Table of contents

The success of quantum mechanics is unavoidably mysterious, as is – to quote Wigner – "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" when applied to physical problems. So how can one hope to demystify the Higgs boson for a government minister? In this issue we publish five successful attempts at doing so – successful at least to the extent that they have convinced the UK's minister, William Waldegrave, to spend his money on prizes of champagne (see pages 8 and 26–28).

UK high-energy physicists have agreed a cut of £16m over eight years in their funds for experiments currently running at CERN in Geneva and the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. Instead the money will be used to prepare for experiments at the proposed Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The reduction, some 8% of the experimental budget, will begin to bite from 1996 as yearly spending on the LHC detectors becomes significant. CERN hopes to get approval for the LHC, which would come on-line in 2001 at the earliest, in December, but this in not guaranteed.

There was good news and bad for physics in the UK A-level results last month. The number of students sitting the physics A-level exam fell to 37 349 (from 41 301 in 1992), but the percentage achieving the top grade increased from 15.1% to 16.7%. Almost half of the physics students achieved one of the top three grades in exams, which are sat by 18-year-olds hoping to go to university.

It has not been a quiet summer in Waxahachie, Texas. In what has become a yearly rite for the members of the US Congress, the fate of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is up for a Senate vote this month. Dramatic speeches will be made, for and against, and the vigorous delegation of Texas politicians will probably save the SSC in the end. However, if the big accelerator has many more seasons like the last, those involved may find mercy in outright rejection.

The technology foresight exercise announced in the UK government's White Paper on science and technology in May, starts this month with a series of seminars designed to hear the views of industry, universities, consumer bodies and the public sector. The meetings"  will provide input to the programme's steering group which plans to decide on the broad areas of technology to be studied in the exercise before the end of the year.

Continuing the tradition of appointing physical scientists to lead the National Science Foundation, President Clinton has nominated Neal Lane, provost of Rice University in Texas, to replace Walter Massey. Lane, a theoretical atomic physicist, takes over at a time when the NSF is under pressure from Congress to bend more of its $3bn (about £2bn) budget toward research that directly improves the ability of US corporations to compete in the global economy (Physics World December 1992 p5). The lesson many are taking from Lane's appointment is that the White House prefers to keep the NSF in the business of basic research, rather than the business of business.

For Russians to arrive late at a scientific meeting is noting new. For almost 40 years, once the end of Stalinism made it possible for Soviet scientists to travel at all, prudent conference organisers have tried to schedule Soviet papers as late in the programme as possible, in the hope that the scientists concerned might turn up on time for at least the final sessions.

This month will witness the unusual sight of champagne and cash being bestowed on selected physicists for writing intelligibly about their subject. Appropriately enough, the two sets of awards will be presented at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at Keele University.

Both the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society have emphasised their concern over future support for basic research under the new structure for UK science and technology announced in the government's recent White Paper (Physics World July p4).

Progress on the Gemini twin telescope project underwent a glitch last month when Canada pulled out of a formal signing ceremony at the last minute. Canada's National Research Council had been expected to sign the agreement during a visit by Sir Mark Richmond, chairman of the UK's Science and Engineering Research Council, but then had second thoughts about its ability to meet such a long-term commitment. Canada's new position on Gemini is unlikely to become clear until after a general election expected in October.

Italy is to set up a supercomputer industry based on highly parallel computers first developed for particle physics calculations by the INFN, the national institute for nuclear physics. The national agency for alternative energy, ENEA, will lead the initiative, which also involves Alenia Spazio, part of the Alenia group.

India has launched its most expensive computer development programme ever in a bid to satisfy mounting computing needs at home, and to become a major player in the global supercomputing arena.

What is the secret of Japan's success? What can we learn by studying it, or it all too intimately associated with the peculiarities of Japanese culture to be worth our while trying? And does it depend on the physical sciences, or is it a matter of management buzzwords like Just in Time and Total Quality Management? To answer these questions we need to consider where Japan started on its way to becoming the word's second largest national economy, producing nearly one-fifth of the world's output and accounting for 17% of total OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) manufactured exports.

The gulf between scientists and the media is something we're hearing more and more about, on both sides of the divide. There's no doubt that there's a problem: scientists complain of misrepresentation in the press, journalists that scientists are often inaccessible, and frequently incomprehensible. Whilst both are valid viewpoints, it is the scientists who are in the best position to change this state of affairs. The incomprehensibility of scientists is very often the reason for the misrepresentations they complain of.

