PHYSICS TODAY Research Articles

Vera Rubin in the pages of Physics Today

The late astronomer’s contributions to the magazine reveal her impressive research, advocacy for women in science, and sharp wit. The late astronomer’s contributions to the magazine reveal her impressive research, advocacy for women in science, and sharp wit.

The most popular Physics Today articles of 2016

A mix of serious and lighthearted, political and apolitical, historical and forward-looking stories drew readers’ attention this year. A mix of serious and lighthearted, political and apolitical, historical and forward-looking stories drew readers’ attention this year.

Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble

Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble

Teaching in a developing country

I had just returned from six months in Rwanda when I read Barry Sanders’s Commentary “Asked to speak in a developing country? Say yes!” (Physics Today, April 2016, page 10). My experience is much more limited than that of Sanders, but I fully agree that undertaking a teaching assignment in a country such as Rwanda can provide a unique opportunity for both the students and the lecturer.I had the fortune to be a Fulbright Scholar at the College of Science and Technology at the University of Rwanda, where I taught undergraduate quantum mechanics. I had a class of 21 third-year students composed of 15 men and 6 women.The students lack many of the resources that those in the West take for granted. Only four of my students owned computers; in fact, computer access on campus was very limited. That in itself was problematic, but less so than a range of cultural issues that created barriers between student and teacher. Creative thinking, individuality, and class participation do not seem to be elements that are stressed in the Rwandan educational system—although attempts are under way to change that. English comprehension was also an issue. Rwanda changed its official language from French to English in 2008, and my students had about half of their education in each language.It quickly became clear to me that conventional teaching methods would be less than effective. By proceeding at a much slower pace and allowing students to converse among themselves, I found that they began to gain confidence, ask questions, and even come to see me during office hours. By the end of the semester, the students were proud to have succeeded in a subject as difficult as quantum mechanics. My interactions with them, and all the contacts I made with Rwandans throughout the country, have affected me in ways I could not have imagined. Hopefully, the students were also left with a positive lasting impression of our time together.© 2016 American Institute of Physics.

Megatelescope releases its first image

In April 2016 Physics Today challenged its readers to write a fictional news story about a discovery made in 2116. Robert Austin’s winning entry describes a huge space telescope fashioned from laser-machined asteroids.

African Arrow sees hints of structure in the fabric of space

In April 2016 Physics Today challenged its readers to write a fictional news story about a discovery made in 2116. Pavel Kornilovich’s runner-up entry describes the revelation in muon–antimuon collisions of the cellular nature of space.

Physics in 2116

Baseball legend Yogi Berra and physics legend Niels Bohr both observed, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” True enough, but conjecturing about what is to come is an exercise that can be hard to resist. In April of this year, Physics Today published an article by Frank Wilczek entitled “Physics in 100 years,” in which he ruminated on what physicists might accomplish in the coming century. By his own admission, Wilczek was “crazily selective” in what he chose to discuss, so the editorial staff invited our readers to join in the prognostication game: We announced a contest challenging you to submit a news story reporting on an exciting discovery or technical advance that occurred in 2116. In the ensuing pages you will find Robert Austin’s winning entry about a telescope built from polished asteroids. That essay is followed by three other submissions that particularly impressed us.In the nearly 200 entries we received, several themes recurred. Those include new understandings of fundamental physics, wonders achieved with black holes or gravitational waves, and fantastic accomplishments aided by advanced artificial intelligences; indeed, incredibly sophisticated computers play a starring role in three of the four following essays. Those themes may sound familiar if you read Wilczek’s piece. Why so few entries tackled the future of condensed-matter physics is a possibly significant mystery.Wilczek’s article concluded that “brilliant prospects lie ahead,” and his upbeat tone was echoed in virtually all of the submissions we received. Our imaginative contestants saw the frontiers of knowledge as continuously advancing and a few even explicitly described how scientific advances improved the quality of life for all humankind. May it be so.© 2016 American Institute of Physics.

Emergent consciousness decoded

In April 2016 Physics Today challenged its readers to write a fictional news story about a discovery made in 2116. John LaSala’s runner-up entry describes experiments on an artificial intelligence that shed light on the nature of consciousness.

Privacy concerns prompt protests in California

In April 2016 Physics Today challenged its readers to write a fictional news story about a discovery made in 2116. Gabrielle Hodgson’s runner-up entry describes workers’ reaction to a new state law mandating neural-network-based screenings.

The Gathering Storm still looms

A decade on, the situation portrayed in the influential report of a deteriorating US science and technology ecosystem has, if anything, worsened.

