In addition to former CERN science communicator Achintya Rao looking back at the famous day in 2012 when the lab announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, there’s an interview with Freya Blekman, who talks about the joy of a career in physics as part of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
You can also find out how CERN’s Quantum Technology Initiative is encouraging collaboration between the high-energy physics and quantum tech communities.
But it’s not all about CERN. Over in the US, there are in-depth interviews with Lia Merminga, the physicist who’s current director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and with Mike Witherell, who’s head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Looking to the future, we’ve included an analysis of the influential “P5” report into the future of US particle physics, which recently called for the construction of a muon collider. Physics World also talks to Ambrogio Fasoli – the new head of EUROfusion, who says that Europe must ramp up its efforts to build a demonstration fusion reactor.
Eager explorer Florence Downs enjoys showcasing the opportunities of engineering to young people. (Courtesy: Florence Downs)
What skills do you use every day in your job?
As an editor, the largest part of my job is doing just that – editing. Most broadly, I spend my time working out how to communicate a story as clearly as possible to the reader. A lot of the time that might just involve a bit of rearrangement and grammatical wrangling. Sometimes it calls for more of a rewrite, and the writer in me can’t help but get excited for those moments. I write shorter pieces for the magazine too, so am trying to develop my approaches to storytelling, interviewing and other more “writerly” skills.
Applying a curious mindset definitely helps me to spot what a story (no matter how long or short) could be missing. Having a scientific background helps a lot with that. Being happy to get stuck into a new subject – if you can call that a skill – is something that’s come in handy in every job I’ve had and that was definitely honed during my physics degree. Without it, it would have been impossible to hop between scientific disciplines and, eventually, find myself in the world of engineering.
As with any job, there’s always a degree of plate spinning. Managing all the smaller aspects of the role – from newsletters to web analytics – is vital.
What do you like best and least about your job?
I love so many things about it. Probably the main one is that I am constantly learning. Every day I get to satisfy my burning curiosities – learn about new technologies and how engineers are making the world a better place. I’m a bit of a magpie so thankfully it’s part and parcel of this job to be drawn to shiny and interesting things.
There’s also the process of seeing an article germinate and eventually take shape. It’s very creative (and a lot of fun) thinking about what to cover and how to guide a piece in the right direction. At the same time, it’s a collective effort, and that comes down to everyone who feeds into it, from our editorial board and team to freelance writers.
I’m grateful to be learning from lots of inspiring people – engineers at all stages of their careers and creative science communicators and writers. Inspiration comes from the other side too. It’s all too often that I’ll interview someone and the amount they’ve achieved before turning 25 will blow my mind.
What I like least is that there’s not enough time in the day to pursue all the article and project ideas we have. It can be a tough call choosing something to prioritize and having to put something else to one side for now.
What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?
Definitely this: stop worrying so much and know that everything will work out. I’ve learned so much from each stage of my career and would love to tell my past self just to enjoy it. That, incidentally, was also some of the best advice I was given about my PhD viva.
Founded in 1920, the Institute of Physics has had some high-flying presidents over the years. Early luminaries included Ernest Rutherford, J J Thomson and Lawrence Bragg, while more recently the presidency has been held by the likes of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Julia Higgins and Sheila Rowan. The current incumbent is Keith Burnett, an atomic physicist who spent more than a decade as vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield in the UK.
He studied at the University of Oxford and worked at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Imperial College London, before returning to Oxford, where he was head of physics in the mid-2000s. But despite a career spent almost entirely at top universities, Burnett is not a distant, elite figure. He grew up in the valleys of South Wales and revels in the fact that his cousin Richie Burnett was World Darts Champion in 1995.
Physics World caught up with Burnett to find out more about his career and vision for physics.
What originally sparked your life-long interest in physics?
I grew up in a mining valley in South Wales, which was a wonderful place with a really cohesive community. It was at the time of the Apollo space programme – oh my god, the excitement. You could see the possibilities and I was fascinated by the idea of space. But one thing I did have was a wonderful teacher in school – Mr Cook. Also, my father worked for a small engineering company that made ceramics. So I just loved the idea of science from the very beginning.
