Table of contents

Einstein's crowning glory If the special theory of relativity – like Einstein himself – appeared in a flash in 1905, then the general theory was a long, hard grind.

Physicists in Italy have demonstrated that empty space can cause light to rotate in the presence of a large magnetic field, writes Matthew Chalmers. Although the effect seen by Emilio Zavattini and colleagues working on the PVLAS experiment at the INFN laboratory in Legnaro is extremely small, it could provide evidence for exotic new "dark matter" particles called axions (arXiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0507107).

It has long been known that a crucial factor in turning cuprate materials, which are normally insulators, into superconductors is the addition of dopant atoms. But Seamus Davis of Cornell University in the US and colleagues have now found that these dopant atoms can also lead to electronic disorder that damages the superconducting state (Science 309 1048).

Understanding what happens when the solar wind encounters the Earth's magnetic field has kept space scientists busy for decades.

Researchers working on the KamLAND experiment in Japan have detected neutrinos produced by radioactive decays deep inside the Earth. The experiment, which is located 1000m underground, recorded electron antineutrinos from the beta decay of uranium-238 and thorium-232. If the accuracy of the measurements can be improved, it may be possible to use these "geoneutrinos" to probe the Earth's interior (Nature 436 499).

A company in the UK has found way to increase the amount of data that wireless devices can handle while reducing the interference between them, writes Edwin Cartlidge. The technology developed by staff at Plasma Antennas is based on a plasma "mirror" that allows devices to send and receive signals to and from a particular direction.

Laser physicists in Europe have put forward plans to build a £500m facility to study a new approach to laser fusion. A panel of scientists from seven European Union (EU) countries believes that a "fast ignition" laser facility could make a significant contribution to fusion research, as well as supporting experiments in other areas of physics. The facility could be up and running by the middle of the next decade.

A physicist in the US has proposed a new way of quantifying the scientific output of individual researchers. Jorge Hirsch of the University of California at San Diego says that the "h-index" gives an estimate of the "importance, significance and broad impact of a scientist's cumulative contributions" and could provide useful in decisions about academic appointments, promotions and grants (arXiv.org/abs/physics/0508025).

The first free-electron laser operating at ultraviolet and soft X-ray wavelengths came online at the DESY research centre in Hamburg last month. The new laser, called VUV-FEL, produces radiation at wavelengths between 6–30 nm in pulses that last between 10–50 fs. "It is the only machine anywhere in the world to combine such a short wavelength with very short pulse duration and high intensity," says Thomas Tschentscher, project scientist for the laser. The opening ceremony was attended by the German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

The surfaces of most paper documents have a unique fingerprint that could be used to prevent fraud, according to physicists in the UK. The fingerprint is contained in microscopic imperfections on the surface of the material and can be easily read by a portable laser scanner. The discovery could be used to identify fake passports and spot counterfeit packaging of drugs, perfume or tobacco (Nature 436 475).

The US Congress has finally passed substantial energy legislation over four-and-a-half years after President Bush took office stating that energy was one of his top priorities. The 1724-page Energy Policy Act of 2005, which sets out detailed spending targets for financial years 2007 to 2009, offers something for just about everyone involved in the energy business, including scientists.

John Bahcall, one of the world's leading astrophysicists, died on 17 August at the age of 70 from a rare blood disorder. Bahcall, who was based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was best known for his theoretical work on solar neutrinos. He was also president elect of the American Physical Society and had led the American Astronomical Society between 1990 and 1992.

The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), which is responsible for maintaining Britain's Trident submarinelaunched nuclear missiles, is to receive an additional £350m a year from the UK government over the next three years to upgrade its research facilities and rebuild ageing labs.

Two sites in the US have been shortlisted to host a new underground lab for highenergy physics and geophysics.

Soaring costs have forced the US National Science Foundation to axe its support for the Rare Symmetry Violating Process (RSVP) project.

