpins the whole communications industry. For a particle with no mass and no charge, however, the photon has certainly made its presence felt, as highlighted by […]
Read article: Canadian physicists work hard to defend their subject
Canada is strong in many areas of physics and astronomy but, as Peter Gwynne found out, the challenge is to convince the government of that
Point your Web browser at http://www.agacooker.com/disc.html and you will learn how Gustav Dalen, the Swedish inventor who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1912, invented the Aga cooker to release his wife from some of the drudgery of cooking. Dalen only realized that his wife was “virtually enslaved” in the kitchen after he was […]
The globalization of industrial research and development is now a fact of life. R&D was once a corporate function, performed on a single site near a company’s headquarters. But now the increasingly global nature of the markets for high-tech products, combined with ever shorter product cycles, requires goods to be manufactured all over the world […]
Many scientists regard people's fascination with the supernatural as harmless nonsense. Tony Jones meets a physicist who confronts proponents of paranormal beliefs
A year ago, as last June’s Physics World was going to press, our North American correspondent contacted us with a late-breaking story about Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University who had just published a deliberately meaningless paper in a “critical studies” journal called Social Text. The story sounded amusing but not, in my […]
Nathan Myhrvold was once Stephen Hawking's postdoc - now he is chief technology officer at Microsoft. Peter Gwynne discovers the secrets of his success
If a week is a long time in politics – and the election campaign leading up to the UK general election on the first of this month has certainly proved that it is – then the past five years have been a time of unprecedented change for the organization of British science. The changes have […]
Read article: What Carlo did next
Since winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1984, Carlo Rubbia has pursued an impressive range of diverse projects. Susan Biggin meets a larger-than-life physicist
