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Artificial intelligence may uncover new scientific concepts that defy human intuition, but will researchers be able to understand and operate with them? This scenario might seem like science fiction, but physicists have faced it before.
Most physics seminars are seen by dozens at most, but the 2012 announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson reached hundreds of thousands of viewers, including non-physicists. Achintya Rao asks what can this event tell us about opening up science to the general public?
In the 20th century, Bell Labs was a renowned industrial research lab in the US, known as the birthplace of the transistor and for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. It was also home to a 40-year minority outreach programme that went on to create a generation of Black scientists. What can initiatives today learn from the success of this fellowship?
100 years ago, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach demonstrated that silver atoms have a quantized magnetic moment, as predicted from the Bohr–Sommerfeld model of the atom. But the correct interpretation of the result proved to be far more subtle — and revolutionary.
Established almost 100 years ago, Bell Labs made a great contribution to advancing both fundamental science and technology. Was that the result of a unique set of circumstances or is there a reproducible recipe for success?
