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...
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...
Read article: Ethics enters the 21st century
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...
Europe and America
When the European Physical Society (EPS) holds its general conference in London this month, there is likely to be much talk over coffee about the need for Europe to match the United States in a variet...
J D Bernal: genius yes, sage no
At the age of two, John Desmond Bernal was taken by his American mother from their farm in Ireland to see his grandmother in California. He amazed other passengers on the steamship by talking in both ...
String theory: simple yet elegant
String theory dates back some 30 years, but it was the “first string revolution” of 1984 that intensified interest in this, the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything&#...
Read article: String theory: simple yet elegant
