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...
Why science thrives on criticism
The first Critical Point column by historian of science Robert P Crease
Read article: Why science thrives on criticism
Gell-Mann from top to bottom
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...
Browsing back over a life on the Web
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 ...
Collaborating with the enemy?
About a year ago I was asked to speak at a local women’s studies conference on mathematics, science and technology. I didn’t flatter myself at having been chosen, because nearly every loca...
Beyond understanding
There was an inevitable irony in the timing of a recent report on “science and society” published by the House of Lords select committee on science and technology. The report was released ...
Lise Meitner: a nuclear heroine?
In 1897 Max Planck wrote the following about the question of whether women should be allowed to study at German universities: “If a woman has a special gift for the tasks of theoretical physics&...
