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In 1931, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung took on an unusual patient, the brilliant young physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Arthur I. Miller tells the story of their friendship, how they impacted each other’s work, and reflects on creativity.
Science and society are inextricably entangled, but the discussion of social issues in optics and photonics is, at best, treated as peripheral to the field. A group of researchers, technicians, administrative staff, and clinical liaisons share how they came together to start a conversation recognizing these oft-disregarded issues.
In an age of expensive experiments and hype around new data-driven methods, researchers understandably want to ensure they are gleaning as much insight from their data as possible. Rachel C. Kurchin argues that there is still plenty to be learned from older approaches without turning to black boxes.
The science of food is strongly connected to chemistry and sensory science, but chewing and swallowing is also governed by soft matter physics as it involves processing materials that are deformable, easily fractured or that melt at low temperatures. What can physics tell us about these processes, and what questions remain?
Women and people of colour are underrepresented in physics in many parts of the world, to the detriment of the field. How do academics’ beliefs about the role of ‘brilliance’ in career success contribute to these representation gaps, and what can be done to address them?
Environmental concerns and rising energy costs are causing leadership of accelerator facilities to consider the impact of the magnets used. How do permanent magnets — which don’t use electricity to operate — stack up?
Reproducibility is known to be one of the biggest issues facing science today — but what is less discussed is its connection to science’s environmental impact, as experiments that aren’t replicable still consume resources. Joanna Marshall-Cook and Martin Farley describe processes that can both improve sustainability in science and help tackle the reproducibility crisis.
Vertebrate hearing uses mechanosensory cells operating near an oscillatory instability. Physics reveals how this mechanism might have evolved from ‘chance and necessity’.
More than half the world’s population lives in cities, which are hotter than rural areas. Jan Carmeliet and Dominique Derome explain what physics modelling can show about how cities get hot, and how to cool them.
Sarah Williams discusses the pressing need to involve the younger generations in the current discussions and decisions about future big projects in particle physics.
Today’s hopes and fears related to the use of AI systems echo familiar concerns about nuclear technology. What can be learned from the dual mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency to promote and control nuclear technologies?
Twenty-five years after the proposal of a jamming phase diagram, Andrea Liu and Sidney Nagel discuss how linking jammed granular materials with glasses helps us understand the physics of many systems.
Stephen Blundell ponders the history of disagreements between scientists — from the ancient Greeks to questions about room-temperature superconductivity — and what they show about how to disagree well.
Labos 1point5 is a nationwide action-research project that so far about half of research units in France have used to assess their carbon footprint. Tamara Ben-Ari describes some of the scientific findings from the resulting dataset and what they show about how to change the scientific system.
Simon Batzner, Albert Musaelian and Boris Kozinsky discuss how exploiting the symmetry of Euclidean space can help tackle challenges in molecular simulations.
In 1973, Philip Anderson published a paper introducing the resonating valence bond state, which can be recognized in retrospect as a topologically ordered phase of matter — one that cannot be classified in the conventional way according to its patterns of spontaneously broken symmetry. Steven Kivelson and Shivaji Sondhi reflect on the impact of this paper over the past 50 years.
