Commentary in 2009

It has been 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the wake of the upheaval, the East German society was radically remodelled. For physicists, it brought new opportunities — and fresh challenges.

The design and synthesis of novel materials is the rubric of both haute cuisine and materials physics — and in both there is great pleasure in creating and sharing the results of a new recipe.

With the increasingly urgent need to find solutions to the impending energy crisis, there is growing interest within the fusion community in revisiting the concept of the fusion–fission hybrid reactor. But how soon could such reactors be realized, and could they meet the challenges of the coming century?

Online tools for collaboration and sharing information have changed the routine of scientists. But the revolution that will turn scientific information from a collection of files into an active system has just begun.

Science can explain many things in the natural world. Although the laws of gravity, the origin of galaxies and the Universe are commonly accepted, the theory of evolution is still questioned by some. There are clear reasons for why that is, and why it need not be so.

The modern evolutionary synthesis, which marries Darwin's theory of natural selection with Mendel's genetics, was developed around the same time as quantum mechanics. Is there any connection between the two?

Economic theory failed to envisage even the possibility of a financial crisis like the present one. A new foundation is needed that takes into account the interplay between heterogeneous agents.