You went on to study at Oxford, where you did a PhD in atomic physics. What attracted you to that field?
I had absolutely wonderful undergraduate lecturers and teachers – one being another Welshman, Claude Hurst. There was also Colin Webb, who later started Oxford Lasers. He was an amazing undergraduate teacher at Jesus College and he really inspired me. In fact, he then passed me on to one of his buddies, Derek Stacey. The group had been founded by Heini [Heinrich] Kuhn, who was an emigré scholar from Germany, and had a wonderful tradition in precision atomic physics.
Did the commercial side of physics ever appeal in terms of your own career?
Not so much, but I did really admire what Colin was doing because he was very early in terms of commercialization. People wanted the type of excimer lasers he was making in the lab. In fact I just got an e-mail from him. He’s retired but very pleased that Oxford Lasers has won a good contract for doing semiconductor work. So I very much admire the applications of lasers and optics.
You were around in the 1990s at the time Bose–Einstein condensation was first observed in the lab. It was a peak period for atomic physics wasn’t it?
I was actually on the search committee that hired Carl Wieman to [the University of Colorado at] Boulder, where I was an assistant professor at the time. Carl joined the faculty and worked with Eric Cornell to make a Bose–Einstein condensate. I was tracking that very closely. It was an absolutely wonderful time because it went from “No-one thinks you can make it” to “Maybe they’ve made it” and then “Wow, it’s really big and juicy and we can do great stuff with it.”
Would you say Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman were worthy winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001?
Yes. They won it with Wolfgang Ketterle. It was a remarkable story with twists and turns because the person who developed the ideas behind [laser] cooling was Dan Kleppner at MIT. He was the first to develop hydrogen cooling with Tom Greytak. But what is really important is that the people at MIT taught other people elsewhere how to do it. Because of that, they progressed much faster and were able to learn from one another. It shows that if you don’t have trust and the ability to exchange ideas, everything slows down.
My cousin Richie was World Darts Champion in 1995. He’s the really well-known Burnett in in the valley. Not me!
Keith Burnett
After spells at Imperial College and then back at Oxford, you became vice-chancellor at the University of Sheffield. How did that come about?
I was about 49 when they said “Will you be head of physics at Oxford?” And I thought “Yeah, that’ll be amazing!” So I did that and it was very perplexing but wonderful – an amazing department. I did that for a year. But the person who inspired me [to move to Sheffield] was actually an ex-president of the IOP – and the previous vice-chancellor of Sheffield – Gareth Roberts [who died in 2007]. He’s another Welshman, though from north Wales, which is very different from south Wales – they play soccer, not rugby – but still Welsh. I was very poor at rugby. But my cousin Richie was World Darts Champion in 1995. He’s the really well-known Burnett in in the valley. Not me!
So what did Gareth Roberts say to you?
Well, I’d worked with Gareth at Oxford and he said “You should really think about it.” Sheffield is a city bathed in the traditions of making steel and metallurgy. So I thought I would love being part of the civic life of the city. I also felt this was a university that does wonderful things for its citizens and students. The other thing is that my daughter had gone to Sheffield before me – she’s an architect there so I always say I follow in my daughter’s footsteps.
As vice-chancellor at Sheffield, you were firmly opposed to the principle of student tuition fees. Why was that?
Higher education is not just for the individual. It has consequences for society and for business too. If you say “No, it’s just an individual choice whether someone goes to university and pays a fee”, well that can work to a certain extent. But you cannot then be sure you’ll have enough scientists to work in, say, industry or defence. As a country, we used to roughly balance the system in terms of where people went. But now it’s a free-for-all in terms of choice, which is bad if we need more people in science and engineering. Tuition fees also fundamentally change the relationship with students. I disagreed with fees when they came in and I still disagree with them now.
