Science studies – what’s wrong?
Physicists form a rather closed group of people. You may occasionally talk to a chemist or a mathematician, but how often do you cross the campus to speak to people working in the relatively new acade...
Fusion energy: the agony, the ecstasy and alternatives
Fusion – the release of nuclear binding energy from light nuclei and its practical exploitation – has been a major world research discipline for the past four decades. It promises to be an...
New look, same standards
“Evolution not revolution” was the motto as we set about redesigning Physics World earlier this year. After nine years with the same design we felt that a new look was long overdue –...
Labour disappoints
The Labour government in the UK has certainly moved quickly since it was swept into power at the start of May. At first it was window-dressing – “call me Tony” the new prime minister...
Laser highlights
The many achievements and uses of the electron have been widely celebrated this year. Photonics has not yet had the impact of electronics, although the interdisciplinary subject of optoelectronics und...
Off the beaten track
Point your Web browser at http://www.agacooker.com/disc.html and you will learn how Gustav Dalen, the Swedish inventor who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1912, invented the Aga cooker to release h...
New horizons for R&D
The globalization of industrial research and development is now a fact of life. R&D was once a corporate function, performed on a single site near a company’s headquarters. But now the incre...
Reality is not a hoax
A year ago, as last June’s Physics World was going to press, our North American correspondent contacted us with a late-breaking story about Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University who had...
What science policies?
If a week is a long time in politics – and the election campaign leading up to the UK general election on the first of this month has certainly proved that it is – then the past five years...
Read article: 100 years of the electron: from discovery to application
100 years of the electron: from discovery to application
Joseph John Thomson – universally known as J J – discovered the electron 100 years ago this month
