Australian physicists fight cuts in university budgets
Like their colleagues in many other countries, Australian physicists are in the midst of a funding crisis. Peter Pockley reports on their attempts to fight back
Author archive
Labour disappoints
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 […]
Laser highlights
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
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
Off the beaten track
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 […]
New horizons for R&D
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 […]
Skirmishes on the wild side of science
Many scientists regard people's fascination with the supernatural as harmless nonsense. Tony Jones meets a physicist who confronts proponents of paranormal beliefs
Reality is not a hoax
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 […]
Cosmic background pays off for Microsoft’s research chief
Nathan Myhrvold was once Stephen Hawking's postdoc - now he is chief technology officer at Microsoft. Peter Gwynne discovers the secrets of his success
What science policies?
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 […]
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