Table of contents

Technology has been one of the chief drivers behind long-term economic growth and improved standards of living. But does it create or destroy jobs? Although new technology clearly destroys jobs in some industries, it creates them in others and has historically led to net job creation, according to a recent report* from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Ernest Rutherford was one of the most remarkable scientists of the twentieth century. From a humble background in New Zealand he made a string of brilliant discoveries in physics, yet somehow managed to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (page 35). To anyone starting a physics degree this month, or anyone under-whelmed by their degree so far (page 15), Rutherford's wholehearted and enthusiastic approach to the subject is a superb example to follow.

Most scientists are convinced that global warming is taking place, but satellite measurements have indicated that the Earth's lower atmosphere is in fact cooling. Such discrepancies between satellite data and ground-based instruments have sparked debate between climate researchers, and allowed some politicians to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. Now, however, Frank Wentz and Matthias Schabel of Remote Sensing Systems in California have shown that small changes in the height of satellite can lead to errors in the measured temperatures (Nature 1998 394 661).

High-energy physicists are constantly building larger and more powerful machines to accelerate beams of particles to ever higher energies. But bigger is not always better, and researchers in France and the UK have now provided the first glimmer of a "table-top" particle accelerator. They used a plasma-based scheme known as laser-wakefield acceleration to boost an electron beam to high energies over short distances (F Amiranoff et al. 1998 Phys. Rev. Lett. 81 995).

European researchers have devised a way to double the temperature at which some copper oxide compounds become superconducting. By creating thin films of lanthanum strontium cuprate under compressive strain, Jean-Pierre Loquet of IBM Research in Zurich and colleagues increased the material's transition temperature from 25 to 49 K (Nature 1998 394 453). The results may also help to clarify the structural properties that influence superconductivity.

Postgraduate students in the UK are to receive an extra £1000 per year from October as a result of the government's recent comprehensive spending review. This will increase the annual grants of most physics postgraduates to £6455. Physics students doing PhDs jointly funded by industry will fare even better. The bonus payments they receive from their sponsoring firms will rise to £3000, bringing their annual grants to £9455. The government says that the number of places will not be cut to pay for the increase in student grants.

Sanctions imposed by the US on India and Pakistan in the wake of recent nuclear tests are starting to hurt scientists. Two Indian researchers have been forced to leave their jobs at the Argonne and the Los Alamos national laboratories, while junior scientists from India and Pakistan working in other national labs were asked to leave as soon as their contracts expired. Visits by Indian and Pakistani scientists to US labs have also been cancelled.

High-flying physicists who work as "rocket scientists" on the international money markets are now a familiar sight in many banks and financial houses. Most of them have PhDs, but one UK university has just launched the first undergraduate degree to train physicists specifically for such posts. Strathclyde University has set up a new MSci in physics with mathematical finance to give students a taste of life in the financial world. Lectures begin later this month.

Unfettered access to the World Wide Web in UK universities could come to an end as a result of the introduction of charges for Internet access. Since the end of July, universities have had to pay UKERNA – the body that runs JANET, the UK's academic network – two pence for every megabyte of information that they download from North America. The bills could be as high as £100 000 a year for some of the UK's largest universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, London.

Work on what could be the first gravitational-wave telescope in the southern hemisphere has started near Perth in Western Australia, bringing physicists nearer to the goal of establishing a linked network of detectors spanning both hemispheres. Gravitational telescopes have been under construction for several years in Germany, Italy and the US, but Australia's involvement is seen as crucial because a truly global network of telescopes will provide much greater sensitivity and resolving power than each telescope alone.

Astronomers have been peering into the future to see what space missions they will need in ten years' time. At a meeting in Boulder, Colorado, last month, more than 120 researchers concluded that four ultraviolet and optical instruments will have to be launched when the Hubble Space Telescope stops taking data early next century. The astronomers will now pass their recommendations to a special committee that has been charged by NASA and the US National Science Foundation to fix astronomy priorities over the next ten years.

Researchers in the UK who have won support from the Realising Our Potential Award (ROPA) scheme do very well in generating further income from other sources. One in three of the successful scientists say that their ROPA-funded work has helped them to win follow-up funding from industry, according to a survey published by the Office of Science and Technology at the end of July. One in five say that it has led to additional support from the research councils, while almost a sixth say that ROPA work has helped to secure extra funding from the EU or other bodies.

