Table of contents

Some of the fundamental constants of physics might not be so constant after all. Astronomical measurements of the fine-structure constant – the dimensionless number that determines the strength of interactions between charged particles and electromagnetic fields – suggest that it is increasing ever so slightly with time. If the result survives further scrutiny, it will have major implications for particle physics and cosmology (J K Webb et al. 2001 Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 091301).

Two teams of astronomers are claiming to have detected evidence for the start of a process known as the re-ionization of the universe. Both teams used the Keck telescope on Hawaii to obtain spectra of distant quasars – galaxies with extremely bright nuclei that look like stars when viewed through a telescope – that had first been detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Re-ionization marks the end of what astronomers call the cosmic dark age.

Physicists will gather in Rome at the end of this month to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Enrico Fermi, one of the outstanding scientists of the 20th century. Awarded the Nobel prize in 1938 for his pioneering work in nuclear physics, Fermi also made notable contributions throughout many other areas of physics. And in Italy, the work of Fermi and his collaborators – known collectively as the School of Rome – paved the way for half a century of success in physics. But this success is under threat because bureaucracy and cronyism hold back many of the country's best young researchers.

Physicists in India are worried about a growing lack of enthusiasm for physics at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Surveys have tracked this declining interest at the University of Delhi, but educators suspect that it is more widespread and reflects a general trend away from pure science among students throughout the country.

As our knowledge of the universe extends to greater and greater distances, so the light from which we gain that knowledge comes from older and older sources. The same seems to be true for the Plumian professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy at Cambridge University – one of the most prestigious scientific chairs in the UK. The last-but-one Plumian professor, Martin Rees, was just 30 years old when appointed to the post. The last holder, Richard Ellis, was 42 when he took up the job. And now Jerry Ostrikcr, who becomes Plumian professor this month, is a stately 64.

With its scientists having played a major role in the human-genome project, the Center for Genome Research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has a daunting reputation for research at the cutting edge of genetics and molecular biology. But in recent months the centre has set the agenda in another way. It has taken on board a significant number of physicists and other physical scientists. The staff now includes five physicists and almost 20 mathematicians. Indeed, Eric Lander, director of the centre, which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a DPhil in mathematics from Oxford University in the UK.

European researchers who use neutrons to probe the structure of matter should be getting some good news in the next few weeks. The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford in the UK is set to get the go-ahead for a major upgrade to its ISIS pulsed neutron source. The £150m upgrade would involve adding a second target station to the source, doubling the number of experimental instruments at the facility. This would ensure that European scientists have access to state-of-the-art neutron-scattering facilities for the rest of the decade.

Low-cost, portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners could become a reality, thanks to an invention by Neil Marks, a physicist at the Daresbury Laboratory in the UK. His invention, which has been patented by the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils (CLRC), would enable high magnetic fields – the key to MRI imaging – to be obtained from cheap, lightweight permanent magnetic materials. It could lead to scanners that are small enough to be transported in a van. The Daresbury lab is now investigating if the invention can be commercially exploited.

"It's a very exciting time for physics in Canada. That's really what attracted me to the position." Those words come from Alan Shotter, the British physicist who becomes director of the TRIUMF nuclear and particle-physics lab in Canada this month. Shotter has already moved his research programme, replete with a grant of several million pounds, to the lab.

Microelectronic engineers at University College Cork in Ireland have invented a new type of communications receiver that uses chaos to overcome signal interference. The receiver, which has been developed by a team led by Peter Kennedy, uses a technique known as differential chaos shift keying (DCSK). It could enable much cleaner signals to be transmitted in "multipath" channels – where multiple digital signals co-exist from different electronic sources.

When Neil Spooner, a physicist at Sheffield University in the UK, goes to work, he heads for his office on the ground floor of the Hicks building on the main university campus. When he wants to check on his experiment, however, he must get into his car, drive for two hours and then take a lift that descends 1100 metres underground. On leaving the lift he has to walk for a kilometre in temperatures of up to 40 °C to reach his laboratory. He must bring food and water with him and he won't see a toilet for another eight hours.