Land’s complex role in climate change

To mitigate climate change at local, regional, and global scales, we must begin to think beyond greenhouse gases.

Pseudoscience versus science

Pseudoscience versus science

Pseudoscience versus science

In his Commentary on the dangers of pseudoscience (Physics Today, May 2016, page 10), Sadri Hassani sweeps under the rug the fact that the mind was explicitly introduced into the basic conceptual structure of quantum physics because a link was found between particles being observed and the observer. Several towering figures of quantum physics—for example, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner—claimed that the consciousness of the observer is vital to the existence of the physical events being observed and that mental events can affect the physical world. Wigner, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, wrote, “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11. E. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays of Eugene P. Wigner, Indiana U. Press (1967), p. 169.Hassani cites “Manifesto for a post-materialist science”22. M. Beauregard et al., Explore 10, 272 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2014.06.008 as an example of the growth of pseudoscience, but contrary to what he pretends, that editorial does not seek at all to equate research on psi phenomena and near-death experiences with quantum physics. De facto, the main objective of the manifesto is to present, in a concise and succinct manner, various lines of empirical evidence that strongly suggests that mind represents an aspect of reality as primordial as the physical world.Mind is fundamental in the universe; that is, it cannot be derived from matter and reduced to anything more basic. Mind and the physical world are deeply interconnected, and mind—that is, will or intention—can influence the state of the physical world and operate in a nonlocal or extended fashion. That is, it is not confined to specific points in space, such as brains and bodies, nor to specific points in time, such as the present. Furthermore, what we are proposing in the manifesto is that, to the great displeasure of Hassani and other pseudoskeptics like him, the consciousness-related interpretation of the quantum measurement problem is consistent with those conclusions and with the emerging post-materialist paradigm. It is not pseudoscience; it is evidence-based responsible science respected by open-minded theorists and experimentalists alike.REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<1. E. Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays of Eugene P. Wigner, Indiana U. Press (1967), p. 169. Google Scholar2. M. Beauregard et al., Explore 10, 272 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2014.06.008, Google Scholar© 2016 American Institute of Physics.

Two-year colleges teach physics to widening range of students

Increasingly, partnerships ease the way to transfer to universities.Increasingly, partnerships ease the way to transfer to universities.

Higgs couplings and new signals from Flavon–Higgs mixing effects within multi-scalar models

Testing the properties of the Higgs particle discovered at the LHC and searching for new physics signals, are some of the most important tasks of Particle Physics today. Current measurements of the Higgs couplings to fermions and gauge bosons, seem consistent with the Standard Model, and when taken as a function of the particle mass, should lay on a single line. However, in models with an extended Higgs sector the diagonal Higgs couplings to up-quarks, down-quarks and charged leptons, could lay on different lines, while non-diagonal flavor-violating Higgs couplings could appear too. We describe these possibilities within the context of multi-Higgs doublet models that employ the Froggatt–Nielsen (FN) mechanism to generate the Yukawa hierarchies. Furthermore, one of the doublets can be chosen to be of the inert type, which provides a viable dark matter candidate. The mixing of the Higgs doublets with the flavon field, can provide plenty of interesting signals, including: i) small corrections to the couplings of the SM-like Higgs, ii) exotic signals from the flavon fields, iii) new signatures from the heavy Higgs bosons. These aspects are studied within a specific model with 3+1 Higgs doublets and a singlet FN field. Constraints on the model are derived from the study of K and D mixing and the Higgs search at the LHC. For last, the implications from the latter aforementioned constraints to the FCNC top decay t→ch are presented too.

La Storia Della Fisica Dello Stato Solito in Una Prolusione Di Eligio Perucca Del 1960 [The History of the Solid-State Physics in a Talk by Eligio Perucca of 1960

In this paper we present and discuss a short work on the history of physics that Eligio Perucca wrote for a talk during the opening ceremony of the Academic Year 1960-1961 at Turin Polytechnic. The talk was entitled Solids in Physics Today, where today is the year 1960. In his talk, Perucca is giving a full picture of the evolution and increasing relevance of his contemporary solid state physics. It is also interesting to see that he recognizes the importance that the researches on the subjects of such physics have as origin of the technologies which are radically changing the human society [text of the paper in Italian]

