Bohr had escaped from German-occupied Denmark in September 1943 and crossed the Atlantic to work with British and American physicists on the Manhattan atomic-bomb project at Los Alamos. However, he returned to Copenhagen in August 1945, partly on the advice of his close contact, Sir John Anderson, who was chancellor of the exchequer and political […]
Sensenbrenner has long campaigned against ITER, an international collaboration between fusion labs in Europe, Japan, Russia and the US. He claims that ITER has soaked up valuable funds that could be used for cheaper, more effective fusion programmes, and called last week’s extension “irresponsible.” He argues that the original goal set by the project – […]
Companies are continuing to build on the tremendous success of the compact disc by developing systems that could eventually replace the traditional video recorder
Read article: Optical data storage
Outside it is a warm May evening, as two friends sit deep in discussion in a coffee house in Berne. “Besso, you must help me, I think I am going mad. How is it even thinkable that a light ray could overtake two reference systems with exactly the same speed if one is moving, the […]
The first news story in that first issue was a sneak preview of the Edwards’ report on the future of physics departments in UK universities, which concluded that 20 staff and 200 full-time-equivalent students was the minimum feasible size for a department. Some 20 or so of the 53 departments of the time did not […]
The goal of all-polymer electronics has motivated an increasing number of research groups around the world for the past 20 years. These groups hope to provide plastics – which have the advantages of low-cost processing, flexibility and toughness – with the electronic properties needed for practical circuitry. In the past few months, exciting new results […]
The report has three main recommendations: all areas of research must be given the opportunity to thrive; technology-based industries should be given the chance to grow; and education must be strengthened at all levels. To encourage research, the report states that the government must “make federal research funding stable and substantial, maintain diversity in the […]
Bill Richardson, head of the DOE, says that Livermore “will provide critical new technologies to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction [and provide] the FBI with new capabilities that could save American lives”. The partnership extends a previous agreement under which the agencies collaborated on crime-fighting technology. The move into civilian science is […]
The Main Injector has a circumference of 3.2 km and contains 432 magnets, each of which weighs over 18 tonnes. The Tevatron itself has a circumference of 6.3km and collides protons and antiprotons at a centre-of-mass energy of nearly two trillion electron volts (2 TeV). “Fermilab’s new Main Injector will open up extraordinary new opportunities […]
The kilogram is currently defined by a platinum-iridium alloy maintained at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) in Paris and six official copies. However, the official mass of the standard kilogram has been known to vary with time, hence the interest in defining the kilogram is terms of fundamental constants like h. The […]