Ambitious plans to turn Grenoble into a European capital for micro- and nanotechnology research were given the green light last month. The French atomic-energy commission (CEA) and Grenoble's local authorities plan to build a new FFr 850m (about £82m) research "pole" that will act as an incubator for high-tech start-up companies. The new facilities, which will allow businesses to carry out joint research projects on a single site, will be complete by 2005. They will include some 60000 m2 of new labs and office space for over 3500 researchers, industrialists and students.

While the International Space Station continues to drain resources from NASA's space–science programme, the European Space Agency (ESA) has high hopes that it will be able to secure new funds for its own science activities. ESA scientists are hopeful that an increase to their budget, and money freed from delayed NASA collaborations, will guarantee their scheduled programme and permit additional missions to be funded. Among the beneficiaries of the freed-up funds should be a mission in 2005 that would reuse the Mars Express platform.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US have retracted their claim to have discovered element 118.

It is difficult to imagine a more inspiring role model for a young scientist than Enrico Fermi. The Italian-born physicist made a string of telling contributions, both theoretical and experimental, across many different areas of physics. The index of any physics encyclopaedia is littered with the evidence: fermions, the fermi (10 l5 metres), the Fermi energy, Fermi gases and liquids, the Fermi surface, Fermilab and so on. Little wonder that physics has such a high profile in Italy. But what would Fermi, who was born in Rome 100 years ago this month, make of the state of Italian physics today?

Although Ireland cannot claim to have as strong a physics tradition as Italy, the Irish physics community can be proud of its performance in the first round of awards made by the new Science Foundation Ireland (see page 13). When it was announced last year that this generously funded agency was going to concentrate on two areas – biotechnology and information and communications technology – the omens did not look good for physics. But of the first ten awards made, each worth about IR£5.6m (about £4.7m), five have gone to physicists. And setting an example that Italy might do well to follow, four of the awards will be taken up by researchers who are currently based outside Ireland.

With the new academic year about to begin, undergraduate students will soon be thinking about whether to apply for a PhD. Doing a doctorate can, of course, be a very rewarding experience. It allows students to mature as independent scientists and to experience cutting-edge research – both within their own departments and at prestigious international conferences. However, it turns out that doing a higher degree is particularly beneficial to women in terms of their future earning power.

The life of William Sweet embodied the tragedy of modern research. His successes were taken for granted, but his failures made headlines, inspired lawsuits and brought vicious condemnation. For him, to use Hamlet's expression, time was out of joint.

After working as a post-doc at various universities, I – like many others – decided that the time had come to enter the commercial world. My initial foray was not terribly successful and I decided that working in software would be the best bet for my future. Unfortunately, my training in FORTRAN did not prove to be of much interest to employers.

Confusing Belfast's citizens with enigmatic questions about string theory may well make intriguing art, but it will do little to help promote the public's understanding and appreciation of science. I refer, of course, to the ten stylish plaques that were recently placed around Belfast as part of an art-science project (June p8). Based on the notion that there is no need to "dumb down" ideas, the plaques present quasi-riddles, such as "What are the fundamental degrees of M-theory and does the theory describe nature?".

In his review of Mad about Physics: Braintwisters, Paradoxes and Curiosities (July p45), Peter Ford says – quoting from the book – that "February 1866 is the only month to have ever elapsed without a full Moon and that this event will not be repeated for another 2.5 million years".

I was interested to read of the presentation by Alun Jones, chief executive of the Institute of Physics, of the first volume of Journal of Physics E to the chief executive of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Bob McGuiness (August p45). However, as a former chairman of the editorial board of the Journal of Scientific Instruments. I am left wondering which first volume was presented.

Readers of my edited letter (June p25) might have wondered what I was getting at. The published title "Biological bonding" expressed the opposite of my original title, which started with the words "Diverging alliances". My original letter referred to three recently formed societies one for biology (the UK Life Sciences Committee) and two for engineering (the Association of Institutions Concerned with Medical Engineering, and the UK Focus for Biomedical Engineering, which was mistakenly printed as the Royal Focus for Biomedical Engineering). A long-standing liaison society – the UK Liaison Committee for Sciences Allied to Medicine and Biology – that embraced both kinds of society was disbanded last year.

According to the old adage, "a picture paints a thousand words". And in many scientific disciplines ultrahigh-speed imaging is the only reliable way to visualize the countless physical and mechanical processes that occur on microsecond timescales. Such processes include ballistics, the propagation of cracks in materials, flame fronts in combustion research, the generation of shock waves in aircraft components and electrical "streamers" in high-voltage research.

