How to fund physics using the wisdom of crowds

05/19/15 • 9 min

Doing physics research costs money and today most of it comes from government funding agencies. Grant applications are reviewed by expert scientists and funding policies are shaped by bureaucrats and politicians. This inevitably leads to mountains of paperwork, and Jackson argues that this wastes valuable time that could be spent on actually doing research.

His solution is for physicists to appeal directly to the public for research money by using Fiat Physica, which he launched late last year. Jackson tells physicsworld.com editor Hamish Johnston about how crowd-funding works and describes some of the projects that have used his service. He also explains how Fiat Physica will avoid paying for crackpot research on topics such as perpetual motion.

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The masters of antimatter

Physics World reporter Tushna Commissariat recently visited the ALPHA antimatter experiment at CERN and caught up with its spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst. In this podcast, they talk about the perfect recipe for making antihydrogen, they discuss dealing with the fact and fiction that surrounds the field, and reveal the everyday realties of being an antimatter architect.

Housed within CERN’s Antimatter Factory, which includes the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) (the source that provides low-energy antiprotons), ALPHA and the other antimatter experiments – ACE, AEGIS, ATRAP and ASACUSA – all study the many puzzling facets of antimatter. From its interaction with regular matter to the biological effects of antiprotons to how it falls under gravity, the various experimental teams hope that all will be revealed about antimatter’s true nature in the coming years.

In particular, the ALPHA experiment – which won the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year in 2010 for trapping 38 antihydrogen atoms for about one-fifth of a second – is gearing up to scrutinize the stuff, as it will begin an experimental run this summer with the newly updated ALPHA2 device, which uses lasers to spectroscopically study the internal structure of the antihydrogen atom.

In addition to finding out how exactly one makes and holds a few thousand atoms of the most volatile stuff in the universe, listen to this podcast to find out why Hangst thinks he has the coolest job in the world and what it is like to visit the one place in the universe where, as far as we know, antimatter is actively being produced.

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Going beyond 'shut up and calculate'

As a teenager, the science journalist Amanda Gefter had a “conscientious objection” to mathematics. She often slept through her high school class on meteorology – a class that, incidentally, she only took because she wanted to avoid physics – and when she went to university, she studied creative writing and philosophy rather than science. At the same time, though, Gefter was also reading pretty much every popular-physics book she could find, as part of a private quest in which she and her father sought to understand what science tells us about the nature of reality.

One of the most important figures in Gefter’s quest was the late John Wheeler, who popularized the term “black hole” and also wrote extensively about physics and philosophy. Wheeler’s ideas included the “participatory universe”, which he represented with cartoons like the one shown above. In the cartoon, an observer looks out upon the universe, but its perspective can never be totally independent because it is, itself, a part of the universe it is observing.

In this podcast, you’ll hear Gefter talking about Wheeler, the role of observers and the complex relationship between mathematics and meaning.