Physics in the 20Th Century Centennial Special: by Curt Suplee; Edited by Judy R
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Celebrate a Century of Physics 1899-1999 Join the American Physical Society for our Centennial Meeting This historic meeting combines the March and April general meetings of the Society with participation by all APS Units. This will be the largest physics meeting ever held. ✹ You won’t want to miss it! Special Physics Exhibits, Plenary Sessions, Festival Events, Gala Dinner, Awards, and Reunions are only a small part of this exciting event. ✹ For more Centennial information, please contact the APS at 301.209.3265 or Toll-free 1.888.256.EMC2 • Email: [email protected] • www.aps.org/centennial Atlanta, Georgia March 20-26, 1999 Physics in the 20th Century Centennial Special: By Curt Suplee; Edited by Judy R. Franz and John S. Rigden Take $100 Off a New Life APS Membership The discoveries and inventions of physicists in this century have revolutionized modern life. One hundred years ago, scientists questioned the very existence of In celebration of the Centennial, the APS atoms and knew almost nothing about the cosmos. Today, physicists can arrange Committee on Membership has initiated a $100 individual atoms on a surface and make an image of the result, and have begun to discount off new life memberships between March unravel the history of time and the universe. 1, 1999 and February 29, 2000. A life membership, In this book, Curt Suplee, science writer and editor at The Washington Post, documents one of the most remarkable flowerings of knowledge in human history. which ordinarily costs 15 times the regular current The extraordinary illustrations focus mainly on the remarkable images—from the annual dues rate, includes a free life membership in atomic to the cosmic scale made possible by the instruments of advanced physics. one dues-requiring unit. Also included are photographs of experimental equipment—massive particle colliders To take advantage of this special offer, look for are beautiful in their own right—and pioneering inventions. This stunning volume is sponsored by the APS and the AIP on the occasion of the details in your next invoice renewal packet. The of- centennial of the American Physical Society. fer is not valid on an existing or previously purchased You will want a copy on your own coffee table and another for your parents and Life membership. Questions may be directed to the children who have always wondered why you find physics so fascinating. Now they APS Membership Department at 301-209-3280 or will know! [email protected]. Alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. 225 illustrations, 125 AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY in full color, 224 pages, 9 1/4 x 11” US $49.50 100100 100100 Can $75.00 TAKE APS LIFE Special APS Member $100 OFF MEMBERSHIP Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratory price $29.95 Time-exposure photograph of a nuclear fusion experiment. (at the Centennial only) A NEW TODAY! More Things in Heaven and Earth: A Celebration of Physics at the Millennium Physical Review Focus Benjamin Bederson, New York University (ed.) A century of unparalleled scientific http://publish.aps.org/FOCUS/ and technological change, mostly fu- eled by the discoveries of physicists, draws to a close simultaneously with the beginning of the second century Selections from Physical Review Letters explained for of the APS and the onset of the third millennium. To acknowledge and cel- students and researchers in all fields of physics. ebrate these milestones, the Editor, with the assistance of the Editorial Board consisting of Kurt Gottfried, Follow developments in all Walter Kohn, Eugen Merzbacher, Myriam Sarachik, Andrew Sessler, areas of physics with and George Field asked some preemi- Physical Review Focus, nent physicists to create a contemporary portrait of their sub- where you’ll find one or two fields, highlighting achievements, articles per week explaining current vitality, and likely directions. The resulting 54 articles give us a unique opportunity to celebrate this PRL papers in a brief, easy- century of physics. The volume is published to coincide with the APS to-read style. For under- Centennial meeting in Atlanta, simultaneously as both a supplement to the March 1999 Reviews of Modern Physics and as a hard-cover book graduate physics majors, from Springer-Verlag New York. Inc. PR Focus can serve as an Among the authors are 15 Nobel Laureates and over 40 members of the National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of excellent introduction to Engineering. The articles, often personal in tone, are written at the level current research topics. of departmental colloquia. Some are intended to be broad but not ency- clopedic, while others are presented as “case studies” focusing on particularly fascinating illustrations of specific topics. Major sections in- LISTSERVE: To receive one-paragraph introduc- clude: historical perspectives: particle physics; astrophysics; nuclear tions to Focus stories each week by physics; atomic, molecular and optical physics; condensed-matter phys- e-mail, send the message “subscribe ics; statistical physics and fluids; plasma physics; chemical physics; and focus” to [email protected]. the applications of physics within other fields. Together, the articles com- bine to paint an illuminating and sweeping canvas of a remarkable time in science and civilization. See the APS and/or Springer websites (http:/ /www.springer-ny.com) for more information. 