Table of contents

A frequent complaint at gatherings of senior physicists is that that everyone with PhD in theoretical physics abandons research to follow a lucrative career as "rocket scientist" in the City. This is good, some senior figures argue, because shows that theoretical physics can create wealth, which is important when applying for research grants. The exodus to the City is bad, others argue, because it means that too many bright people are leaving the subject. A recent report* from the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) in London confirms that there is a genuine and growing demand for physicists in the City but that the numbers involved are relatively small. Would-be rocket scientists should also be aware that the City is only interested in the "top two per cent" of talent, and that interpersonal skills are more important than in-depth knowledge of finance.

Computer hard disks and other data-storage devices that exploit the magnetic moment of atoms may be ten times faster in the future. Researchers from Brown University and the IBM Almaden Research Center in the US have found a high-speed way to flip the alignment of atoms in a thin layer of magnetic material using ultra-short pulses of laser light (G Ju et al. 1999 Phys. Rev. Lett. 82 3705).

Lasers that emit light with an extremely well defined wavelength are crucial for high-precision laser spectroscopy and measurements of many of the physical constants. Optical clocks, for instance, make use of an optical resonance in atoms to define the clock frequency. But further improvements in accuracy may be possible if the "line width" of the laser can be reduced. Now Brent Young and co-workers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder; Colorado, have built a laser that emits visible light in a spectral line that is ten times narrower than previously achieved (Phys. Rev Lett 1999 82 3799).

A huge demand for world-class facilities in UK universities was revealed last month when the first results of a government initiative to improve laboratory facilities were announced. Some 37 projects were awarded a total of £l50m in the first round of the "Joint Infrastructure Fund", although over 180 bids worth a total of £800m were entered. About half of the successful bids were from the physical sciences, with six coming from physics. These included VISTA, a 4 m survey telescope to be built by a consortium of 18 universities. Also approved were projects on nanoscale science at Birmingham University; mesoscopic materials at Cambridge University; gravitational-wave detection at Glasgow University; low-temperature physics at Lancaster University; and mass spectrometry for planetary and environmental sciences at Oxford University. The exact amounts of each award are still to be finalized.

A team of physicists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has discovered a particle with a charge of e/5, where e is the charge on an electron. Moty Heiblum and co-workers made the discovery by studying the behaviour of low-temperature two-dimensional electron gases in high magnetic fields. The findings lend further weight to the "quasiparticle" theory developed by Robert Laughlin of Stanford University to describe the fractional quantum Hall effect, and for which he shared last year's Nobel prize with Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui.

Efforts to discover life beyond the Earth received a boost in the US in the past month. NASA has appointed a Nobel prizewinning biochemist as the first director of its new Astrobiology Institute, and the prestigious National Academy of Sciences has elected a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to its membership.

A new breed of café is spreading across France – les cafés scientifiques and bars des sciences. Topics up for discussion over a glass of Bordeaux include France's nuclear policy, radiation in the universe, and perhaps inevitably, the science of wine. Inspired by the famous cafés philosophiques, les cafés are now starting up all over France and in April the first national meeting took place in Lyon.

The world's biggest nuclear-physics experiment is due to start this month when researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US collide their first set of high-energy gold ions. Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) they hope to create a "quark-gluon plasma", a state of matter that is thought to have existed for a split second after the big bang.

The on-line tutorial does not work, many of the pages are empty, and one section requires a password that appears impossible to obtain. For a Web site that has cost £1m to set up, the UK government's new "knowledge pool" seems less than impressive. It is part of the Foresight process, which is designed to help industry and academia identify and respond to future market trends and technological opportunities. The knowledge pool was launched by Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, at the end of April.

In a protracted and acrimonious meeting, Europe's space-science ministers agreed a new four-year budget for the European Space Agency (ESA) last month. The Euro 2.1bn (about £1.3bn) budget focuses on new industrial programmes, including high-speed Internet satellite communications, a global positioning system, and an upgrade to the Ariane5 launcher. A new Earth-science programme called "Living Planet" receives Euro 593m.

As the US congress starts work on the budget for fiscal year 2000, which starts this October, American science faces a volatile situation. The Republicans who dominate congress want to decrease taxes and increase the spending on defence. This year's spending on defence is already several billion dollars over budget as a result of the military action in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, they want to hold to the current tight limits on discretionary spending, which includes the science budget.

As the world rushes on to the Internet, the demand for "bandwidth" is growing at a heart-stopping rate of some 36% a year. The only way for telecommunications operators to keep up with this growth in traffic is to invest in "photonics", in which photons – rather than electrons – are used to transmit, store and process information. One lab that has already done much for photonics, both scientifically and commercially, is the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at Southampton University in the UK. Among other advances, pioneering work at Southampton led to the development of optical fibres that amplify light, eliminating the need for electronic repeaters in long-distance telecommunications systems.

