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 […]
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 […]
Over 300 guests gathered at the Savoy Hotel in London last night for the presentation of the 1998 Institute of Physics awards and medals
Leo Esaki, the physicist who is president of the University of Tsukuba, is one of the joint winners of this year's Japan Prize
The chairman of the US House Science Committee, James Sensenbrenner, has criticised the Shuttle-Mir space missions as "an especially bad example of an international agreement"
Organic lasers are attractive for optical applications because they are inexpensive to manufacture, can be grown as thin films and have good temperature stability. Results from the Princeton team suggest that they can be made to operate at wavelengths between 460 and 510 nm, making them ideal for use in optical storage devices. The Princeton […]
The UK science budget for 1998-99 was announced by John Battle, the science, industry and energy minister, last week
To do this Levy adapted a technique used by solar astronomers in which a black disk is placed in the focal plane of the telescope. The size of the disk is chosen so that it exactly matches the Sun’s image in the focal plane, allowing astronomers to observe the delicate structure of the corona. Levy […]
A more detailed review by Bernard Pagel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) appears in the January 1998 issue of Physics World Some 30 years ago, the hot big-bang paradigm was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of the microwave background radiation and its precise black-body nature. Since then, cosmology has advanced at a […]
Reviewed by John Maddox If war is too important to be left to the generals, then surely the research community should be on its guard against leaving the history of discovery to the historians of science who have recently captured their eponymous field. That must surely be the reasonable person’s first reading of this well […]
