Table of contents

What are the limits of science? In particular, can it have anything useful to say about religious belief? About free will? About responses to great art? In short, about the human mind? No, declares the distinguished theoretician Sir Brian Pippard in a recent issue of Contemporary Physics(29 393). Is it mere pride that leads some physicists to recoil from such a conclusion?

'The Authority's fusion research programme depends on the political will to press forward with the development of fusion as a major source of energy for the next century' notes the 1987 annual report of the Culham Laboratory at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). The next sentence, 'Strong support for fusion is expected in the future ...', contrasts starkly with the news last month that Britain's fusion programme is to suffer a £5m cut (around 25%) in its funding over the next three years.

Researchers at Plessey's Caswell laboratories groaned while many city analysts reacted favourably to the proposed Plessey takeover by the heavyweight combination of Siemens and GEC. While much of the discussion centred on monopoly considerations and relative market strengths, the R&D capacities of the three companies were also thrown into relief.

Staff at the UK Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) laboratories have yet to learn whom they will be working for when the Board is privatised, but the laboratory buildings have now been allocated among the three new companies that will be formed and the research activities in each seem likley to continue, at least initially.

Despite the plaints of the politicians from losing states, November's announcement of the winner of the contest to host the super-conducting supercollider (SSC) did not surprise the US physics community in either its timing, two days after the election, or its choice of Texas as the location for the $4.4 billion machine. The announcement that the machine is to be named after Ronald Reagan may have raised some eyebrows.

Fast measurement of phonons and magnons in single crystal samples has moved a step closer with the inauguration of the Prisma spectrometer at the ISIS pulsed neutron source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

The report by the Edwards committee on the future of UK university physics (see Physics WorldOctober p5) is drawing fire from the academic community for the allegedly arbitrary way in which it establishes thresholds of acceptable department size. Also attacked are 'inconsistencies' between its recommendations and industrialists' opinions as to course relevance.

The first university interdisciplinary research centre (IRC) has at last been formally inaugurated at Cambridge by Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education and Science. It brings together superconductivity expertise distributed between five departments to act as a focus for national research, though there is a widespread belief that it will take some time to establish an integrated programme.

With the establishment of a second 'club' for industrial companies involved with high-temperature superconductors, the UK is one of the most actively coordinated of the countries pursuing these enticing but frustratingly unstable materials. The new club, based at Harwell, offers large and small companies a share of the action though electronics companies such as GEC, which has the largest UK industrial R&D programme in this area, have so far stayed away.

Here is your chance to win a Psion Organiser.

Five or ten years ago, those of us who work in small British university physics departments felt fairly happy with our lot. Of course we presumed we had more teaching and administration to do than people in bigger departments, and some central facilities, such as the library, were not as extensive as they would be in a larger place. But there were compensations, as it seemed to us. For example, we were very immediately accessible to our students, and syllabus revisions could be discussed and implemented rapidly. With proper organisation our research effectiveness stood up to national and international comparison. Those who bothered to look into such things knew that unit costs were not out of line, and often below the national average. Then we began to hear about Problems with Small Departments. It was not altogether clear what these Problems were, although after a time it became obvious that the main one was that influential people kept mentioning them. However, in politics repetition is proof, so that soon we had to accept the reality of the Problems.

Having been responsible for the recruitment of physics teachers for some years, I, like C J Humphreys (Physics WorldNov. 1988 p48), feel that there is a shortage. However, I have to confess that with repeated advertising I have never failed to fill a vacancy with a good member of staff, but this has not always been a physics graduate.

As readers will be aware. The Edwards Committee on the future of physics in British universities has produced its preliminary report, and has invited comments. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) has set up a working party to consider its responses to the report and also to the Stone Committee report on university chemistry.

I read with interest the article by Gareth Roberts and Brian Davies on the survey of the industrialists' view of usefulness of the content of university physics courses (Physics WorldNov. p45-6). A crude summary of the results is that electronics and computing are the most important subjects to industry, while subjects essential to an understanding of physics such as quantum mechanics are not rated highly. The survey certainly tells us a lot about the attitude of UK industry. Why, for example, did only one-third of those asked respond? Why do they employ physicists at all rather than engineers?

Professor David Shoenberg of the Cavendish Laboratory has pointed out to me that I misidentified one of the people in the Mond picture used on the cover and on p31 of the November issue of Physics World.

Your recent news story 'Politics hits UK space industry' (Physics WorldNov. p5) probably only reflects the tip of the iceberg. I am sure that there are many small UK companies like us at Kendall Hyde who have special knowledge and skills which they have developed alongside the European space industry only to find themselves now suddenly out in the cold.