There is no doubt that the world has an increasingly intense love-hate relationship with science. Physics certainly does not escape this deep ambivalence, and we naturally wonder if there is anything that might make "them" love us a little more and hate us a little less? This question can be formulated seriously, and will be among the issues concerning science and its relations with society that will be addressed at the World Conference on Science in Budapest, Hungary, later this month. Most scientists will be represented in some way at the conference, since it is sponsored by both the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU), which represents national scientific bodies.

André Lebeau's article on climate change (May ppl5 16) advocated greatly enhanced monitoring and measurement of climatic processes. It is certainly correct to emphasize the need for accurate and diverse experimental data in developing our understanding and in supporting the construction of predictive models. And if such data arc genuinely in short supply, thcn calling for more investment in gathering that data, as Lebeau does, seems quite correct. However, Lebeau is less persuasive in his implicit view that practicable amounts of data would ever make climate change convincingly predictable. I find it regrettable that the very predictalility of climate change is so rarely challenged.

Your editorial casts around for basic research that has potential for patents and pay-back (May p3). The article by Phil Walker on pl9 of the same issue has the very subject – "nuclear isomers" as energy stores.

Dieter Hoflinann's review of my book Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture March PP41–42) is long on clumsy personal abuse but somewhat short on accurate technical discussion of the extensive scientific analysis in the book. Instead of discussing the scientific arguments that I adduced to demonstrate Heisenberg's mistaken conception of the principles of an atomic bomb – in particular his belief that the critical mass required for a uranium-235 bomb would be in the range of tons of uranium-235 rather than kilograms – Hoffinann misleadingly remarked that "if you read Heisenberg's Collected Papers (Springer 1989)...you come to a quite different conclusion".

Should funding for basic non-military research be channelled through a military body like NATO? This question came to my mind after reading about NATO's civil science programme (April p43).

Continuum Press is a new Californian publishing firm that specializes in republishing the work of a number of mid-20th-century writers who have gone out of print. The company is particularly keen to republish the work of Lancelot Law Whyte, a brilliant British physicist, manager and philosopher. The publishers believe that he and other contemporary writers have profound implications for our civilization and for individuals struggling to understand our place in the process. However, all efforts of the publishers to trace the trustees of his estate have failed. Any readers who may be able to help are invited to contact me in the first instance (tel. +353 51 563462; e-mail brian@rothery.com).

Your obituary of Glenn Seaborg (May p51) said that he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry at the age of 39 and "remains the youngest winner of the prize". However, Ernest Rutherford, who was born on 30 August 1871, received the same prize in l908 at the age of 37.

To many sports fans, the month of June is synonymous with the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Thousands of people will flock to the All England Lawn Tennis Club to watch the players battle it out on the grass courts, and millions more will watch the tournament on television. But many tennis officials, players and spectators complain that the speed of the players' serve on "fast" courts, like those at Wimbledon, has simply become too quick. Indeed, most games at Wimbledon are won on the strength of a layer's serve alone rather than following a long rally. And for some players over 30% of their sets end in tie-breaks.

As electronic devices get ever smaller, it is becoming more and more important to understand and control the behaviour of electrons on the nanometre scale, where quantum effects dominate. This so-called quantum-state engineering is relatively mature for semiconductor structures hut not so well advanced for metals. However, this situation is changing as two recent experiments on ultrathin metallic films have demonstrated.

How many dimensions are we living in? This question is fundamental and yet, astonishingly, it remains unresolved. Of course, on the everyday level it appears that we are living in four dimensions – three space plus one time dimension. But in recent months theoretical physicists have discovered that collisions between high-energy particles at accelerators may reveal the presence of extra space time dimensions.

The Standard Model of electroweak interactions, developed in the early 1970s, has been enormously successful. In this theory, heavy left-handed W and Z particles carry the weak force, while massless photons are responsible for electromagnetic interactions. The left-handedness of the heavy particles leads naturally to parity violation, the well known tendency of weak-interaction processes to be different from their mirror images.

The question "how strong is a chemical bond?" has intrigued scientists since the concept of bonding itself was introduced. A chemist might estimate the amount of energy required to break a covalent bond from indirect measurements on a large number of molecules; the answer is tins less than 1018 J. Physicists, however, tend to think in terms of forces. If it were possible to grab two atoms in a covalent-bonded molecule, how much force would it take to break the bond? This question was recently solved by Hermann Gaub from the Ludwigs-Maximillians University in Munich and his team, which included researchers from the Technical University of Munich and Stanford University in the US (M Grandbois et al. 1999 Science 283 1727).