On 5 January this year, Mike Brown and colleagues were sitting in his office in the California Institute of Technology looking at slides from a survey of the outer solar system when Brown came across something completely unexpected. The shock was so great that he immediately called his wife, told her all about it, and then asked her not to tell anyone else.

Five years ago BP, once known as British Petroleum, changed its logo from a green shield to something called "the helios" – a flower-like object that is named after the Sun god of ancient Greece. BP was no longer an oil company, it was an energy company, and BP now stood for beyond petroleum. A company that produced 2.5 million barrels of oil every day was going green.

Controversial claims about a new energy state in hydrogen have led to a flurry of new experimental and theoretical work. In a series of papers over the past decade Randy Mills and co-workers at BlackLight Power have argued that the results of a variety of experiments on hydrogen plasmas can only be explained by the existence of a new state in which the electron has less energy than the n=1 ground state.

"There are few things more boring", the editor of The Economist wrote in 2001, "than long articles by editors about how their redesigns are going to produce a sharper, more modern, publication, brightening readers' lives and furthering world peace." Although he has a point, it is still appropriate to outline the thinking behind the new design that is being introduced in Physics World this month.

It is not just Physics World that looks different this month – the universe might well have changed its appearance too. If Jean-Pierre Luminet and co-workers are correct, space is not, as we previously thought, flat and infinite.

"Stop telling God what to do!" When Niels Bohr said these words to Albert Einstein-if indeed he ever did – it was probably in exasperation with Einstein's frequent repetition of the phrase "He does not play dice with the universe". The latter is perhaps the most famous of Einstein's many references to religion, although "The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not" comes a close second. There are many others too (see box).

Since it was first published in 1980, A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn has sold over a million copies and become one of the most influential works of history in the US. A popular textbook in schools and colleges, it claims to focus on "hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win".

Ian Rutt is right to stress the importance of software engineering in the development of scientific software (August p22). Before beginning to develop any software code, you have to assess the possible damage to your personal standing – and to the reputation and finances of your employer – from getting the software wrong. In addition, failing to plan the software-development process from the start can often lead to erroneous results, much wasted time and expensive code re-writes.

In his article about light-emitting diodes (LEDs), Nadarajah Narendran writes that the first such devices were demonstrated by General Electric in the 1960s (July pp25– 29). In fact, the first practical visible injection devices were made by my group at the Services Electronics Research Laboratory (SERL) at Baldock in the UK, where by early summer 1962 a prototype production line had been set up to supply external users. The devices were, at the time, called "crystallamps". An encapsulated device, properly engineered for a specific application, was illustrated in the 5 july 1962 issue of New Scientist (p43). More detailed descriptions of the devices were published a few months later in Instrment Practice (16 1463) and Solid State Electronics (695). Red lamps were based on gallium phosphide doped with zinc and oxygen, while green lamps were made by doping with zinc not oxygen.

Your article about physicists who have been involved in the search for gravitational waves before going into industry covered only rather recent history (August p45). In fact, Robert L Forward, who was the first person to receive a PhD for work on the detection of gravitational waves, also won a lucrative job in industry.

David Howe (May p18) and John Chapman (July p17) both make interesting points about whether a team of rowers could move a boat faster through the water by introducing a phase delay between strokes. However, neither author mentions the effect of the rudder. Typically located at the stern it is a self-imposed pivot point that prevents the boat from being a completely freely floating object.

I rather enjoyed Alan Calverd's solution to global warming (July p56) – just a shame it wouldn't work. Rearing animals is a terrible waste of land, but abandoning meat would contribute nothing to climate change. Although any living animal (such as a cow) creates greenhouse gasses, it only does so by eating plant material that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the first place. Living organisms are one way of cycling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, only to replace it at some later time. The net effect is almost zero.

For centuries the size and shape of space has intrigued the human race. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle claimed that the universe was finite with a clear boundary. Democritus and Epicurus, on the other hand, thought that we lived in an infinite universe filled with atoms and vacuum. Today, 2500 years later, cosmologists and particle physicists can finally address these fundamental issues with some certainty.