J E Bolwell asks (Physics BulletinSept. 1988 p339) if anybody knows if a draft exists of volume 3 of E T Whittaker's History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, or if it was published somewhere.

Regarding the letter, 'Test your own eyesight' by Peter Kalmus (Physics WorldOct. 1988). I first came across this laser-based eye test, called Laserspec, when I was a guest researcher at the Institute of Optical Research, Sweden, approximately one and a half months ago. The eye test was just one experiment in their (famous?) Laser Grotto – a laboratory full of experiments designed to fire public interest (particularly schoolchildren) in the general field of optics and lasers.

Research into artificial neural nets (ANNs) is often defined as the silicon modelling of the architecture and methodology of organic brains. In fact, it is occasionally claimed that the models provide insight into the biological processes they simulate. But one recurrent message at Boston was that these models are generally based on a theory of the nervous system which is fast being proven too simplistic.

The Bohr-Sommerfeld model describes atoms as microscopic planetary systems. Of course, this picture is in general over-simplified because electrons in atoms behave a lot more like waves than particles. However, recent experiments by L D Noordam and colleagues (J. Phys. B.: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 21 L533) at the FOM Institute, Amsterdam, show that in atoms properly prepared, electrons could actually behave according to this simple model.

The two mainstream programmes in controlled thermonuclear fusion research have reached remarkably similar positions. The large tokamak experiments and the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) laboratories presented results at the Nice IAEA meeting which have generated confidence that the next generation of experiments should be able to demonstrate thermonuclear ignition.

The aggregation of colloidal particles is a phenomenon of longstanding interest because of its role in natural processes, such as the formation of smokes, and industrial products, such as foods, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and other materials. In 1916 M von Smoluchowski gave an approximate theoretical treatment which described the kinetics of aggregation surprisingly well but was unable to predict the structure of the aggregates. It was not until some 60 years later, with the popularisation of fractal concepts by B Mandlebrot (IBM, Yorktown Heights), the diffusion-limited aggregation model of T A Witten and L M Sander (Michigan) and the extensive computer simulations of P Meakin (du Pont, Wilmington) and many others, that significant progress was made in quantifying aggregate structure.

Today was a quiet day. So I decided to get ahead by writing about the new reactor proposed for Hinkley Point in Somerset. It's the kind of thing I am really supposed to do. It didn't happen.

The all-pervading presence of water in our lives may lead us to consider that this common 'chemical' has ceased to hold much scientific interest. The basic molecule composed of just two atomic species is simple and the formula is probably the first introduction many children have to any formal scientific nomenclature. Surely, there can be little left to say about such common-place material? The truth of the matter contrasts strongly with this view. Water possesses many unusual properties that distinguish it from other liquids and, at a molecular level, it appears to have a complexity which still baffles us. In some respects it remains as one of the most challenging problems in liquid state physics.

The earliest attempts to measure the constant Gin Newton's law of gravity began with the work of P Bouguer in the 1730s and to used geophysical methods to measure the attractions by mountains, but these were limited by lack of detailed knowledge of geological structures and their densities. In the 1850s the availability of deep mines inspired astronomer-royal George B Airy to develop a much better method, using well observed and simpler structures. However, by that time the greater reliability and precision of laboratory methods were becoming recognised so that geophysical methods were abandoned.

While the basic aspects of transformer design were established over 100 years ago, the modern transformer – with copper windings wound around a laminated electrical steel core – continues to develop. In particular, recent advances have been driven by the need to reduce the energy losses that occur when the core is magnetised during its operation.

Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the cornerstones of modern physics, and at the same time it seems to be one of the most difficult parts of physics for people to become comfortable with. Our intuition seems to be able to understand or at least to accept other surprises of modern physics: the fact that quantum mechanics has reduced prediction in physics to probability; that modern particle physics looks to ten or eleven dimensions in order to unify all the forces; or that astronomy has revealed that stars routinely evolve to a state so dense that a thimbleful would contain a billion tonnes of neutrons. Strange as these ideas are, they stretch and extend notions that we have grown accustomed to in everyday life. But relativity contradicts everyday experience: the relativity of simultaneity, the fact that the ticking rate of a clock depends on its speed, the existence of horizons that cut off space itslef and wrap it up into a black hoel – everyday experience seems to leave us unprepared for phenomena like these.

Silicon integrated circuits, or chips, have been called the crude oil of the electronics industry. The importance of the silicon chip cannot be measured by the size of the world market at a mere£17 billion in 1987. Chips process and store information in computers and an ever increasing range of electronic products. This much larger electronics industry now impacts most aspects of life in the latter part of the 20th century. The silicon age has dawned.