Silicon dominates the semiconductor industry thanks largely to our ability to grow crystals that are as large as a human being and that are almost perfect. Indeed, crystal impurities can now be controlled to the level of one part in a billion, while major faults in the crystalline structure can be avoided. These crystals can then be sliced into wafers that are flat to within the wavelength of light and covered with structures that are only a few tens of atoms wide.

The only property of an electron in free space that can be calculated directly from first principles is its magnetic moment. First discovered in experiments on ions in the early 1920s, the understanding of magnetic moments played a central role in theoretical physics during the 20th century.

Everyday macroscopic objects follow the laws of classical mechanics. For microscopic objects, such as atoms or nuclei, the wave character of their dynamics has to be taken into account within the framework of quantum mechanics. While wave-like behaviour can show up in various ways, one of the most striking is the tunnelling effect: some events that are classically forbidden for energetic reasons happen because the quantum particles can tunnel under a potential barrier. Similarly, events that are prohibited due to some other dynamical constraints can occur via a process known as dynamical tunnelling. Indeed, tunnelling plays a major role in a variety of physical phenomena, ranging from α-particle radioactivity to the current–voltage characteristics of transistors.

Optics has always been the most pure and the most applied area of physics. This is as true now as at any time in history. From Newton and his prism to the semiconductor lasers and optical fibres that form the modern world's communications infrastructure, light has both fascinated physicists and facilitated whole new industries.

The optical microscope is probably the only scientific instrument that children are familiar with, and possibly the only one that can be bought in toy shops. At school, most of us looked into such microscopes with great expectations, hoping to see unimaginable details of a leaf or dead fly. Often we were disappointed that we could not see more. Where were all those atoms and molecules that everything is supposed to be made of? If we complained to the teacher, we were usually told that one cannot see things that are too small in an optical microscope. Until recently the teacher was right, but not any more.

As Anyone who uses the Internet will know, the last ten years have seen some incredible developments in communication. We can now e-mail colleagues thousands of miles away and download research papers from distant servers in seconds. Much of this extraordinary progress has been due to improvements in optical communication. And, despite recent reports of a financial downturn in the optical-technology sector, we are now at a very exciting stage as far as the technology itself is concerned.

Many amateur photographers are disappointed when they discover that their shots of fast-moving objects are blurred beyond recognition. The most likely reason for this is that the exposure time was not short enough to freeze the motion. In contrast, modern ultrahigh-speed cameras can take up to a million images every second and can capture motion that is normally imperceptible to the human eye. By projecting the photographs on a screen in sequence, the action can be replayed in slow motion. While these techniques are ideal for studying macroscopic objects, how can we possibly follow the motion of atoms and electrons?

Electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability are concepts that are deeply embedded in electromagnetism. The electrical permittivity of a material determines its response to an applied electric field, while the permeability summarizes how it reacts to an applied magnetic field. Together the permittivity and permeability determine how the material responds to electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths. Indeed, the speed of light in vacuum can be defined as c = 1/√₀μ₀, where ₀ is the permittivity of free space and μ₀ is the permeability.

The Northern Lights is a well researched biographical tale of the Norwegian physicist and genius Kristian Birkeland, whose life was spent exclusively in pursuit of the scientific goal of understanding solar–terrestrial relationships. The author, Lucy Jago, has turned his life into a highly compelling story that keeps the reader interested, and also learning, as the tale unfolds.

When theoretical physicists predicted a real possibility of nuclear explosives in the 1940s, it set a precedent for the level of government commitment to ideas from the scientific community. The UK and the US proceeded to launch huge "all-or-nothing" ventures based purely on theory. A whole industry had to be created before one demonstration could be attempted; the inherent critical mass for fission allowed nothing less. Where-as government decision was driven by fear of overwhelming disadvantage, responsibility for its technical justification lay with theoretical physicists whose initial predictive theory of nuclear function had to be sound enough to support that decision.

One morning shortly after waking, I was sitting on my young son's bed. Like many boys, he frequently makes up the most imaginative games, many of them designed to end in bloodshed, very rarely his own. A feeling of impending doom crept over me.