Physicist shares Japan Prize
Leo Esaki, the physicist who is president of the University of Tsukuba, is one of the joint winners of this year's Japan Prize
Author archive
Sensenbrenner criticises Shuttle-Mir missions
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 laser breakthrough
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 […]
Science budget fails to match inflation in the UK
The UK science budget for 1998-99 was announced by John Battle, the science, industry and energy minister, last week
Light gets in your eyes
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 lucid account of the universe
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 […]
Weighty history misses mark
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 […]
Superficial images
Reviewed by Matin Durrani Felice Frankel, the renowned landscape photographer, was hosing her driveway one Sunday afternoon when she decided to search for one of the more interesting puddles. After dropping some oil onto the water, she waited half an hour until the diffraction colours caught her eye, and then captured a stunning image of […]
Perrin’s hypothesis reborn
In a unimolecular reaction a molecule breaks into two smaller molecules (or atoms) in a manner that appears to be independent of the chemical composition of its surrounding. The number of molecules falls exponentially with time. Perrin’s radiation hypothesis is based on two conjectures: the reacting substance has to absorb radiation at the frequency required […]
1998 NAS awards
The National Academy of Sciences has honoured several physicists and astronomers for outstanding contributions to science
Read article: 1998 NAS awards
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