Celebrating women of talent
The difficulties faced by women in science come brilliantly to life in this hugely enjoyable book of cartoons by Jim Ottaviani. The strips include a fascinating account of Rosalind Franklin’s sc...
Three cheers for 100 triumphant years
In mid-December 1900 Max Planck presented a series of papers to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin that were, eventually, to revolutionize not only physics as a discipline, but our entire conc...
Emerging from Hawking’s shadow
Physics World is not in the habit of reviewing books by non-physicists, but when the author was married to one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century, we can make an exception. In this book...
Reflections on the life of a laser pioneer
Charles Townes has written a biography – but it is not clear if it is his own or that of the laser. The laser is now such a feature of our everyday life that the remarkable story of its birth ne...
Read article: Ethics enters the 21st century
Ethics enters the 21st century
When the great and the good met at the World Conference on Science in Budapest in June, one question was on many people’s lips. How much has science changed since the previous World Conference h...
History and ethics
One clear result from the reader survey distributed with the July issue of Physics World was the large number of you who want more articles on the history and philosophy of physics. This came as a big...
Taking a fresh look at maths and physics
The standard story about the development of physics as a separate discipline runs more or less as follows. After the Newtonian revolution of the 17th century, natural science divided into two parts: m...
No time or ties for independent scientist
It was a beautiful October afternoon in 1963 when Julian Barbour’s life changed forever. He was travelling by train with a student friend to climb the Watzmann in the Bavarian Alps when he start...
The classroom needs you
Towards the end of the last century many physicists feared that their work was done and that the end of physics was in sight. In 1894, for instance, Albert Michelson said that “it seems probable...
Soul-searching on the Internet
“The entire scope of human experience can be viewed as a collective effect resulting from elementary particles dutifully following well-understood equations.” Statements like this excite d...
