LAUSR

PHYSICS AND SOCIETY A few of my favourite things My favourite paper published in the fifteen-year history of Nature Physics? I couldn’t possibly single out just one. But I can note a ‘favourite thing’ about Nature Physics: the exceptional collection of magazine material that has appeared alongside those research papers. I had the privilege to be the first Chief Editor of Nature Physics for its launch in 2005, and I wanted the journal to follow the example of Nature, in carrying not only the latest and best research in the field, but also to feature comment, opinion and review on all matters physics. And that meant ‘all matters’, including the role of physics in history and in the arts. In the October 2007 issue, on the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the first artificial satellite, Joe Burns gave a remarkable personal account of the space race in ‘Sputnik, space and me’1: from his teenage experience of hearing the satellite beep across the sky, Burns traced the line through the subsequent political and technological developments, which, he said, “altered the course of physics”. Also drawing on a moment of history, the second issue in 2005 offered an ‘Appointment at Trinity’2, a review by Jay and Naomi Pasachoff of the John Adams opera Doctor Atomic. Art reviews are an opportunity for rumination, and over the years we’ve pondered more opera (for example, Einstein on the beach3, Dr Dee4), and also theatre (The Life of Galileo5, The Physicists6), dance (E=mc2, ref. 7; Tree of codes8), film, books and the visual arts. Back in 2009, we marked another anniversary: 50 years since C. P. Snow’s famous essay, The two cultures. In ‘Never the twain’9, our regular Thesis writer Mark Buchanan revisited Snow’s contention that “a yawning gulf separates the two cultures of science and the humanities, making communication between the two all but impossible”. Mark’s own conclusion was more positive: “These differences are so set in the subject matter of the two cultures — one exploring everything human, and the other aiming for what is outside the merely human — that it is difficult to imagine the two cultures ever coming together. Even so, scientists remain human, and artists live in a world described by laws of inspiring beauty. There will always be innumerable points of contact.” My hope is that Nature Physics has been, and will remain, one of those vital points of contact.