Light influences the way we live today in ways that could never have been imagined just a few decades ago. The invention of the laser has led to fibre-optic communications, compact disks for data storage and laser surgery. Other developments in optics have had a less obvious but equally profound impact. Examples include the optical lithography techniques used to make computer chips, high-resolution microscopes, infrared sensors and highly efficient lighting sources.

Semiconductor lasers are widely used in modern life. In telecommunications they send signals for thousands of kilometres along optical fibres. In consumer electronics, semiconductor lasers are used to read the data on compact disks and CD-ROMs. Other applications include laser printers and laser pointers. Although they are just the size of a grain of salt, typically a few microns in cross-section and a few hundred microns long, semiconductor lasers are an integral part of the modern world.

From car bumpers to bullet-proof vests – everyone is familiar with polymers as flexible yet mechanically strong materials. Less well known is the fact that some polymers can also conduct electricity and emit light. These semiconducting polymers, which have been intriguing researchers for the past 20 years, are now poised to enter the market-place. One of the most advanced applications lies in displays, where semiconducting polymers can be used as the active element in light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, has moved fastest to the market, and will commission a polymer-LED pilot production line at its factory in Heerlen in the Netherlands later this year. The firm will probably use the devices as back-lights for mobile phones and other portable electronic products. Another promising application of semiconducting polymers is in the field of photovoltaics, where they could be used as area detectors or solar cells.

The invention of the silicon microchip and the resulting boom in information technology has shaped the 20th century to a far greater degree than other physics-based developments such as spacecraft and nuclear power stations. In the same way, new techniques aimed at improving the way that biological and medical information is collected and analysed will probably have a far greater impact on medicine in the 21st century than big breakthroughs such as organ transplantation or bionic implants.

In the glare of the rockets of the "science wars", physicists on the battlefield have come to identify the sociology of science with the sociology of scientific knowledge, where the focus is not just on the scientists themselves, but also on the body of knowledge they strive to create. This often leads to claims about the character of that knowledge that many of us find unconvincing. But The Stars Are Not Enough is firmly almost apologetically, situated in the older tradition, It is about physicists, not about physics.

Richard Feynman, both as a man and as scientist, excited varied reactions: you either loved him or you hated him. As a man, was either narrow-minded and sexist, or else charming and completely fair in the most unselfconscious way. As a scientist, he was either "a magician" – the most impressive kind of genius – or else he was "not in the first rank of physicists". This book will not offer much guidance among this range opinions, since it is mostly about computation, rather than Feynman. However, the snapshots of – and reactions to – that fascinating personality come as a welcome, refreshing stream running through the technical essays that form the bulk of the text.

Brookhaven National Laboratory – the first US nuclear research establishment to have been founded along non-military lines and now a jewel in the crown of world science – is situated about 60 miles east of New York city, in the middle of the great spit of glacial sand that is Long Island. It is set among barrens of pitch pine, scrub oak and fields of potatoes, which in the 1950s, I remember, cost 50 cents for a 100-pound bag. The area was memorably characterized by Isidor Rabi, one of Brookhaven's more radical founding fathers ("Go for broke," he frequently said) as a cultural wasteland of "car pools and cesspools".

Nicolet Instruments has introduced a new scries of high-performance, fully upgradable FT-IR spectrometers for near, mid, far and FT Raman applications. The Nexus scries has a choice of seven patented smart sampling accessories including Graseby Spccac's Smart Golden Gate diamond ATR (attenuated total reflectance) that can be used with both Nexus and Avitar spectrometers. The diamond ATR is chemically inert and allows up to 200 pounds of pressure to be applied to the sample, maximizing optical contact. The ATR also allows microsamples such as fibres and forensics to be analysed. OMNIC software automatically recognizes the accessories allowing the system to be optimized for high throughput and performance. The Nexus Smart system automatically links the spectrometer, sampling accessory, software and spectral information, and a Smart Purge feature maintains purge while samples and accessories are changed. The instruments feature plug-andplay beam splitters, detectors and sources that are claimed to allow a wide range of spectral ranges to be interchanged within seconds. A high-precision cast optical frame ensures that results are reproducible over time, and all optical components are pinned-in-place so that the device can be easily upgraded. The platform can be used for complementary techniques including IR microscopy, GC/IR, LC/IR, TGA/IR and FT Raman, as well as step-scan and time-resolved spectroscopy.

In scientific thought, no abstraction has greater importance than number, and no discipline has applied it to greater effect than physics. Lord Kelvin, as is well known, could only comprehend a concept properly if it were expressed numerically. (Most people suffer from the opposite problem.) Pythagoras, in a more mystical age, attached theological significance to prime and irrational numbers (apparently, he would swear by the square root of two), and saw numerical relationships as the key to the universe. For him, quantum theory would have been the stuff of dreams.