Physics World


Physics World is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world. It is an international monthly magazine covering all areas of physics, pure and applied, and is aimed at physicists in research, industry, physics outreach, and education worldwide.

Overview

The magazine was launched in 1988 by IOP Publishing Ltd, under the founding editorship of Philip Campbell. The magazine is sent free to members of the Institute of Physics, who can access a digital edition of the magazine; selected articles can be read by anyone for free online. It was redesigned in September 2005 and has an audited circulation of just under 35000.
The current editor is Matin Durrani. Others on the team are Michael Banks, Louise Mayor, Margaret Harris and Tushna Commissariat. Hamish Johnston is the editor of the magazine's website physicsworld.com. James Dacey is multimedia projects editor.
Alongside the print and online magazine, Physics World produces films and two podcasts. The Physics World Stories podcast is hosted by Andrew Glester and is produced monthly. The Physics World Weekly podcast is hosted by James Dacey.

Breakthrough of the Year

The magazine makes two awards each year. These are the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year and the Physics World Book of the Year, which have both been awarded annually since 2009.
;Top 10 works and winners of the Breakthrough of the Year
2009: "to August Jonathan Home and colleagues at NIST for unveiled the first small-scale device that could be described as a complete "quantum computer"
2010: "to ALPHA and the ASACUSA group at CERN for have created new ways of controlling antiatoms of hydrogen"
2011: Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada for using the technique of "weak measurement" to track the average paths of single photons passing through a Young's double-slit experiment.
2012: "to the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider".
2013: "the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory for making the first observations of high-energy cosmic neutrinos".
2014: "to the landing by the European Space Agency of the Philae on 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko", which was the first time a probe had been landed on a comet
2015: "for being the first to achieve the simultaneous quantum teleportation of two inherent properties of a fundamental particle – the photon".
2016: "to LIGO's gravitational wave discovery".
2017: "to First multimessenger observation of a neutron-star merger".
2018: "Discovery that led to the development of “twistronics”, which is a new and very promising technique for adjusting the electronic properties of graphene by rotating adjacent layers of the material."
2019: "First direct observation of a black hole and its ‘shadow’"
;Top 10 books and the Book of the Year winner
A blue ribbon appears against the winner.
2009: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
2010: The Edge of Physics: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology by Anil Ananthaswamy
2011: ' by Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University
  • Engineering Animals – Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean
  • Measure of the Earth: the Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped the World – Larrie Ferreiro
  • – Brian Greene
  • Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema – David Kirby
  • – Lawrence Krauss
  • Rising Force: the Magic of Magnetic Levitation – James Livingston
  • Modernist Cuisine – Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet
  • The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality – Richard Panek
  • Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout – Lauren Redniss
  • Hindsight and Popular Astronomy – Alan Whiting
2012: How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher – Joel Achenbach
  • The Science Magpie: A Hoard of Fascinating Facts – Simon Flynn
  • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation – Jon Gertner
  • Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution – John Gribbin
  • The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters – Mark Henderson
  • Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos – Peter M Hoffmann
  • How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture and the Quantum Revival – David Kaiser
  • How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog – Chad Orzel
  • Pricing the Future: Finance, Physics and the 300-Year Journey to the Black–Scholes Equation – George Szpiro
  • Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything – Margaret Wertheim
2013: Physics in Mind: a Quantum View of the Brain by the biophysicist Werner Loewenstein
  • The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body – Frances Ashcroft
  • – Sean M. Carroll
  • Hans Christian Ørsted: Reading Nature's Mind – Dan Charly Christensen
  • Churchill's Bomb: a Hidden History of Science, War and Politics – Graham Farmelo
  • Physics in Mind: a Quantum View of the Brain – Werner Loewenstein
  • J Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center – Ray Monk
  • The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets – Simon Singh
  • – Lee Smolin
  • The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics – Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky
  • Weird Life: the Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own – David Toomey
2014: Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape our Man-made World - Mark Miodownik
  • Wizards, Aliens & Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction - Charles Adler
  • Serving the Reich: the Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler - Philip Ball
  • Five Billion Years of Solitude: the Search for Life Among the Stars - Lee Billings
  • - Kate Brown
  • Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment - Jon Butterworth
  • Sonic Wonderland: a Scientific Odyssey of Sound - Trevor Cox
  • The Perfect Theory: a Century of Geniuses and the Battle Over General Relativity - Pedro G Ferreira
  • Stuff Matters: the Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World - Mark Miodownik
  • Einstein and the Quantum: the Quest of the Valiant Swabian - Douglas Stone
  • Island on Fire: the Extraordinary Story of Laki, the Volcano that Turned Eighteenth-century Europe - Dark Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe
2015: Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: a Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing and the Beginning of Everything - Amanda Gefter
  • Life on the Edge: the Coming of Age of Quantum Biology - Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden
  • Physics on Your Feet: Ninety Minutes of Shame but a PhD for the Rest of Your Life - Dmitry Budker and Alexander Sushkov
  • Half-Life: the Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy - Frank Close
  • Beyond: Our Future in Space - Chris Impey
  • The Water Book: the Extraordinary Story of Our Most Ordinary Substance - Alok Jha
  • Monsters: the Hindenburg Disaster and the Birth of Pathological Technology - Ed Regis
  • Tunnel Visions: the Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider - Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb
  • The Copernicus Complex: the Quest for our Cosmic Significance - Caleb Scharf
  • Atoms Under the Floorboards: the Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home - Chris Woodford
2016: Why String Theory? - Joseph Conlon
  • The Jazz of Physics: the Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe - Stephon Alexander
  • Storm in a Teacup: the Physics of Everyday Life - Helen Czerski
  • Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex - Michael Hiltzik
  • Strange Glow: the Story of Radiation - Timothy Jorgensen
  • Cosmos: the Infographic Book of Space - Stuart Lowe and Chris North
  • Spooky Action at a Distance: the Phenomenon that Reimagines Space and Time - George Musser
  • Goldilocks and the Water Bears: the Search for Life in the Universe - Louisa Preston
  • Reality Is Not What It Seems: the Journey to Quantum Gravity - Carlo Rovelli
  • The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin
2017: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story - Angela Saini
  • Marconi: the Man Who Networked the World by Marc Raboy
  • Hidden Figures: the Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly
  • The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel
  • Scale: the Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies by Geoffrey West
  • Not A Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent and Utterly Mangle Science by Dave Levitan
  • Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini
  • Mapping the Heavens: the Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos by Priyamvada Natarajan
  • We Have No Idea by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson
  • The Secret Science of Superheroes edited by Ed. Mark Lorch and Andy Miah
  • The Death of Expertise: the Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols
2018: Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different - Philip Ball
  • Treknology: the Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drives by Ethan Siegel
  • Ad Astra: an Illustrated Guide to Leaving the Planet by Dallas Campbell
  • Exact Thinking in Demented Times: the Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by Karl Sigmund
  • Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different by Philip Ball
  • The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
  • Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
  • The Dialogues: Conversations About the Nature of the Universe by Clifford V Johnson
  • When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11: Or How to Explain Quantum Physics with Heavy Metal by Philip Moriarty
  • What is Real: the Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker
  • Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine by Hannah Fry
2019': The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information are Solving the Mystery of Life'' - Paul Davies
;Top 10 Favourite Pictures of the Year
2015: