Thomas Kuhn’s best-selling philosophy
Thomas Kuhn is famous for writing the surprise best-seller The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Who would have thought that a book published in 1962 on the history of science would turn out to be ...
Read article: A new framework for Europe
A new framework for Europe
Philippe Busquin, the European Union’s commissioner for research, has moved with remarkable speed since he was appointed last September. By January he had published a consultation paper on his b...
Read article: How to survive the 21st century
How to survive the 21st century
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...
Read article: Dedication celebrations at scientific labs
Dedication celebrations at scientific labs
Robert P Crease discusses the impulse to dedicate scientific instruments
Art and science draw together
“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...
Read article: Biological lessons for physicists
Biological lessons for physicists
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...
Fusion: the final frontier for plasmas
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...
How Britain was saved by radar
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...
Impossible things usually don’t happen
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 matters
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...