Perfection from a simpler time

The feature article “A perfect proposal” by Daniel Kleppner and Paul Horowitz (Physics Today, January 2016, page 48) is enough to make a scientist cry. An entire field of science proposed in 800 words with a six-line equipment budget.I suspect that proposal would not fare well today. It included no salary or fringe-benefits budget, no tuition budget, and no indirect cost recovery. No environmental impact statement was prepared, even though the antenna surely changed the aesthetics of the lab building, and it wasn’t vetted by a grounds committee.No bibliography was offered, no curriculum vitae were attached, and no figures were enclosed. The submission did not contain a “broader impacts” statement; since the impact was obvious to author and reviewer, why waste words?The proposal included no mention of outreach or demographics. It gave deference to individual competitors rather than assembling a multi-investigator, cross-disciplinary team or demeaning the work of others. And the submitter had a reasonable expectation of a two-month review cycle and a high probability of funding.Perhaps that’s the point of the article: Much that attracted prior generations to science is now unfundable! If we came up with a proposal to fix what is so obviously broken with the grant and funding system, to whom would we send it?© 2016 American Institute of Physics.

Martin Moses Block

Martin Moses Block

Commentary: Bringing science’s value to the US Congress

Commentary: Bringing science’s value to the US Congress

Brexit, immigration, and me

The day after the UK voted in favor of leaving the European Union, Physics Today’s online editor, Andrew Grant, wrote a news story on the reaction of the UK’s physics community to Brexit, as the secession is known, and on its possible impact on the country’s scientific enterprise.Most scientists in the UK oppose Brexit—with good reason. As a member of the EU, the UK contributes to a union-wide pot of research funding. Its scientists, however, are notably successful in competing for that funding. Andrew reported that in 2007–13, scientists in the UK received a net €3.4 billion ($3.8 billion) from the EU.I wrote “scientists in the UK,” rather than, say, “British scientists,” deliberately. When Andrew sought the opinion of a physicist based in Northern Ireland, he reached Mauro Paternostro, an Italian at the Centre for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics at Queen’s University Belfast. The other full professor in the center, Hugo van der Hart, is Dutch.The freedom of the EU’s citizens to work or study in any EU country was established in the union’s founding charter, the Treaty of Rome, which went into effect on 1 January 1958. However, it took longer to make that freedom a practical reality. In 1984–88, when I was a graduate student at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy, there were students from other countries—Australia, Brazil, Norway, Finland, if I remember correctly—but none from the EU. (Finland joined the EU in 1995.) Now 9 of the department’s 44 graduate students are from the EU (minus the UK); 12 are from non-EU countries.I left my native Britain and the EU in 1988. That year, I started a postdoc at Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science near Tokyo. When the postdoc was over, I moved to the US to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. I have remained in the US ever since.So I can’t tell you from personal experience what it’s like to exercise my right as an EU citizen to work in any of the union’s 28 countries. But I can tell you what dealing with immigration bureaucracies is like. When I lived in Japan, I was obliged to carry with me an alien registration card. Besides my photograph and biographical details, the card also displayed my left thumbprint.On 28 November 1990 I set foot in the US for the first time to start my NASA job. Having inspected my visa, the surly immigration officer demanded, unnecessarily, to see my offer of employment. Luckily, I had it to hand. Under US immigration rules, I could renew my H-1B visa only outside the US. Fortunately, I did so in Tokyo, which I visited periodically for work and whose US embassy is large, well staffed, and not overwhelmed with visa renewal requests. Some of my colleagues were less fortunate. They had to remain abroad for months while overworked or inefficient immigration officials labored over their applications.Applying for permanent residence and then US citizenship was another Kafkaesque ordeal. I had to have my fingerprints taken twice because they had “expired.” When I became a US citizen in 2000, it was because the US is now my home and because I treasure the Bill of Rights. But one other motivating factor was to avoid having to deal with the Immigration and Naturalization Service ever again.Most readers of Physics Today are US citizens who live in the US. The consequences of Brexit might seem remote, but the ugly anti-immigration sentiment that fueled the Leave campaign has its counterpart in the US. And it’s not necessarily confined to factory workers who rail against globalization. During the recession of the early 1990s, some postdocs in the US formed the Young Scientists Network (YSN) to campaign against the lack of jobs in academia and industry. Among YSN’s targets: foreign graduate students and postdocs. The movement fizzled as the economy recovered, but I worry that a similarly nativist pressure group could be in the offing.As I write this editorial, it’s too early to know whether UK citizens will continue to work freely in whichever EU country they choose and whether EU citizens will continue to work freely in the UK. EU negotiators will likely insist that the UK can have free access to its markets for goods and services only if EU citizens have free access to the UK’s market for jobs. If that proves to be what the EU negotiators offer, I hope the UK accepts the deal. It’ll be worth it.© 2016 American Institute of Physics.