Universities and research organizations in the Netherlands are to have their annual budgets cut by about 3% in real terms, as part of the new government's plans to lower taxes and reduce public borrowing. The cut will be phased in over the four years to 2002.

News in brief artilces for September 1998

Switzerland is a good place to be a scientist. Research papers by Swiss scientists have the highest impact factors in the world, while only Sweden and Japan spend more of their gross domestic product on R&D. And physics is one of the strong points of Swiss science. The country is home to two of the world's most famous physics laboratories – the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva and the IBM Research lab in Zurich – and, as is well known, the most famous physicist of all discovered relativity while working in the Patent Office in Berne.

The fascination of physics, for me, lies in its supremely exotic nature. Although it is a subject grounded in experimental test and rigorous verification, it nonetheless spans an awesome range of weird and wonderful concepts. The power of physics to describe the real world is persuasive, but it is its power to describe other worlds beyond our normal experience – worlds of antimatter and of hyperspace, of dilated time and infinite possibility – that is most potent.

The higher education bill passed recently by the Serbian government appears to be another outrageous measure from the ruling coalition. It will allow the government to regulate many aspects of the country's universities, and has shocked both academics and the overwhelming majority of the public.

In his letter about the Advanced Subsidiary (AS) courses that will be introduced in England and Wales in September 2000 (August pl9), Bryan Chapman seemed to worry that secondary school students will drift from physics as a result of the new courses. What a shame that so many people have such a sad and uninterested view of what is a fascinating subject. I feel that it is now time to tackle the real root of the problem and turn physics around. To put it bluntly, we need to rewrite the subject.

There are many everyday objects, emotions, circumstances and actions for which no word or term has yet been invented. However, the wonderfully diverse language of physics lends itself naturally to such definitions, and we have found it mildly diverting to redefine various physics terms. Here are a few, although there are, perhaps, many more.

Gerry Meeten suggested that the metric foot (0.3 m) has disappeared (July p16). However, he will find that it is alive and well at his nearest timber yard or do-it-yourself emporium. There the lengths of pieces of timber are quoted in metres, but the only lengths you can buy are multiples of the metric foot i.e. 1.8 m, 2.l m, 2.4 m, 2.7 m, etc. Similarly, the transverse dimensions of sawn wood are related to binary divisions of the metric inch (25 mm). Thus 19×38 mm, which approximates to 3/4 inch by 1 1/2 inch, is a standard size. And the next size up from 19 mm is 22 mm (7/8 inch). Plywood, on the other hand, uses Imperial (not metric) feet and so comes as panels measuring 2.44×1.22 m. A standard thickness is 12.5 mm.

The news story "Scientists to be evaluated by new rules" (August p13) should have referred to researchers working for the French national research council council (CNRS), not French universities as stated. Also, André Rougé, the Ecole Polytechnique physicist who is president of the CNRS council for the national institute of nuclear and particle physics (IN2P3), said that the work of the departmental councils was "largely redundant", not "largely absurd".

Since the invention of the laser nearly 40 years ago, there has been an inexorable trend towards creating devices that are smaller, more efficient and tunable over a wider range of wavelengths. This has been achieved through continuous improvements in the three principal building blocks of the laser – an active medium that provides amplification, a pump that serves as the source of energy and a resonator that provides feedback. In the latest advance, researchers from Lucent Technologies and Yale University in the US, and the Max Planck Institute for the physics of complex systems in Dresden, Germany, have tackled the limitations imposed by laser resonators in a fresh and effective way (C Gmachl et al. 1998 Science 280 1556). They have obtained strong beams of laser light from microdisk lasers, which were previously only able to produce weak laser emission.

When atoms come together in free space, groups containing particular numbers of atoms are more stable than others. These "magic clusters" are now well known, and similar clusters are thought to exist in two dimensions. Indeed, researchers believe that two-dimensional magic clusters could form the basis of single-electron transistors and other quantum components. Such clusters have proved elusive, but M Lai and Y Wang at the Academica Sinica in Taiwan have now created and observed magic clusters of gallium on a silicon surface (M Y Lai and Y L Wang 1998 Phys. Rev. Lett.81 164).

Most scientists would agree that the eye-catching images and high-profile results from the Hubble Space Telescope have conveyed the excitement of observational astronomy to the general public. One of most its most impressive achievements is the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), an ambitious exposure of over 150 hours that made it possible to see the universe as it was billions of years ago. But new measurements at sub-millimetre wavelengths indicate that the optical image may not be telling the whole story. Results reported by four different groups reveal several strong sources of sub-millimetre radiation, suggesting that star formation in these regions is occurring more rapidly than indicated by optical measurements.

