Yesterday the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to three scientists who pioneered some of the key technologies that have helped revolutionise both our lives and the way we do science in the last few decades. One of the laureates, Charles Kao, was honoured for his work on optical fibres, that has helped transform the telecommunications infrastructure we use every day. The others, William Boyle and George Smith, invented the charge coupled device (CCD) – the silicon imaging devices that lie at the core of the digital photography revolution. Congratulations to all three of them!
Misconduct in Physics: Further reading
May 12, 2009 By
I found the May copy of Physics World in my inbox today, featuring a long cover story on Jan Hendrik Schön, the perpetrator of one of the biggest physics fraud scandals of the last decades. For years, Schön was considered to be one of the brightest minds of his time and something of a publishing monster. In 2002 his fame came tumbling down when much of his breakthrough work was found to be, well, fake. Read the full story here.
How nice of Physics World to publish this story to accompany my recent posts!
(I kid, I kid)
Ethics in Research: Share your views
April 15, 2009 By
In the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics in physics and astronomy. While in astronomy we don’t have to navigate the perilous minefield of research on people or animals, proper scientific conduct is still considered to be an essential requirement for a career in astronomy. But what defines “proper scientific conduct”, or its counterpart, the dreaded “misconduct”, and who writes those definitions? Plagiarism is the one form of misconduct students are taught from undergraduate level to avoid at all cost. How far does the definition of plagiarism actually stretch, and why? And does that make sense? Moreover, what is the punishment, and who should it be administered by?While these issues are often presented in very black and white terms, once you dig below the surface they are really pretty murky. [Read more...]
Fundamental Physics work scoops the Nobel Prize
October 7, 2008 By
The Royal Swedish Academy of Science has just awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics to three theoretical physicists working in the field of fundamental subatomic particle physics. Read their press release here. Prof. Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago received half the prize “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic particles”; the other half went jointly to Prof. Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK Laboratory and Prof. Toshihide Maskawa of the University of Kyoto, both in Japan, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”. Congratulations to them and all their collaborators!
Nobel Prize in Physics announced tomorrow!
October 6, 2008 By
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