Suppose you were a politician in charge of shaping your country's science policy. Let's also suppose you are actually interested in promoting the welfare of the nation and humanity at large (hopefully not all politicians are driven by sociopathic greed, and after all, we are talking about you here). Let's also suppose that you are not entirely stupid. What kind of science policy would you make?

One half of the Nobel Prize in physics for 2009 goes to Chinese-British physicist Charles K. Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", and the other half is divided between Canadian Willard S. Boyle and American George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor".

After the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese and Indians, the Germans have now also set their sights on the moon. The aerospace coordinator in the German federal government, Peter Hintze, proposed in a televised interview that an unmanned lunar mission by the year 2015 should be part of a government plan to strengthen the economy.

According to Hintze, a public investment of about 1.5 billion Euros spread out over five years would  not only put a robot lander on the moon, but also lead to the development of innovative technologies, in particular in robotics, that might be of use in industry and medical care and create new jobs in high-tech industries.

For a long time, recreational computer users all over the world have benefitted from improvements to computing systems that were invented in order to facilitate research in fundamental physics. The foremost example is, of course, the World Wide Web which you are using to read this.

Now the time has come for the gamers to give back to physics. Of course, nobody would buy that as a moral argument, but money talks louder than most ethicists, and the market for games consoles and graphics cards has become huge and strongly driven by increases in computational performance, leading to ever faster graphics processors being developed to please the gamers. If you have a moderately recent desktop computer, odds are that the graphics card has more computational power than the CPU.

In the most recent edition of PhysicsWorld, there are two articles that on the face of it have little to do with each other: one is about Jan Hendrik Schön, the physicist formerly famous for creating the first organic superconductor and the first single-molecule transistor, and now most famous for having simply made up all of those results out of thin air, the greatest kind of scientific fraud in physics.

The other article is about how the internet is transforming scientific communications, looking at which new means of scientific communication failed (such as Physics Comments and scientists contributing to Wikipedia -- although Scholarpedia is taking off quickly at the moment, probably because its signed and peer-reviewed authorship model is more in line with academic customs than Wikipedia's semi-anarchistic one) and which succeeded (the arXiv) in making the dissemination of scientific results quicker and more transparent.

At first glance these two topics appear to have little to do with each other. At second glance, however, they are closely intertwined.

The launch of the Herschel and Planck satellites is now underway. Video can be seen at ESA's site.

So after having eaten all those chocolate Easter eggs you come to realize that the bathroom scales now show your weight to be even further from what it ought to be for your own good, and as a scientifically minded person you decide to blame it all on the Higgs field; after all, as everyone knows from reading the popular press, it's the Higgs field that gives elementary particles their mass.

Everybody has heard the sensationalist claims about the alleged dangers of black holes at the LHC, but the real physics rationale behind the LHC and its experiments has been featured much less prominently in the media. So what do physicists actually hope to find with the help of the LHC?

Gamma Ray Bursts are colossal cosmic explosions: in their death throes, supermassive stars collapsing into a black hole will send out a pair of powerful rays from their poles that carry away most of the energy of this incredibly violent event in a second-long burst of intense radiation, radiating away more energy in the blink of an eye than the Sun will during its entire lifetime of billions of years.

As most people following physics research at some level or other will have noticed, physicists love symmetries. In fact, it can be and has been said that all of modern theoretical physics is based on a bunch of symmetry principles from which the rest follows.

While that may be a bit overly reductionist (experimental input plays an important part in the construction of a scientific theory after all), it is certainly true that symmetry considerations play a huge role in the building of our theories. But why is that so? The answer is that there are a number of mathematical theorems that link the existence (or absence) of certain symmetries in the mathematical formulation of a theory to physical features of the reality described by that theory: the laws of nature are constrained by symmetry.


Emmy Noether (1882-1935) (from Wikimedia Commons)