I am thinking of writing a Short History of Relevant Physics. The main episode in Chapter 1 (19th century) will be about factory owners who have trouble with power transmission. The long shafts develop whirling instabilities, the pulley belts slip and break. They call on the Royal Institution to ask Mr Faraday to give up his obsession with the way a galvanometer flicks when he pushes a magnet into a coil of wire, and instead to study the relevant physics of their problems. He listens, but carries on. Next year a cabinet minister offers a bottle of champagne to anyone who can explain mutual induction to him. A professor writes that students of physics will find complex numbers to be useless in their work.

Stephen Hawking might reasonably have expected to be misquoted in the popular press but he has real cause for complaint when the same sort of error occurs in a journal such as Physics World. In his review of Robert Matthews' Unravelling the Mind of God, Russell Stannard (July pp53–4) makes the common error of saying that Hawking claimed that when we arrive at a complete theory of everything we should "know the mind of God", and the he makes an accusation of arrogance that would be fully justified if his premise were correct; but it is not.

Jilly is struggling with her A-level physics homework and decides that she is in need of assistance.

I opened the June issue of Physics World eager to read the articles on "Physics-mathematics symbiosis", only to be gravely disappointed. I struggled for some time with three of the articles but gave up, disappointed and demoralised, having learned that current applications of mathematics in physics are, apparently, so esoteric and remote from my own decades-long experience of physics that they are forever beyond my understanding. Whilst I do not doubt the erudition and, indeed, brilliance of the authors, I wonder if they are inhabiting a different conceptual world from most "journeyman" physicists like myself?

I noted in the recent annual report of the Institute of Physics that as part of its increasing commitment to public relations, complimentary copies of Physics World are sent each month to selected Members of Parliament, ministers and government advisory bodies as well as to science journals.

I read with interest the letters relating to Institute of Physics qualifications (July p20, August p20). I believe that chartered status is very appropriate since other scientists and professionals have a similar qualification.

The answer depends on the public perception of physics.

I was sorry to read the depressing news (News, June p11) that the physics department of King's College, London has been told to shed 40% of its staff by July 1995. However, I must take issue with the statement that it has the oldest department in the country.

When I was at school in the 1950s I had to learn by heart large numbers of formulae for physics, mathematics and chemistry. Yet I knew that working scientists and mathematicians only really learnt those formulae they used frequently and that once my exams were over, I (and my colleagues) would forget nearly all of what had been learnt "parrot-fashion". I resented that aspect of the examination because it was simply a worthless short-term memory test. Shortly after I started my career as a physics teacher. How refreshing it was to encounter the new Nuffield physics course. Exam candidates did not need to learn formulae; instead they appeared on the front of the paper.

The Higgs boson is a hypothesised particle which, if it exists, would give the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.

What determines the size of objects that we see around us or indeed even the size of ourselves? The answer is the size of molecules and in turn the atoms that compose these molecules. But what determines the size of the atoms themselves? Quantum theory and atomic physics provide an answer. The size of the atom is determined by the paths of the electrons orbiting the nucleus. The size of those orbits, however, is determined by the mass of the electron. Were the electron's mass smaller, the orbits (and hence all atoms) would be smaller, and consequently everything we see would be smaller. So understanding the mass of the electron is essential to understanding the size and dimensions of everything around us.

Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is, she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is harder to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.

Theoretical physicists always aim for unification. Newton recognised the fall of an apple, the tides and the orbits of the planets as aspects of a single phenomenon, gravity. Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism and light. Each synthesis extends our understanding and leads eventually to new applications.

The Higgs boson is an undiscovered elementary particle, thought to be a vital piece of the closely fitting jigsaw of particle physics. Like all particles, it has wave properties akin to those of ripples on the surface of a pond which has been disturbed; indeed, only when the ripples travel as a well defined group is it sensible to speak of a particle at all. In quantum language the analogue of the water surface which carries the waves is called a field. Each type of particle has its corresponding field.

Imagine flying down the M1 at 3000 mph and at a height of 50ft, without deviating more than an inch or two in height and alignment from the central barrier. The equivalent of this, but on a scale ten thousand times smaller, is achieved routinely by the laser "stylus" in a domestic compact disc player. And that's just one of the feats of precision engineering and applied physics that make possible the recording and reproduction of almost perfect sound from a small glistening disc of aluminium-coated polycarbonate plastic.

For over 50 years electronic engineers have controlled the balance between electrons and holes in semiconductors to design electronic switches. But now that material science has made the production of microscopic magnetic films possible, a new pair of charge-carrying populations is poised to make its mark in a plethora of devices based on the magnetic properties of metals, rather than the electronic properties of semiconductors. Mark Johnson of Bellcore in New Jersey has developed a switch in which currents are carried by the oppositely directed spins (magnetic moments) of electrons; the carriers are controlled by magnetic electrodes and switched by pulses of magnetic field (Science (1993) 260 320). But Johnson's most spectacular prediction is that such a switch will work better as it is made smaller - a complete reversal of the difficulties encountered in nanofabricated electronics.

