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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 that most of the grand underlying principles [of physical science] have been firmly established". Of course, the discovery of X-rays, radioactivity, the electron, relativity and quantum mechanics around the turn of the century proved him wrong.

Back in 1995, physicists hit the headlines by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate – a new state of matter in which all the atoms accumulate in the same quantum state at low temperatures. The effect was a dramatic demonstration that bosons – particles with integer values of intrinsic angular momentum or "spin" – can share the same quantum numbers. The next challenge was to create a similar "quantum degenerate" state of fermions – particles with half-integer values of spin. In a quantum-degenerate gas the atoms are so cold that their de Broglie wavelength becomes comparable with the typical inter-atom separation, leading to new forms of behaviour.

Many physicists work with potential health hazards such as laser beams, X-rays and radioactive materials on a daily basis. Now a group of medical physicists in Egypt has studied the effect of another common hazard in physics labs, fast neutrons, on a not-so-common but just-as-dangerous substance – snake venom. Magda Hanafy of Zagazig University and colleagues at the Animal Health Research Institute in Cairo found that the neutrons reduced the toxicity of the venom from a Cerastes cerastes snake, a member of the viper family (Phys. Med. Biol. 1999 44 2343). The untreated venom is fatal to humans – and the rats used in the experiments.

A team of researchers in the US has directly observed the electron orbitals in a crystal for the first time. Jianmin Zuo and co-workers at Arizona State University used a combination of electron and X-ray diffraction to map the charge distribution in copper oxide (Nature 1999 401 49). The technique may help to clarify the role of copper-oxygen bonds in high-temperature copper-oxide superconductors. The theory of these materials is an outstanding problem in physics.

The quality of physics teaching in English universities is higher than that found in many other subjects according to the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). The 22 physics departments in England reviewed by the QAA so far have scored an average of 22.5 points out of a maximum of 24. This is higher than in any subject review so far completed, and four departments have achieved top marks of 24 (see table). A further 18 departments in England and Northern Ireland will be reviewed by next summer, to be followed by a new programme of review that will take place some time between 2003 and 2006. Departments in Scotland and Wales have already been reviewed but were not given numerical gradings.

The past month has been a difficult time for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's biggest laser project. The $1.2bn laser, located at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is $350m over budget and two years behind schedule. And the project's director, Michael Campbell, resigned at the end of August when it was revealed that he did not have a PhD.

Americans who watch golf on television are frequently bombarded by adverts for magnetic devices. Placed on the wrist, in shoes and elsewhere, the devices are touted as cures for everything from aching muscles to arthritis. In fact magnet therapy has recently become a major business far beyond the fairway. "It has been sitting round for hundreds of years," says Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland and communications director of the American Physical Society. "But it's a big deal now. You can find therapy magnets in department stores and pharmacies worldwide. It's real money."

Radio astronomers have been fighting a losing battle against electromagnetic interference from satellites and mobile phones for many years. Most communication systems broadcast around 1420 MHz – the so-called hydrogen line that is widely used by radio astronomers. Other systems "leak" into frequency bands that are supposed to be reserved for astronomy (Physics World January 1998 p 10). Now Bart Smolders and colleagues from the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (NFRA) have developed a new type of radio telescope that could reduce such interference by a factor of 10 000 or more. The team hopes that the technology will play a key role in the $500m Square Kilometre Array, the world's most ambitious radio-telescope project.

Large scientific facilities in France are set to bear the brunt of cuts to the country's research budget that were announced last month. Claude Allègre, the research minister, says that instead he wants to increase basic funding for national research council (CNRS) labs and on government-defined "priority areas", such as nanotechnology and alternative energy. Funds for research are set to fall by 0.5% to FFr 39.8bn (about £3.9bn) next year. Incentives for innovation and technology transfer will, however, receive a 3% boost to FFr 14.7bn.