The UK university sector has expanded hugely over the last 20 years thanks to a huge rise in student numbers and the trebling of tuition fees in 2012. Has that been good or bad?
The big thing that happened during my time at Sheffield was the increase in student tuition fees [to £9000]. I was very much against the increase, which wasn’t a popular [position to hold] among many of my vice-chancellor colleagues. In fact, I remember being pressured by Number 10 to sign a letter with other Russell Group universities to support the rise. I knew it was going to be a major burden on households and we’re now in a situation where the UK has to write off £12bn [from students who never earn enough to pay their loans back]. We’ve got a very bad investment portfolio and the students have got debt. It’s been a disaster.
Boom times The UK higher-education system has been hugely successful in recent decades. When Keith Burnett left the University of Sheffield in 2018 after more than 10 years as vice-chancellor, it had nearly 8000 staff and a turnover of £500m. Money earned on the back of growing numbers of international students has helped universities like Sheffield to fund new projects, such as its Diamond study and engineering facility pictured here. (Courtesy: University of Sheffield)
Tuition fees haven’t risen for more than a decade now and many universities have come to rely on the much higher fees paid by international students. How has the growth in foreign students affected the higher-education sector?
International student fees used to be a top-up. When I was at Sheffield, we used them to build a new engineering teaching lab, known as the Diamond. But nowadays the income from international students is pretty much built into the fabric – in other words, without their fees you can’t run a university. We have some amazing physics departments in this country, but the tap that feeds them is actually undergraduate physicists, cross-subsidized by international students, especially from business schools, international relations and engineering. As a country, we need physics properly funded and less reliant on foreign students.
If you look at a place like Sheffield, students bring enormous benefits – vitality, money, inward investment
Keith Burnett
The rise in international students has also played a role in increasing immigration to the UK. Where do you stand in that debate?
If you look at a place like Sheffield, students bring enormous benefits – vitality, money, inward investment. Others may say “No, we don’t like students taking accommodation” and things of that sort. If you talk to experts in immigration, it’s far more neutral than people think. But the whole topic is inflammatory and it’s difficult to get a balanced discussion of the advantages and disadvantages. There are, though, some incredible physics departments in the UK – look at the number of companies working with the University of Bristol in its quantum tech. This is a big potential business long term.
After Sheffield, you became involved in the Schmidt Science Fellows scheme – what’s that all about?
It was an idea of [the US computer scientist] Stu Feldman, a long-term confidant of Eric and Wendy Schmidt – Eric being a former chief executive and chair of Google. Stu said “There ought to be a way in which people, once they’ve done their PhDs, can think more broadly rather than just carrying on in a particular thing.” How, in other words, can we identify people across the world who’ve got fantastic ideas and then give them some freedom to move? So we – our team at Rhodes House in Oxford – select people with exciting ideas and help them choose where they might go in the world.
What’s your role in the scheme?
My job is to mentor researchers in making this transition. Initially, I did all of the mentoring but now I have some colleagues. It can be all the way from handling financial issues to dealing with principal investigators to writing faculty applications. Over the last six years we’ve helped about 120 people across the world in different institutions. Some are now in national labs, while others have set up their own businesses. For me, it’s the most wonderful job because I get to hear the issues that early-career scientists have, such as using machine learning in all sorts of things – imaging biomolecules, precision drugs, everything.
What are the main challenges facing early-career researchers?
First and foremost, salaries. I think we’re in grave danger of underpaying our early-career scientists. We also need to do more to help people with their work–life balance. The Schmidt programme does have generous parental leave. There’s also the question of supporting and promoting people who work in interdisciplinary areas.
Making an impact The Institute of Physics, of which Keith Burnett is the current president, has three main strands to its new five-year strategy, which runs 2024–2029. They are: tackling the skills shortage and opening up opportunity; strengthening physics research, innovation and technology; and ensuring the social and economic benefits of physics are appreciated and widely understood. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Supavadee butradee; iStock/Devrimb; Shutterstock/pisaphotography)
In October 2023 you started your two-year stint as IOP president. What are your priorities during your term in office?
