Physics Web has announced the Top 12 physics stories of 2002, a number stretched beyond the usual Top 10 to include human-interest stories like the shortage of women in physics and fabrication-of-data misconduct. Advances in optics were lumped together as one achievement for work as diverse as sub-diffraction limit microscopy and quantum photon cloning. Neutrons were big news, providing insight on quantum gravity and atomic nuclei with neutrons but no protons. Some research was COOL, like Bose-Einstein condensates made from cesium and superconductors made from plutonium. One discovery was HOT, namely nanoscale magnetic logic gates that operate at room temperature. The top discoveries were totally sublime: solar neutrinos change identities on their trip from Sun to Earth, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may be broken (can perpetual motion be far behind?) and microwave radiation from the Big Bang is polarized just like a pair of Neo’s sunglasses. The number one physics story, however, was straight out of Star Trek: creation of “cold” anti-hydrogen gas that could be stored indefinitely as long as it didn’t touch anything while being held in a magnetic field. Maybe the top physics story for 2003 will be the development of a dilithium chamber to put the anti-hydrogen gas into…
3 thoughts on “Top Physics Stories of 2002”
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People already mistrust and misunderstand the science community, so high profile cases of falsified data and proffessional misconduct are not a good thing. Joe average already has very little faith in the scientific commmunity, so stuff like this really doesn’t help. More and more people seem to be “healing themselves” with magnets and talking to the dead. Ignorance can’t be a good thing.
The business about the 2nd law seems very ordinary and expected – statistical mechanics is nothing new. The nanoscale stuff seems very ordinary research as well. Superconductivity is pretty ubiquitous among nonmagnetic metals, so what’s surprising about that one is that anybody actually wasted their time making weird plutonium compounds… I’m no expert in the other fields, but from the descriptions it sounds like the only surprising result of the lot was the tetra-neutron… Perhaps the big story should be how so much ordinary research gets hyped way beyond any real implications it may have… which gets us into the ethics area again!
Physics News Update has a similar list with some overlap – the top two are on the Physicsweb list as well. The other one that seems interesting there is the “stopping and storing light” work, which actually does seem to have a great deal of potential.