In 1994 the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Cliff Shull and Bert Brockhouse for, in the words of the Nobel committee’s citation, showing “where atoms are” and “what atom...
Read article: Neutron scattering: strategic necessity or expensive luxury?
Two of the oldest and largest physical societies in the world celebrate anniversaries this year. The Institute of Physics, which publishes this magazine, can trace its roots back to the Physical Socie...
“Heisenberg is an intelligent man, but a typical German (that is to say a Tacitus).” So wrote Albert Einstein to his Swiss confidant Carl Seelig, in January 1953. Although the quotation do...
Three major reports have already been published – on atomic, molecular and optical science; plasma science; and elementary-particle physics – and reports on nuclear physics and gravitation...
To what extent should a formal education in ethics be part of the university physics curriculum? When this question is raised in the physics community, the response is often that there is no significa...
On page 38 of this provocative book, Thomas Gold describes how he began “nosing around in the field of petroleum geology” only after establishing himself as an esteemed astronomer and phys...
When it comes to employing new graduates, scientific institutions are increasingly keen to take on people who have practical scientific experience as well as the academic understanding that a physics ...
Colloids are also immensely important in a range of industries. Although the products themselves are low-tech – paint, mayonnaise, toothpaste and ice cream, for instance – the physics unde...
It was in 1867, in a letter to his friend and colleague Peter Tait, that James Clerk Maxwell first stated his renowned “demon paradox”. He imagined a vessel with two compartments, separate...
Transforming the Soviet Union’s highly centralized communist regime into an open, democratic society based on free-market principles has proved to be much harder than people at first thought. Li...