The IOP has just launched its new five-year strategy and the big focus is the skills base of teachers and researchers. First, are we helping teachers enough – the people who help people get into physics? We need a strong pipeline of talent because physicists don’t just stay in academia, they move into finance, industry, policy.
Second, we are very interested in influencing science – especially the green economy. We have to explain that it’s physicists – working with engineers and chemists – who are at the core of efforts to tackle climate change.
We’re also thinking more about how to make membership of the IOP more useful and accessible. It’s not arrogance to think that someone with an awareness of physics is just that much better prepared for lots of things going on in the modern world.
How can members of the IOP get involved with helping put that strategy into practice?
Start by looking at the strategy, if you haven’t already. If you’re a member of a particular group or branch, then feed your ideas back to your representatives. Our influence as an institute is much more powerful if we’re the convenors and co-ordinators of a more general effort. We can’t do all the things, but our membership is big and strong. If you can’t find somebody, contact me.
You feel strongly about the need for the physics community to be more diverse. How do you see physics evolving and over the next few decades?
There’s a wonderful book, After Nativism, that just came out by Ash Amin, who’s a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, which I chair. He argues that many of the things needed to make a just, equitable and diverse society are not being advocated, with many parts of society backing away from these issues. But the younger generation is utterly committed to a future that’s more just, equitable and diverse. They’ve grown up freer of prejudice but also used to discussing these things more openly. They’re not interested in many of the divisions that people would see in terms of labels of any sort. Any labelling of people due to race, ethnicity, sexual proclivity – anything at all – is an anathema and I personally find that inspirational. I really find that inspirational.
As a profession, we are a long way off equity and have great deficits in terms of inclusion
Keith Burnett
How can the IOP help with such issues?
One of the things that the IOP can do is say “Well, what are the advantages of a society of that sort?” Some people may accuse us of being a bunch of “woke liberals”. We’re not. We’re just people who believe in justice and equity in society. But we’re going have to work for it because, as a profession, we are a long way off equity and have great deficits in terms of inclusion. Going forward, we will have a younger generation who will care much less about these issues because they won’t see them. In fact, they’ll find it very strange that there was a time when the IOP didn’t represent society as a whole.
What are the benefits of a more equitable and inclusive physics community?
The advantages are huge. You know, if you exclude groups of people because of the labels you attribute to them, you’re “deleting” people who could be powerful, influential and helpful for physics. You’re just wasting people. I have this absolute commitment that the broader we are in terms of our people, the better, the more just and the more powerful we will be. I think our community wants that. Some won’t; some people might have a more traditional view of what society is. But it’s our duty and our incentive to say why we want a more just society – after all, it’s smarter, more powerful, more fun.
I can’t really claim to have known the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, but after the sad news emerged last week that he had died on 8 April at the age of 94, I was immediately reminded of my one brush with him.
An obituary in the Times described Higgs as “warm, funny and engaging” – and that was exactly the person I encountered when we met at the offices of IOP Publishing in Bristol, UK, in May 2012.
Higgs, then 82, had come to Bristol to speak at the city’s Festival of Ideas and to open the “Dirac–Higgs Science Centre” at Cotham School, where he spent five years as a child while his father was stationed in the city as an engineer for the BBC during the Second World War.
As the centre’s name suggests, Higgs wasn’t the only Nobel laureate to have studied at the school. In its earlier guise as the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College, it had also been attended by Paul Dirac, whose name the young Higgs used to see on Cotham’s honours boards.
“Concerning the propopsed interview with Physics World, I would be happy to do this, but Dr Durrani should be warned that I am a complete layman with regard to the LHC experiments.”
Peter Higgs
Jo Allen, currently head of media at IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, had got wind of his impending visit and decided to ask Higgs if he wanted to visit our offices and be interviewed by Physics World.
Rumours were circulating at the time that physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN were about to announce the discovery of the boson that Higgs had predicted almost five decades earlier – and we knew that an interview with Higgs would be eagerly lapped up.