1999/Approx. 800 pp., 72 Illus (10 Color)/Hardcover/$75.00 (Tent.) ISBN 0-387-98662-6 Image credits: Special pre-publication offer (40% off) for APS members Quark-gluon plasma—Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Crab nebula—© Malin/Pasachoff/ PRICE FOR APS MEMBERS: $45.00 (Offer expires March 20, 1999) Caltech; Levitated drop of molten aluminum oxide—Shankar Krishnan, Containerless Research, APS Centennial Meeting price $49.50 (March 21-April 30, 1999) Inc.; Northern Lights—Jan Curtis, University of TO ORDER Alaska at Fairbanks (include promotion code S620 to ensure your APS-member discount): CALL 800-SPRINGER or FAX 201-348-4505 E-MAIL [email protected] WRITE Springer-Verlag, Dept. S635, PO Box 2485 The American Physical Society Secaucus, NJ 07096-2485 10 Physics News in 1998 Joost Wintterlin thinks this is the first time that a kinetic description of a chemical tions. Such vortex studies may be relevant to the question of how airplanes stall, reaction was achieved based only on the statistics of the underlying atomic pro- and also may help explain why certain insects can fly with great efficiency. (A. cesses. (J. Wintterlin et al., Science 278, 1931, 1997.) Belmonte, H. Eisenberg, E. Moses, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 345, 1998.) THE DURATION OF SONOLUMINESCENT PULSES has now been deter- TURBULENCE IN SOAP FILMS. Researchers at Los Alamos National Labo- mined and is independent of wavelength. Sonoluminescence (SL) is the clocklike ratory have made quantitative measurements of the velocity and vorticity fields, emission of light pulses from a bubble that is trapped in a fluid by an acoustic as well as the fluctuating thickness, throughout an entire soap film. Rather than field. (See PHYSICS TODAY, September 1994, page 22.) Until 1997, researchers using the standard single-point probes, they could only establish an upper limit for the width of SL flashes, not their actual added tiny, highly reflective titanium diox- duration. But then, researchers at the University of Stuttgart adapted the tech- ide particles to the fluid, let the film flow nique of time-correlated single-photon counting to SL and announced that SL through a comb and snapped pictures of the pulses for their bubbles lasted from about 50 ps up to more than 250 ps, and resulting two-dimensional turbulence every presented evidence that the length of the pulse for a given bubble is identical in 160–300 ms with a digital camera. The ac- the red and the UV parts of the spectrum. Applying the Stuttgart technique, re- companying composite image shows—for a searchers at the University of California, Los Angeles were able to confirm the 12 mm square region of soap film located 1 result, and found that the flash width varies by less than 3 ps from 200 nm to 800 cm downstream from a comb—the film’s nm. The different pulse widths for different bubbles depend on the composition thickness fluctuation as the surface eleva- False-color image of turbulence in a 30- of the bubble’s gas and on the intensity of the emitted light. The color-indepen- tion (greatly exaggerated); the vorticity as micron-thick soap film. (Courtesy Los dence of the pulse duration rules out the “adiabatic heating” hypothesis, because color, with red and blue representing high Alamos National Lab.) blackbody radiation should last longer at the longer wavelengths. Both groups positive and negative values; and the stream- think that bremsstrahlung remains a viable mechanism for producing the light. line pattern as textured lines. Although the film was clearly compressible, the (B. Gompf et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 1405, 1997; Hiller et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1090, researchers found the statistics of enstrophy (vorticity squared) to be in rough 1998.) agreement with the theory for incompressible turbulence. (M. Rivera et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1417, 1998.) A LARGE MAGNETOCALORIC EFFECT has been found in certain materi- als containing gadolinium, reported Vitalij Pecharsky (Ames Laboratory, Iowa ECONOPHYSICS is the application of physics techniques to economics State University), Robert Shull (National In- problems. Like a collection of electrons or a group of water molecules, the stitute of Standards and Technology, world economy is a complex system of individual members (in this case, Gaithersburg, Maryland) and Carl Zimm (As- countries) that interact with each other. In a situation that many experimen- tronautics Corp of America) in separate talks tal physicists would surely envy, the world economy produces an incredible at the March 1998 meeting of the American amount of data—one year of US stock-exchange transactions results in 24 Physical Society in Los Angeles.