Some scientists have reached their dotage. At 70, John Lenihan has achieved his anecdotage. After a professional career in which he has made many notable contributions to the subject of trace elements, he has produced this splendid collection of anecdotes and observations, wickedly illustrated by Jack Fleming. Those who have heard John Lenihan's witty after-dinner speeches will not be surprised by the wide-ranging scholarship displayed in this volume. It is popular science at its best. The scientific observations are clearly described, the historical perspective is neatly worked in, and the reader is nowhere misled by bias or prejudice. My wife, not herself a trained scientist, greatly enjoyed reading this book, as I did. There are few works with which it may be compared, though R L Weber's A Random Walkin Science has some of its intellectual flair. Otherwise you have to go back to Victorian classics such as A H Church's Chemistry in Daily Life.

Disordered systems are currently attracting renewed interest, for example in connection with semiconductor structures where the effective dimensionality may be three, two or one. The absence of long range order in a condensed phase still poses a major challenge to theory and, whilst some aspects of disordered substitutional alloys can now be treated, problems involving structural disorder remain largely unsolved.

The Institute has given a generally warm welcome to the proposed National Curriculum Science for Ages 5 to 16, but has also expressed a number of reservations, some of them serious.

The Institute's engineering committee was elevated in status to a standing committee of Council with its chair becoming Vice-President for Engineering at the Council meeting on 4 October. The new Vice-President is A E ('Arlie') Bailey who now holds the unusual distinction of having served as an IOP vice-president in two areas. As Vice-President for Membership 1982–86 he was closely involved in opening the way towards registration as a chartered engineer for IOP corporate members and his engineering committee is currently engaged in processing the first such applications.

The Institute has established a prize to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP). The Harrie Massey prize will be awarded for contributions to physics or its applications made by an Australian physicist working anywhere in the world or by a non-Australian resident in Australia for work carried out there.

An Engineering Physics Division has been formed within IOP to cover the interests of physicists working in engineering or applied physics

The fifth Physics Educationseminar at the annual Association for Science Education meeting will take place on Friday 6 January(11.00am-12.00) at Birmingham University. The theme is the way that physics will be taught in the 16–18 age group, hence the title 'Post-16 physics courses – breadth or depth?'.

Nominations are sought for the Simon memorial prize, which is to be awarded at the IOP solid state conference at Warwick University, in December 1989. The prize, which recognises the outstanding contributions of Sir Francis Simon to low temperature physics, is awarded every three years for distinguished work in experimental or theoretical low temperature physics. There is no nationality restriction but the prizewinner should not previously have received a major award.

From October onwards, a steady stream of requests for representatives of the physics profession to man stands at career conventions comes into the Education Department, with demand continuing unabated until late spring. In the main, the requests come from individual schools or career services which are organising events for several of the local secondary establishments; they may vary in length and organisation but most tend to be 'bazaar'-type where a large number of professions and jobs are represented and children, often with parents in tow, are free to move from stand to stand, eliciting advice from the experts. Occasionally conventions are organised according to ability groupings but usually a representative is expected to provide information for the whole ability range and for all age groups. This means talking to those who are still deciding upon subject choices for GCSE as well as answering specific questions from those who have already made up their minds to follow a particular career and want information about courses and/or jobs.

A room filled with an incredible variety of telephones and telephone exchange apparatus was an excellent setting for the sponsors, British Telecom, to launch the 1988-89 IOP schools lecture, 'From whiskers to Walkman: one hundred years of radio'. Ken Smith's enthusiasm and commitment to encourage young people in physics was evident as he talked with local radio and television reporters, and tried out some of the antique equipment still in operation at the British Telecom museum in Oxford. His lecture itself benefits by having an enormous number of practical activities and demonstrations, some of which involve replicas of the original equipment used by Hertz and Marconi.

From January 1989 IOP Publishing will offer authors the facility to submit manuscripts of articles for publication in many of the IOP research journals in electronic form (on disk). This will initially be limited to journals published in the single-column, B5 format, which includes most of the Journals of Physics, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Nonlinearity, Inverse Problems, Reports on Progress in Physics and Physics in Medicine and Biology. It will also be limited to TEX files (see below) on PC-compatible disks (3.5 or 5.25 inch), although we expect to broaden this requirement to allow other file types (e.g. plain uncoded ASCII) if the initial experience is successful. Authors without access to PC-compatible micros also have the option of sending the file by electronic mail to our JANET mailbox.