Higgs, who had long since retired, famously avoided e-mails and rarely – if ever – used his phone. So more in hope than expectation, Allen – who was then head of marketing at IOP Publishing – posted a letter to him at his flat in Edinburgh. A few weeks later, she was thrilled to receive a two-page hand-written letter from him in return. Dated 1 May 2012, it said he was “delighted to accept” our invitation.
“On May 16, I’m committed to being at the Bristol Festival of Ideas,” Higgs wrote. “However, I shall not be returning to Edinburgh until the evening of May 17, because the particle physicists at the University of Bristol have persuaded me to give a talk there (title “My Life as a Boson”) at 4 p.m.”
Higgs added that he was planning to have a coffee at 10 a.m. on 17 May with an old colleague Trevor Priest from Exeter University, who had also been a pupil at Cotham. “So I should be free from about 11 o’clock,” Higgs concluded.
While saying he was “happy” to do an interview with Physics World, he insisted with trademark modesty that “Dr Durrani should be warned that I am a complete layman with regard to the LHC experiments”. Higgs said he would therefore “stick to the CERN line on what constitutes a discovery!”
(Courtesy: Jo Allen, with permission from the estate of Peter Higgs)
In the interview, which you can listen to here, Higgs proved to be charming, open and friendly. He talked about how the Higgs boson came to be so named, what his research interests were, why he eschewed religion – and what he thought the best analogy anyone had ever made for the Higgs boson.
Keen to insist that others should get the credit for their theoretical contributions, he was constantly at pains to refer to the “so-called” Higgs boson. Not one to stand on ceremony, he even remained unfazed when IOP Publishing’s tea lady accidentally barged into the room with her trolley, unaware an interview was going on.
After the interview, we took some photographs with Higgs. He then accepted an offer from Allen to drive him up to Cotham School – on the proviso that no physics was to be discussed during the short journey through Bristol.
I never saw Higgs again. Only now, following his death, do I realize how lucky I am to have met him, however brief that encounter was. And what a lovely hand-written letter to have as a reminder.
Sunday 14 April 2024 will be the third World Quantum Day. An annual celebration “promoting public awareness and understanding of quantum science and technology around the world”, it’s a bottom-up initiative from scientists in more than 65 nations from Algeria to Zambia. The day of 14 April has been chosen because “4.14” are the first three digits of Planck’s constant when rounded up: 4.14 × 10–15 eVs.
The pedant in me is irked a bit by the date. Unless you live in the US, 14 April is surely 14.4 not 4.14. Plus, I’ve always known Planck’s constant as 6.63 × 10–34 Js not 4.14 × 10–15 eVs. Putting that aside, World Quantum Day is a brilliant initiative. These are great times for quantum physics, with burgeoning applications of “quantum 2.0” technology such as quantum computing, sensing and cryptography.
As James McKenzie describes in his recent feature article, overall private investment in quantum tech stood at $1.2bn in 2023 according to the State of Quantum 2024 report. Sure, that figure has dropped sharply since 2022, but up to $50bn in public cash has already been ploughed into quantum science. In fact, 33 countries around the world have government initiatives in quantum technology, including 20 with full-scale national strategies.
One person with an overview of the quantum-technology landscape is Mauro Paternostro from Queens’ University Belfast, editor-in-chief of the IOP Publishing journal Quantum Science and Technology. In a wide-ranging interview to be published next week, he argues that the most advanced quantum technology is actually quantum sensing.
In fact, as Steve Brierley – chief executive of Riverlane – points out in his recent opinion article, quantum computers will only ever be properly useful once we can properly deal with error correction.
But quantum tech holds great promise, including in Africa, where “steady progress” is being made, according to Farai Mazhandu and Mhlambululi Mafu. Output from African researchers in quantum-related fields is relatively small, but with a young, digitally native population and a burgeoning quantum workforce, they believe the continent is “poised to take advantage of the coming ‘second quantum revolution’”.
