Table of contents

The many achievements and uses of the electron have been widely celebrated this year. Photonics has not yet had the impact of electronics, although the interdisciplinary subject of optoelectronics underpins the whole communications industry.

Australia and Chile are locked in a race against time to participate in the Gemini project to build twin 8 m telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. Although Chile has been a partner in the $l76m project for three years, it has yet to make any financial contribution. The other Gemini partners – the US, the UK, Canada, Argentina and Brazil – have given Chile until 1 September to pay up. Meanwhile, Australia is poised to take over Chile's share if the funds are not forthcoming. The telescopes – which are due to be operational by August 2001 – will give high-quality simultaneous coverage of the northern and southern skies at infrared and optical wavelengths.

Homer Simpson, head of the dysfunctional Simpson family in the eponymous cartoon series, works at a nuclear power plant where he ignores safety precautions, carelessly scatters radioactive material and spends most of his time on duty eating doughnuts and avoiding work. Now, in a case of life imitating art, a report by seven US nuclear specialists has unearthed a Canadian cadre of Homer Simpsons. Spot checks at nuclear power plants run by Ontario Hydro found that the technicians responsible for monitoring the plants were taking naps and playing video games. Management proved equally inept: executives at one plant had failed for 18 years to inform the local community that heavy water was leaking into the environment.

A massive reshaping of the Italian research system began last month when the ministry for universities and research (MURST) issued a 70-page document outlining guidelines for reform. Under the proposals, decision-making on scientific affairs will be removed from the national research council. More money will be provided for research and Italy's space agency will be reorganized.

The number of students sitting A-level physics exams in England, Wales and Northern Ireland this summer rose by 2.2% to just over 33500, compared to a 5.2% increase across all subjects. A-level exams are mostly sat by 18-year-olds hoping to go to university. In Scotland, where most pupils leave school aged 17, the numbers taking Higher grade physics fell by 4.5% to 11 678, compared to a rise of 1.6% across all subjects. About a fifth of all pupils in the UK were awarded the top grade (see table).

When Ernest Moniz returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after almost two years in Washington as associate director for science in the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), he looked forward to resuming his day-to-day academic life as head of the physics department. "I knew there would be a few months getting familiar with the job," he recalls. "And I was trying to get back slowly to research."

The number of US students receiving first degrees in physics fell by a further 2% last year. According to the 1996 Bachelor's Degree Recipients Report, issued by the American Institute of Physics, the 4173 physics bachelor's degrees earned last year represented a drop of 17% from the peak in 1989. "The physics community has not seen undergraduate degree production this low since the late 1950s," the report states.

Japan's massive budget deficit – some $2000bn – could derail the government's plans to increase spending on science. Funding for the country's space programme has been cut (see box) and there are rumours that the Science and Technology Agency will be abolished or merged with one of the other government agencies responsible for science. The news comes just one year after the government promised to increase science spending from Y2700bn (about £15bn) in 1996 to an estimated Y4100 bn in 2000 (Physics World August 1996 p7), in an attempt to bring R&D spending into line with other leading industrialized nations.

Most scientists think that they know how science works. You take a theory, make a prediction and then do an experiment to test your hypothesis. At least that's the image that most scientists tend to project to the public. But science is rarely so clear-cut. Scientists are also affected by social factors; their choice of research depends on which topics are flavour of the month, which theories are in fashion and even whether a referee happened to like their last paper.

The national pastime of speculating about what Sir Ron Dearing – the British government's educational troubleshooter – might say about the future of UK universities finally ended in July. That month the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education at last published its long-awaited report after 14 months' deliberation under Sir Ron's guidance. The report had plenty to say about university teaching and research, but its headline-grabbing recommendation was that all students should each contribute £1000 a year towards their tuition fees.

Sir Martin Rees is right to say that the most important challenge facing the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is to identify its scientific priorities (August p15). Indeed, as a member of PPARC's Council from 1994 to 1997, he will know the emphasis that I have continually placed on optimizing our new "research investment". Before tackling that issue, however, I would like to qualify two of Rees' points of fact.

Jonathan Osborne is right to say that GCSE courses, which are taken by 14–16-year-olds in England and Wales, must suit the needs of those who will not study physics beyond this level (August p21). I suspect that many people who have been involved in designing and teaching such courses over the past ten years feel that considerable progress has been made in this direction, without having neglected the needs of those who will continue studying physics after the age of 16.

Your news story about the plans for the European Large Magnetic Field Facility (ELMF) describes various high-field facilities in Europe and the US (July p9) – but fails to mention the 31 T pulsed field facility of the Institute for Materials Science of Aragón (ICMA) at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. (For a full list of facilities, see F Herlach and J A A J Perenboom 1995 Physica B Condensed Matter 211 1.) The facility, which has been on-line since 1994, was constructed in France by a collaboration between the ICMA's Condensed Matter Physics Department and the Service National des Champs Magnetiques Pulsés of the CNRS in Toulouse.

In an interview supposedly confronting proponents of paranormal beliefs (July p11), Steve Donnelly "reads the mind" of the interviewer, and discusses alien spaceships hiding behind comet Hale-Bopp, the absence of clear-cut evidence for influences of planetary positions on personality, and cold fusion. Curiously absent is any reference to the results of careful experiments carried out by parapsychologists under conditions that magicians have agreed do not afford an opportunity for them to use their magical techniques, and in which sceptics have found it hard to provide alternative explanations that hold up to detailed examination. (On the question of sceptics and their often spurious attempts to debunk experiments on the paranormal, I refer interested readers to Dean Radin's book The Conscious Universe (Harper Edge 1997)).

