Physics World September 2021
Picture of success: why open-source software is so powerful for physics
Roughly 23,000 people helped create the first image of a black hole, taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2019. But without the imaging software all those people had written, it would never have been possible to extract the famous image from the EHT data. As perhaps the most high-profile example of how free and open-source code is becoming a powerful tool in academic research, Achintya Rao investigates how such software is being used in physics research, and its role in the wider open-science movement. Also in this issue: remembering Steven Weinberg, the mystery of the solar corona, and advances in biological mass spectrometry.
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