In the good old days, scientists who wanted to do an experiment at one of the UK's central research facilities had it easy. The research councils paid for the running costs of the facilities so that access for researchers was essentially "free", assuming that their proposed experiments were good enough. Physicists also had a choice of some of the world's leading facilities, which included the Synchrotron Radiation Source at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, the ISIS pulsed-neutron source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, and the Central Laser Facility, also located at the Rutherford lab.

The long-awaited decision on where to site Diamond – Britain's new third-generation synchrotron-radiation source – had still not been taken as Physics World went to press last month. The front-runners are the Daresbury Laboratory in the north-west of England and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the south. The £175m facility is designed to replace the ageing Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury. Diamond has already received a £110m pledge from the Wellcome Trust – a biomedical charity – with the French and UK governments footing the rest of the bill.

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 started reading an article in Scientific American by Paul Dirac. The article questioned whether it was correct to unify the concepts of space and time into space-time: Dirac appeared to be challenging one of the tenets of modern physics.

Physics is the foundation of all of our knowledge of the physical world, yet relatively few people practise it professionally. As a result, most of the students that we are asked to teach are not going to become physicists. This raises two difficult questions. First, what aspects of physics should we teach to people who are not going to become professional physicists? And second, how should we teach it? While there is not much doubt about how to train a physicist, there is a lot of uncertainty about how and what to teach non-physicists. I expect that most experienced physics teachers will agree that, with some exceptions, we do not do a very good job of this.

Your news story (July p7) reports remarkable claims made in the 29 May issue of The Spectator by the journalist Nicholas Farrell – the "mouthpiece" for the military historian Nigel West – that the physicist Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife Eugenia had been Soviet spies. This accusation is completely ridiculous to any person who was acquainted with Sir Rudolf and Lady Peierls and who knew their openness and the depth of their loyalty to Britain. I wish to bring together all of the evidence available, and use it to show that West has got it wrong.

Physicists cannot but agree with the first sentence of your editorial (August p3): "Spin is one of the most fundamental and mysterious phenomena in physics." Spin was indeed one of the radically novel concepts, introduced during the earlier part of this century that lie at the foundation of modern physics. Others are the concepts of "quantization" and of "matter waves".

The cost of the Next Linear Collider is estimated to be $7.9bn, not $7.9m as stated last month (September p9).

An international team of nuclear physicists has found strong evidence for the existence of nuclear supersymmetry, a theory that relates bosons, which have integer values of spin, and fermions, with half-integer values of spin. The researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the US obtained the results in a series of complex experiments at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, the University of Bonn and Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (A Metz et al. 1999 Phys. Rev. Lett. 83 1542). The findings are the culmination of sustained effort by many people to establish the validity of theoretical ideas that link the properties of various nuclei. This relation follows from a "supersymmetric" transformation that converts bosons into fermions and vice versa.

Circular and spiral wave patterns are widely seen in nature, and are often associated with the activity of an "excitable medium". As everyone knows, dropping a stone into water generates a series of concentric waves that looks like a target, while stirring a cup of coffee produces a spiral wave. The same underlying physics describes the propagation of circular and spiral waves in many biological systems. For example, the rhythmic contractions of the heart are triggered by waves of electrical activity through the cardiac tissue, and the development of organisms is controlled by waves of chemicals flowing between cells.

Back in the 1970s Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University in the UK made the theoretical discovery that small black holes are not "completely black". Instead, a black hole emits radiation with a well defined temperature that is proportional to the gravitational force at its surface. The finding uncovered a deep connection between gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. Later, Bill Unruh of the University of British Columbia in Canada proposed that quantum particles should emit thermal radiation in a similar way when they are accelerated. According to Unruh, a particle undergoing a constant acceleration would be embedded in a "heat bath" at a temperature T = ℏa/2πck, where ℏ is the Planck constant divided by 2π, a is the acceleration, c is the speed of light and k is the Boltzmann constant. But is it really possible to detect such radiation?

