What is happening to the subject that we have loved and served? More than any other discipline, physics has transformed the face of civilization, particularly during the last century. It has developed...
“Science is more controversial than art can ever be.” Strange words for an artist, perhaps, but Cornelia Parker has been inspired by science for many years. Indeed, Parker’s “C...
Interdisciplinary research is currently in fashion, and no interface is more in vogue than that between physics and biology. But whereas the subject matter of, say, chemical physics or materials physi...
One of the standing jokes that those of us who work on fusion have to suffer every now and then from other physicists is that the best-conserved time invariant in physics is the time to achieve a cont...
I was recently 60 feet underground in the museum attached to the old operations room of 11 group at Uxbridge, one of the nerve centres of the Battle of Britain, staring at pictures of senior Royal Air...
Sam Treiman was a distinguished particle theorist. The famous Goldberger-Treiman relation was, at the time of its discovery in 1958, an amazing connection between the strong and weak interactions. Col...
Measurement is at the heart of physics. As physical quantities have been measured with greater and greater accuracy, our knowledge of the world has improved. This applies equally to measurements on th...
George Steiner once proposed a challenging thought experiment. He suggested that we imagine a world without art critics. What would it be like, asked Steiner, professor of English and comparative lite...
When Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969, his colleague at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, said: “This event marks the public recognition of...
Tim Berners-Lee’s name will be familiar to most readers of Physics World as the one-time Oxford physics student who, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva, invented the World ...