Results presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics – hosted by the TRIUMF laboratory in Vancouver, Canada at the end of July – have confirmed the remarkable success of the Standard Model of particle physics. This model incorporates the electroweak theory, which describes how particles respond to the electromagnetic and weak forces, and quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which covers the strong interactions of quarks and the gluons through which they interact.

The invention of the transistor by John Bardeen and William Shockley in 1948 triggered a new era in electronics. Originally designed simply to emulate the vacuum tube, scientists soon found that this solid-state device could offer much more. The great potential of the transistor for speed, miniaturization and reliability has been fully exploited since well controlled materials such as pure single-crystal silicon became available. According to the latest "road-map" for the microelectronics industry microchips containing one billion transistors and operating with a clock cycle of a billionth of a second will be on the market just a few years into the new millennium

Ernest Rutherford is one of the most illustrious scientists that the world has ever seen. He achieved enduring international fame because of an incredibly productive life, during which he altered our view of nature on three separate occasions. Combining brilliantly conceived experiments with much hard work and special insight, he explained the perplexing problem of naturally occurring radioactivity, determined the structure of the atom, and was the world's first successful alchemist, changing nitrogen into oxygen.

Over the second half of this century, scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding the properties of electrons in condensed matter. This success has primarily been due to describing the electrons in terms of a collection of states, with each state labelled by its momentum and spin. Electrons are fermions and therefore obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which means that two fermions cannot have the same momentum and spin quantum numbers. The exclusion principle forces electrons to occupy a range of momentum states up to a so-called Fermi surface. In three dimensions the Fermi surface is a sphere.

There are few men who generate such strong and diverse emotions as Lord Weinstock, who became without doubt Europe's most prominent industrialist since the war. Born the son of a poor Jewish immigrant, he rose to become managing director of GEC, Britain's largest manufacturing company. He transformed the firm, raising its turnover from £100m in 1960 to £11bn by the time he retired in 1996. Lord Weinstock is now emeritus chairman of the company.

The continuing commercialization of new technologies is the key to future world prosperity and business competitiveness. Many examples of such developments now play an essential part in modern life, both in their own right and as "enablers" of other developments. For example, the transistor, which was invented by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain in the late 1940s, has now evolved into the microprocessor, a device that is now fundamental to nearly all aspects of life – from the modern car, the control of plant and medical instrumentation, to telecommunications, the Internet and children's toys. Few inventions, apart from developments such as the wheel and electrical power, are as fundamental as the transistor. (One could argue that other inventions, such as television and the internal combustion engine, are perhaps as important, but both of these have themselves been enhanced by the application of the microprocessor.)

There is currently a considerable resurgence of interest in the debate between science and religion. This is evident in the writings of both "creation scientists" and "new age" enthusiasts. But despite their substantial public following, neither group is part of the serious academic debate, because they do not give sufficiently earnest attention to scientific issues.

Lake Shore Cryotronics has introduced the Model 218 temperature monitor. The unit can read up to eight diode or resistance temperature sensors twice each second. All eight channels can be displayed continuously in Kelvin, Celsius, volts or ohms. The Model 218 supports a variety of sensor types, with diode sensors allowing temperature measurements down to 1.4 K. Two versions of the unit are available, one with an IEEE-488 interface and one with a serial interface. The Model 218 also features an alarm capability. Relays can be used with the alarm set-points in latching mode for error detection or in nonlatching mode for simple on/off control. The unit also includes two analogue voltage outputs, a printer interface and a data-logging facility.

Lam Research has launched the TCP 9100PTX high-density dielectric etch system. The equipment is designed for the production and fabrication of 0.25 micron wafers in the semiconductor industry. The system includes a wide gap chamber to help enhance centre-to-edge uniformity and photoresist selectivity This could be useful in the production of structures with high-aspect ratios or self-aligned contacts. The TCP 9100PTX has also been optimized for low-k dielectric etching and damascene applications. The system includes a 8 inch SEMI SiC inner focus ring and keyed gas distribution plate to help lower the cost of consumables. Mean time to clean has been reduced through the inclusion of chamber liners and a chamber lift, while having fewer consolidated chillers should increase reliability.

It started with the old joke about theoretical physicists