Technology

It's a Physics World

Distinctions between "discoveries" and technological "spinoffs" are meaningless, even misleading

October 07, 2013
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I have admittedly a personal reason for celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Institute of Physics’ house magazine Physics World: its founding indirectly got me hired as an editor at Nature. But my affection for the magazine isn’t entirely solipsistic. There’s the title itself: an unabashed proclamation to the effect that “this is where the geeks are”. There’s the fact that it runs fleet-footed rings round its rather stodgy American counterpart. And so I share some of the magazine’s delight in seeing a BBC report on its canny silver jubilee strategy briefly occupying the most-read slot of online news.

For the Physics World staff have compiled an alluring selection of Top 5 lists for the discipline: the top physics discoveries of the past 25 years, the top technological spinoffs, the top unanswered questions, the field’s prime movers and shakers, and more. The public response to this potentially recondite parade, as seen from the BBC’s news story, testifies to the heartening thirst that evidently still exists for science. If you’re truly keen to find the "science you should know", you’d do well to got hold of the jubilee issue, although for most newsagents the magazine is as elusive as dark matter (unanswered question number 2).

This doesn’t mean, of course, that I agree with all the choices on these lists. As my forthcoming article in Prospect explains, quantum computing (technological spinoff number 3) is likely to have a rather limited impact in the near term and possibly in any term. It’s the broader links emerging between quantum theory and information theory that offer richer, perhaps revolutionary fare, and which will perhaps even enable us finally to get to grips with why quantum phenomena seem so strange. Graphene (spinoff number 2) – carbon sheets one atom thick – is an extraordinarily interesting material, but personally I won’t be holding my breath for any world-changing technological breakthroughs. Perhaps the most promising outcome has nothing to do with mobile phones and touch-screens, but will see graphene used for ultra-fast sequencing of genomes, as DNA is pulled through tiny holes in the material one base-pair at a time. More generally, I would challenge the whole notion of dividing physics into fundamental "discoveries" and technological "spinoffs", as though the practical benefits are just side-products. Pure and applied research are, here as in all of science, so intimately blended that these labels become meaningless, even misleading.

But this risks carping; every physicist would make a different selection. What is most exciting, and most sobering, is the breadth and profundity of the questions still to be answered – questions that have mostly been with us for a century or more, if not for millennia. Is there life on other worlds? What is time? Can we unify quantum theory with gravity? It’s highly likely that Physics World might find itself asking the same questions on its golden jubilee. What is most exciting of all is that, for some of them, it may no longer have to.