If all this talk of technology is too much, check out the feature by Philip Ball, who looks at the work of “quantum plumbers”. Meanwhile, Robert P Crease, Jennifer Carter and Gino Elia examine “Wigner’s friend” – a quantum thought experiment that has stumped physicists and philosophers for more than 60 years. And why not try our quantum-physics cryptic word search and see if you can reveal the hidden message.
Finally, do check out the Physics World quantum channel as well as a special collection of quantum-themed research articles, focus issues and ebooks from IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World.
I’ll be honest: the cinema in Bath where I saw the Mongolian-language film If Only I Could Hibernate wasn’t exactly packed to the rafters. There’s probably never going to be a huge audience for a movie about a teenage boy from a hard-up family in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar wanting to enter a physics olympiad.
Written and directed by Zoljargal Purevdash, who apparently excelled at physics herself, the film stars Battsooj Uurtsaikh as Ulzii, who lives with his siblings and mum in a freezing, snow-covered hut in the hilly outskirts of the city. His mum has a drinking problem and goes off to the country with her youngest son to earn some money, leaving Ulzii at home in charge of the rest of the family.
Ulzii’s a typical teenage boy, mucking about with his mates in the snow, getting drunk on cheap spirits, and playing silly games with his other brother and sister. At school, however, he realizes he has a knack for physics and his teacher encourages him to study hard to enter a physics olympiad.
Ulzii enters a regional heat at a local university, where he starts to see that if he studies hard, physics could open the door to a much brighter future. But lacking money to heat his hut and struggling to keep his home in some kind of order, Ulzii gets sidetracked and quits his studies to earn money out in the forests illegally chopping trees.
There’s a stand-off with his teacher who tracks Ulzii down in the countryside and, without going into spoiler-alert territory, the film takes a few twists and turns as Ulzii tries to decide where his future lies: doing physics or chopping trees. There’s a certain amount of dramatic tension to the story here but, had I not been a physicist, I’m not sure I’d have been that bothered about Ulzii’s fate.
On general release at UK and Irish cinemas from 19 April, If Only I Could Hibernate made its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and I do know that real physics competitions, such as the British Physics Olympiad, are popular among school-age students and their teachers. Perhaps, then, there’s scope for another film-maker to explore such competitions but with more added spice, drama and – dare I say – more “real” physics.
Communication skills in all their forms are vital, whether it’s giving a presentation, writing a news article, discussing matters with one of our boards, or working with the team at the secretariat of the European Physical Society (EPS) in Mulhouse.
I also use a lot of project-management skills. The EPS runs several international conferences, is part of European Union projects, and facilitates the work of our volunteer members to promote and support physics and physicists – so there are often a lot of plates to keep spinning at the same time.
I’m grateful for the broad knowledge of physics I acquired during my degree. My PhD was in soft-matter physics on the behaviour of colloids in liquid crystals, but I also occasionally find that specialist knowledge I picked up in areas of science beyond my thesis topic come in handy for understanding matters under discussion.
What do you like best and least about your job?
I really enjoy working with a huge community of physicists and getting to hear them talk with enthusiasm about their research. I particularly enjoy interacting with the EPS’s Young Minds Sections and hearing about the outreach and engagement activities that they organize with EPS support.
My job is also really varied, and no two days are the same. I might be travelling for an editorial meeting, working on administration in Mulhouse, or participating in a planning meeting for a conference – all in the same week. The downside is that I occasionally miss the focused quiet of a meticulous laboratory experiment and I rarely get the luxury of spending an uninterrupted block of time on something.
What do you know today, that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?
I wish I’d known how vital language skills would be. Of course, most science is formally communicated in English and as a native speaker I have an advantage. But everyday life around the world happens in each country’s native language. The EPS is based in Mulhouse, France, very close to the Swiss and German borders, so I use French every day and have to converse in German at least once a week. I’m really grateful for the Erasmus year I spent in Grenoble during my degree for giving me a decent proficiency in French and the confidence to speak a foreign language.
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