The Adam Hilger Series on Plasma Physics has been launched by IOPP. The first book in the series, An Introduction to Alfven Wavesby R C Cross, University of Sydney, was published at the end of November (£19.50, members £15.60).

Bringing lasers out of the technology of the vacuum tube and into that of the microchip was the subject of a recent meeting on diode lasers and diode-pumped lasers. Until recently almost all lasers relied on a gas discharge, either to excite the laser directly (as in the CO₂ laser) or to excite a flashlamp to pump a laser rod (as in the ruby laser). The development of higher powered semiconductor diode lasers in the last few years has fuelled the work on diode-laser pumping of solid state materials such as Nd:YAG. These all-solid-state lasers are much more efficient, long lived, and reliable than their predecessors. Dave Hanna (Southampton University) introduced the meeting, and reviewed the laser media accessible to diode-pumping between 780 and 840 nm. The possible lasing transitions range throughout the near infrared, and many are suitable for producing visible radiation via nonlinear processes.

Graham Russell of Durham University died in August, at the tragically early age of 44 years, as the result of a drowning accident near Swanage. He was at the peak of his career, with over 90 primary research papers to his credit, 60 of them published in the last four years.

Paul Denham has died at the early age of 46. He studied physics at King's College London, gaining a first class degree in 1964 and completing his PhD on electroluminescence in diamond in 1967.

The Institute's career break kit for physicists (Physics WorldOct. 1988 p58) was launched at the second annual 'Women in Physics' meeting and acted as a focus for the day's talks and discussions. Elizabeth Laverick, who chairs the subcommittee, welcomed over 60 people to the meeting, not including a number of children who saw the canteen at IOP headquarters transformed into a creche. The subcommittee had two main aims in producing the kit: to encourage more girls to take up physics at school and to improve conditions for women who have opted to follow a career in physics. This meeting provided an opportunity for members to share their experiences and thoughts on career breaks and also to contribute their own ideas for future projects for the subcommittee.

The British economy is in unrelenting decline although there seems to be no single cause for this. The only hope for the future lies in the young generation now leaving school and university with their new – perhaps in today's terms more realistic– attitudes. Overall the nation needs to try harder if it wishes to consider itself successful. This is the verdict of Sir Monty Finniston, well known both as former chair of British Steel and for his report on the training of engineers. With his background in science and industry, he is a well qualified, if rather unexpected, commentator on the British economy.

On 19 October the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to three Americans, Leon Lederman, Mel Schwartz and Jack Steinberger for the 'observation of high-energy neutrino reactions and the existence of two kinds of neutrinos'. Now, 25 years after their original experiment, when we know that there are at least three types of vs, it is perhaps a little difficult to appreciate its importance.

Luis W Alvarez was probably the most versatile man of science of his generation. His creative work encompassed optics, cosmic radiation, the radioactivity of tritium, the magnetic moment of the neutron, the spin dependence of nuclear forces, nuclear physics, radar and its application to blind landing of aircraft, antisubmarine warfare, implosion techniques for nuclear weapons and methods of measuring pressures of shock waves, electron acceleration (microton), the tandem van de Graaff accelerator, the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber and its use, superconducting magnets, the use of cosmic radiation to search for possible chambers in an Egyptian pyramid, and asteroid extinction theory for the dinosaurs and other life. Some of this was done with collaborators, the last with his son, Walter.

Megatech Ltd has announced the availability of a new range of quality products from Advanced Energy. It includes a range of RFgenerators providing 1–2.5 kW at 13.56 MHz together with their associated tuningnetworks, representing the first products designed within the 'RF power system' concept. This allows a planned group of products such as power supplies, tuners, pulse generators and phase control units to be integrated via an internal communications hannel to provide superior control and process flexibility. All products in this range use solid state and switched mode technology for efficiency and economy of space. These products have many applications for R&D and manufacturing processes in the semiconductor, electronic and vacuum coating industries. Tl

If it's to be a normal day in the office, the alarm goes off at 07.36 – a more comfortable time than 07.30 or 07.45. If I don't get up immediately, I probably never will, so I go downstairs and listen to the Today programme as I have breakfast. Sometimes I hear one of the Department's Ministers talking about the area I am responsible for – perhaps the Secretary of State urging more British companies to become involved in European standards making or Eric Firth on skill shortages in key areas such as information technology. Some of my staff will have provided information for him so it's nice to hear the results of their efforts.

I am cross, I am furious, in fact I am seething with rage from the bottom of my chiropodisttreated feet to the top of my balding head – I am fed up, browned off, brassed off, cheesed off, lividly, despairingly, bristlingly, ANGRY (do I make my point?). With what?