The future of magnetic recording is a matter of considerable debate because it appears to be approaching various physical limits imposed by the dynamics of the recording process. In conventional magnetic recording, for example, information is recorded on a thin film containing a magnetic layer that is divided into small domains, each with a well defined magnetization. Information is "written" by reversing the direction of magnetization using an external magnetic field that is antiparallel to this direction. But this technique limits the "speed" of the recording process to the nanosecond level. Now Christian Back from the ETH in Zurich and co-workers in Switzerland and the US have used ultrafast magnetic-field pulses to reverse the magnetization of cobalt films in 2 picoseconds (Science 1999 285 864).

Can Science be used to further our understanding of art? This question meets with reservations from both scientists and artists. However, for the abstract paintings produced by Jackson Pollock in the l940s and 1950s, scientific objectivity proves to be an essential tool for determining their fundamental content. Pollock dripped paint from a can onto vast canvases on the floor of his barn. Although recognized as a crucial advance in the evolution of modern art, the precise quality and significance of the patterns created by this unorthodox technique remain controversial. Here we analyse Pollock's patterns and show that they are fractal. In other words, they display the fingerprint of nature.

Last month some 600 students in 25 schools and colleges across the UK began piloting a completely new physics course for 16–19 year olds, called Advancing Physics. The course is part of a £1m initiative by the Institute of Physics, in partnership with the OCR examination board, to make physics teaching more up to date, more exciting and more relevant to all aspects of modern life. It is backed by funding from the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, and various industrial sponsors.

It is widely accepted that innovation is essential for companies to remain competitive as business and industry become increasingly international. Innovation can help small companies to grow and large companies to maintain or increase their market share. Research and development is an important element of technological innovation because it helps to generate the superior products, processes and services that can give a company a competitive edge. But R&D alone is not enough for innovation.

This book outlines the story of a remarkable transformation – the conversion of most of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) from a public-sector body, that was funded to do research and development to meet national objectives, into a business seeking profitable work in the private sector. It is remarkable because the criteria for success and the general culture of two such organizations are so very different.

It was a pleasure to receive for review a light-weight, compact, well bound, inexpensive book – with the promising title Measuring the Universe – by Kitty Ferguson, an author known for her biographical and philosophical writings. The book begins with a delightful prologue in which the author describes her childhood experience of learning how to measure the height of a windmill by ingenuity alone – tackling the problem by indirect means rather than by physically reaching the top of the windmill.

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: mechanics on the one hand and experimental science on the other. The latter investigated nature in a mostly qualitative way, whereas mechanics – under the influence of mathematicians such as Lagrange and Legendre – became more and more mathematical, giving rise to new branches of mathematics, in particular calculus.

Spectra International has now introduced an integrated sensor control system that automatically monitors vacuum chamber environments and alerts the operator to any deviation from normal conditions. The Cluster Tool Profiler is an in situ multi-sensor system designed to minimize scrap and enhance productivity. The system uses Process Eye software that is directly interfaced to the cluster-tool production system. The software continuously monitors each pumpdown or process and makes comparisons with normal conditions. Communication between the cluster tool and its array of chamber-specific sensors takes place through the tool's SECS II port. Any change from normal operating conditions automatically triggers an alarm and the operator is given an on-screen diagnosis and remedial instructions. If necessary the SECS II link can shut down and isolate a chamber, preventing a contaminant being transferred to other chambers in the tool. Because the profiler can access data directly via the fabrication network, equipment and process problems can be investigated from outside the clean room. The software also allows advanced troubleshooting, trend analysis and tool-condition monitoring. The system can provide a direct link between data from the cluster-tool sensors to individual wafers and wafer lots.

I am an experimental physicist. Every now and then, however, it becomes necessary for me to try to understand what my experiments are telling me; to dabble in some simple theory in other words. On one such occasion a few months ago, I found myself needing to do a Taylor expansion of a function – but to my horror, I was unable to remember how. Even a quick check with several other graduate students napping in the office failed to elicit any useful information.