In the food processing industry, routine analysis of fat, moisture and protein is essential for monitoring product quality, process control and for compliance with strict consumer requirements. In flour milling, for example, batches of wheat with differing protein content are ground and blended to yield a finished product with a specific protein composition. Even a small flour mill can generate up to 10 tonnes per hour, so the costs associated with low-grade output can be very high.

From love letters to bank statements, wedding invitations to eviction orders, around 60 million letters pass through Royal Mail sorting offices on their journey from A to B every day. Key players in this process are a group of luminescent organic materials called phosphors, which are used to code the envelopes.

The outermost region of the Earth's atmosphere, at heights of 100 kilometres or more, has long been know to suffer violent disturbances, such as auroral displays and geomagnetic storms, as a result of solar activity. The lower atmosphere (below about 15 km), however, is affected only in subtle and little-understood ways by the Sun. Indeed the study of Sun-weather and Sun-climate relationships is a controversial area.

The European Community (EC) spends billions of ECUs on research and development every year. Although most of this money goes on applied research, the Human Capital and Mobility (HCM) programme mainly funds basic research. EC research is organised in multi-year "Frameworks" and HCM is part of the third Framework (1990–94). The HCM programme, which started last year, has a budget of ECU 587m (about £440m) and will run until 1994. It follows a much smaller programme, called SCIECNE, in the second Framework (1987–91) that was mainly dedicated to small projects and "twinning" between laboratories. The aim behind the HCM programme is to enhance the industrial competitiveness of Europe by increasing the number, and quality, of researchers working in universities, national research centres and industries across Europe. The idea is to increase both the geographical and intellectual mobility of European researchers.

The relationship between biology and physics has often been close and, at times, uneasy. During this century many physicists have moved to work in biology. Amongst the most famous are Francis Crick (the joint discoverer of the DNA double helix with Jim Watson), and Max Delbrück and Salvatore Luria (Nobel prize-winners for their work on mutations). However, after these scientists changed their research field, they worked in the same way as other biologists and used their physics training to a reduced extent.

A Major task in any scientific investigation is the analysis of data to obtain results. Often there are large amounts of data, possibly from computer simulations or satellite observations of the Earth for example, and a new result can be buried in the columns of numbers like a needle in a haystack. But effective visualization tools are now available for exploring such large data sets and locating regions of interest, often interactively and in real time. Powerful desktop computers coupled with scientific visualization software allow the scientist to analyse his or her data in a powerful and flexible way.

This important contribution chronicles the forging of the US military-industrial-academic complex and the impact of Department of Defense (DOD) funding on higher education institutions. It does so by carefully examining the evolution of physics and engineering departments at two leading schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University, but similar stories could be told for other institutions.

Alvin Weinberg is a scientist of distinction, an early pioneer of nuclear energy, and above all a scientific administrator. Administrator here is used in the broadest sense, where science strategy and the choices between various scientific programmes are by far the most important parts of the job.

Liquid crystals (LCs) have been known for more than 100 years, but only in the last 25 years have they emerged from being a laboratory curiosity to being the core of display technology. The science of LCs underpins the displays revolution: LCDs find application from cars to cockpits, calculators to computers. Indeed, we now see full-colour LCDs in portable lap-top computers of a quality to rival any cathode ray tube display. Besides displays, increasing numbers of LC devices are being developed, and a multiplicity of non-electro-optic applications is appearing. This series of books, of which this is the final volume, was conceived as a review of the entire field.

So spoke my grandfather Georges Friedel in 1922, talking to physicists about liquid crystals. He could also have said that metallurgy was in the hands of chemists, surfaces studied by physical chemists...

National Instruments has launched LabWindows/CVI (C for Virtual Instrumentation) scientific and engineering software for developing instrumentation applications for the ANSI C programming language under both Microsoft® Windows for PCs and Solaris for Sun SPARCstations®.

Hide Analytical has released the HAL ion milling probe (IMP). The HAL IMP is a quadrupole mass spectrometer with ion optics and integral energy filter for direct analysis of secondary ions from the etch process. The secondary ions provide very precise data about the substrate surface composition.

The dB has never been a quantity with which I have felt comfortable and at ease. In this, I am unlike most of my colleagues, to whom it is an invaluable and familiar friend. Many of them are engineers – perhaps they have log tables built into their memories.