It is well known that atomic nuclei, which make up the bulk of the visible matter in the universe, are made of protons and neutrons. But what are protons and neutrons made of? The simple answer is that they consist of up and down quarks that are bound by the strong nuclear force: the proton contains two up quarks and a down quark, while the neutron contains two down quarks and an up quark.

From the halls of the Royal Astronomical Society to the shores of West Africa, Arthur Eddington was no ordinary scientist. He saw science not just as a series of intellectual goals but as a way of advancing humanity as a whole. He was the man who made Einstein famous and who first peered inside a star. He combined physics with astronomy to solve scientific mysteries, and helped to reconcile British and German scientists after the First World War.

For the last four decades the miniaturization of the microchip has been the driving force behind developments in all kinds of technology, from home entertainment to space exploration. At the heart of this revolution lies the metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor, which has evolved in two ways. First, it has become smaller, with the latest devices measuring a thousandth of their original size. Second, the number of transistors that can be interconnected on a single chip has risen from a few tens to hundreds of millions.

When it was announced in June that France had beaten Japan in the race to host the world's next big fusion lab, the news made headlines around the world. The media reported in generally positive tones how the €10bn International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be the next step on the path to a commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor (Physics World August p5). The coverage was a clear sign of the growing debate surrounding the future of nuclear power.

Fred Hoyle was a marvellous man and a brilliant physicist who was full of ideas, many of which turned out to be correct. He was never afraid to take an opposing view, but his arguments were always linked to observations. He was a creator, having founded the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge in 1967 and played a major role in the construction and operation of the Anglo-Australian Telescope. As someone who was very close to Hoyle and worked with him for nearly 50 years, I can assure readers that these two books give full and fair accounts of the life of this great astrophysicist.

Giorgio Margaritondo is vice president of the Ecole Polytechnique Fèdèrale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where he works in solid-state and X-ray physics.

Many physicists have been celebrated on postage stamps over the years. Countries initially tended to featured their own scientific sons and daughters, such as Alessandro Volta (Italy 1927), Roland Eötvös (Hungary 1932) and Marie Curie (Poland 1947). But the second half of the 20th century saw the net cast wider, with Paul Dirac being featured on a Guyanan stamp and the Japanese theorist Hideki Yukawa appearing on one from the Gambia. As for Einstein, it is almost easier to list the countries that have not pressed him into service in the cause of philately.

As Physics World columnist Robert P Crease points out on page 19, many contemporary fiction writers choose to ignore scientists and the impact of science on everyday life.

The title of 109 East Palace by the US journalist Jennet Conant refers to the nondescript office in Santa Fe to which all new scientists recruited to the Manhattan atomic-bomb project had to report, before being driven 35 miles up a mountain road to the Los Alamos lab. The book tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer and Los Alamos through the eyes of Dorothy McKibbin, a young widow who worked at 109 East Palace and, so the author claims, "came to know everyone involved in the project".

In a special wing of a new six-storey building at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, researchers will soon be able to use the "quietest" laboratories in Canada. The labs, which open early next year, are specially engineered so that mechanical vibrations, acoustic noise and electromagnetic interference will be as small as possible. Forming part of the new home for Canada's National Institute for Nanotechnology, the facilities will let researchers create and study nanoscale structures with exquisite precision.

Alok Jha is science correspondent at the Guardian newspaper in London

Physicists working at universities in England are better paid than their colleagues in all other subjects, according to a new report from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It reveals that physicists in full-time posts earned a median salary of £41,330 in 2003/4 – compared with an average of £35,370 across all fields – and that just over a fifth of physicists (21%) earned more than £50,000. Physics is also the only subject - apart from chemistry - where the proportion of staff aged over 50 has fallen between 1995/96 and 2003/04 (from 52% to 44%).

In 2004 readers of Physics World voted for their favourite equation in the scientific equivalent of Pop Idol (October 2004 pp 14–15). The result was shocking. To me, it seems obvious that E=mc² should have been top of this physics hit parade, but, in fact, it was relegated to sixth position.