Europhysics News

https://link.springer.com/journal/770

List of Papers (Total 1,523)

The evolution of IBM Research - Looking back at 50 years of scientific achievements and innovations

By the mid-1950s IBM had established laboratories in New York City and in San Jose, California, with San Jose being the first one apart from headquarters. This provided considerable freedom to the scientists and with its success IBM executives gained the confidence they needed to look beyond the United States for a third lab. The choice wasn’t easy, but Switzerland was eventually...

The atmospheres of extrasolar planets

The discovery of extrasolar planets, or “exoplanets” – i.e., planets orbiting around other stars – may be seen as the major discovery of astronomy over the past two decades. About twenty years ago, in 1992, the first discovery of a couple of planets around a pulsar was announced by A. Wolszczan and D. Frail.

Physics and theology

The role of theology in relation to science is not to try to tell physics how to answer its own proper questions. We have every reason to believe that physics questions will eventually receive physics answers. However there are meaningful and necessary questions which arise from considering the results of physics but which exceed its selflimited power to address.

‘In free fall’

Physicists in the lead of a fiction book or a play, that’s a rare event! Writers in general do not understand physics, while physicists seldom have the talent of writing for a large audience. So when it happens, we should rejoice. The up-and-coming German author Juli Zeh [1] (1974), who studied law, has succeeded in combining beautiful prose, psychological drama, crime and...

Physics funding at the German Research Foundation

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) is the central German organization to support basic research primarily at German universities. An important difference to other national funding organizations is that DFG works as a self-governing organization of German Science in a “response mode” by funding proposals made by scientists, but also contributing...

A look inside white OLEDs

White organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) for lighting are finding their way to the market. These OLEDs have organic layers only a few nanometres thick. Improving their efficiency and stability requires nanometre-precision information about where the light is emitted. Reconstruction of the emission profile from the measured emission and molecular-scale modelling provide a...

An eye-witness report on how the WWW came about

During the 1990s basic web technologies were developed at CERN. Seeking approval for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and being short of resources, CERN decided very soon to provide free access to the web technologies. This would ultimately lead to a revolution in communication.

The European Mathematical Society: the home for Mathematics in Europe

The European Physical Society has invited me to write an article on the European Mathematical Society (EMS) in its magazine, Europhysics News. This gives me a great opportunity to provide the community of European physicists with an overview of a learned society whose objectives are very similar to those of the European Physical Society. The longstanding connections between our...