I have been following the correspondence on the physics of curling with interest and enjoyment. I was therefore disappointed to read that you have closed the correspondence on that subject. I appreciate that none of the letters made any references to budgets, business, European programmes, education, frameworks or the declining status of physicists, but do you know, some of us – a dwindling minority, perhaps – actually like our physics like that!

Until a decade ago, the free levitation of superconductors above a magnet, or vice versa, could be observed only through the small window of a cryostat. The superconductors known at the time would only superconduct if cooled to liquid-helium temperatures, around 4 K. But since the discovery of high-temperature superconductors – such as yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), which has a superconducting transition temperature of 92.5 K – levitation can be demonstrated openly on the tabletop. A small disk of YBCO is cooled to 77 K in a bowl of liquid nitrogen, and then placed above an appropriately shaped permanent magnet. The superconductor levitates in this position until it warms to 92.5 K and falls. Particularly impressive is the continuous levitation of a person standing on a magnetized plate that floats above a closed tank containing pieces of YBCO in liquid nitrogen.

Archaeology no longer has to rely on paint-brushes and the painstaking removal of desert sands by eccentric dilettantes. Increasingly sophisticated technology has been developed in the last 20 years, and archaeologists now use many techniques derived from physics, chemistry and biochemistry. The latest technique to take advantage of fundamental physical properties is ground penetrating radar (GPR), which exploits low-frequency radio waves to let us "see" what is beneath our feet. GPR has now been used to map out the position of an anatomy theatre that was built in London in the 17th century.

Although microscopy – the technology of imaging objects on the micrometre scale and smaller – is an old discipline, the development of new instruments and techniques has led to impressive achievements during the last few decades. Today's electron microscopes can image the crystallographic structure of thin films with atomic resolution. This achievement could have been anticipated long ago, since it is based on the short wavelength of the electrons. In contrast, the versatility and high resolution of scanning probe microscopes came as a surprise. One recent example is the development at Bell Laboratories in the US of a device that can image electric charges on surfaces with a sensitivity better than that of a single electron (M J Yoo et al. 1997 Science 276 579).

Adequate lighting is important in many practical situations. Roads must be lit well enough to minimize the number of accidents, while safety regulations cover many industrial procedures. This means that it is vital to measure light levels accurately, which is possible in daytime and night-time conditions by using photometers calibrated to our visual response. However, the complex nature of the human visual system means that standards have not yet been defined for the light levels that are typical of dusk or twilight. A team of UK scientists has now taken a fresh approach to the problem. We have developed a model that predicts visual performance in the range of lighting conditions at dusk or twilight.

Ultra sound is now routinely used in the non-destructive testing of materials, but most techniques involve immersing the object to be tested in a water bath. This can be time-consuming and impractical, particularly when testing large numbers of objects on a production line. An ideal testing method would be able to detect the ultrasonic signals remotely, and this has led to the development of a technique called laser ultrasound.

Where is the South Pole? You may think that this is a simple question, but constant ice flow in the Antarctic means that geologists must re-mark the position with a new pole every year. Indeed, when the Global Positioning System was used to locate the Pole for the first time in 1995, it showed that previous markers were tens of centimetres away from the true position.

No comic-book science-fiction story would be complete without a laser gadget of some description. Often featuring as deadly weapons, lasers also appear as strange medical tools or as devices to trap and deflect alien spacecraft. Physicists will naturally be highly sceptical about the possibility of using lasers to trap macroscopic objects, but a quick glance at the latest research reveals a different picture. Lasers are now widely used in biotechnology laboratories to manipulate living cells, parasites and even single strands of DNA – and a nothing has to actually touch the samples.

When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see a complex organism that is based on a vast array of proteins. Proteins form the structure of the body, defend us against invaders, metabolize food, control the actions of other proteins and help in reproduction.

Semiconductor lasers are key components in many of the appliances that we take for granted in everyday life. Fibre-optic communications and compact-disc players are perhaps the two best known examples. There is also a world-wide research and development effort to improve the performance of these devices by making them smaller, brighter, more efficient or capable of lasing at new wavelengths. A new class of semiconductor laser – a quantum dot laser that self assembles – is showing great promise in many of these areas.

When Stephen Hawking gave an evening lecture at a conference on particle physics and the early universe in Cambridge in April, he packed out the biggest lecture theatre in the Cavendish Laboratory. The overspill had to watch the event on closed circuit TV in the lecture theatre next door, which only heightened the impression that we were watching someone who had been elevated from a mere physics superstar into a media supernova.

We are currently in the midst of a boom in experimental and theoretical work related to the foundations of quantum physics. This delightful book by Gerard Milburn, which draws many different strands of these activities together, shows how this work is leading to the emergence of completely new technology – related to quantum computing, communication and cryptography.

Physics has been around for a long time – the author of this book goes back to the Greek scholar Thales in the 6th century BC – and in that time our understanding of the physical world has lurched forward in fits and starts. But in the 20th century our knowledge has advanced at such a furious pace that people now talk with increasing regularity and confidence about the possibility of a "final theory".

Version 6 of ZEMAX, the optical design package, is available from Optima Research. Developments in this version include a relative illumination facility. This allows the relative brightness of images produced by optical systems to be calculated. Effects due to optical field, apertures, aberrations, vignetting, apodization, thin-film coatings, glass transmission and polarization can all be included.

This enduring annual ritual features one of the traditional icons of elementary mechanics. Determining the fate of the ladder when placed at an angle ϕ to the floor is easy, at least when you've described it for the thirteenth consecutive year.