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 […]
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
Read article: What Carlo did next
Joseph John Thomson – universally known as J J – discovered the electron 100 years ago this month
Read article: 100 years of the electron: from discovery to application
It is difficult to imagine how a discovery in physics could reverberate around the world in the same way that Dolly the cloned sheep has in recent weeks. As biologists clone sheep and monkeys – albeit with only one event in noisy backgrounds of several hundred failed attempts – physicists are still trying to ‘clone’ […]
1. It is already nearly five years that the self-acclaimed ‘world socialist system’ crashed and the USSR broke into pieces. One might think that the grandiose experiment over the lives of hundreds of millions of people that Bolsheviks (communists) had launched in 1917 ran its full course and the total impotence of the communist ideology […]
As Physics World went to press in mid-February, the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, was playing down reports that evidence for new physics – rumoured to be supersymmetry – had been found in high-energy scattering events at the HERA collider. Conclusive proof of new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics is the dream […]
Predicted in 1924 and first observed in 1995, the fifth state of matter is now under intense scrutiny
Read article: Bose-Einstein condensation
The announcement that undergraduate physics teaching is to be phased out at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has sent a shiver through the UK physics community. Students admitted last year will finish their course, hopefully graduating in 2000, but there will be no fresh intake into physics this autumn, and staff who retire will […]
