Physics World Weekly Podcast

Late last year the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel ( P5) released a report that looks to the future of particle physics in the United States. The report is called Exploring the Quantum …

Jellyfish have a very simple, yet very effective way of swimming – and this has attracted the attention of the aeronautics engineer John Dabiri at the California Institute of Technology. In this epis…

Hydrogen can be used as a carbon-free source of energy in a wide range of applications including home heating, transportation and industry. However, there are significant challenges that must be over…

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and proton beam therapy are two powerful techniques of medical physics. The former gives us real-time images of internal structures of the body, and the latter can de…

SBQuantum is a Canadian company that spun-out of Quebec’s University of Sherbrooke in 2017. It has developed a magnetometer that uses a superposition of quantum states to enhance its sensitivity to m…

The Magellanic Clouds are prominent features of the southern sky that are named after the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. He sailed west from Europe to the Philippines in the early 16th centu…

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features an interview with Henri Lorach, who is part of the team that won the 2023 Physics World Breakthrough of the Year award. The Swiss–French grou…

Random numbers are used in several important technologies including cryptography and numerical simulation. However, large sequences of truly random numbers are notoriously difficult to generate – and…

Paul Howarth is the CEO of UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory and our guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast. He talks about the challenges of getting politicians to engage in long-t…

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features a lively discussion about our Top 10 Breakthroughs of 2023. Physics World editors discuss the merits of research on a broad range of topics i…

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at two very different and very difficult challenges — how to build a quantum computer that can overcome the debilitating noise that plagues curr…

Our guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast is the biomedical ethicist Vasiliki Rahimzadeh, who along with colleagues has called for the commercial space industry to adopt ethical p…

Astronomers are becoming increasingly concerned about the growing number of satellites that are lighting up the night sky by reflecting sunlight to Earth. In 2022, the prototype communications satell…

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features a wide-ranging interview with Dave Newbold, who is Executive Director, National Laboratories Science and Technologies for the UK’s Science an…

Some of the biggest mysteries of physics – including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the origin of the universe – are in the sights of cosmologists and astroparticle physicists.

In th…

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features two pioneers in their fields.

Margaret Gardel is a biophysicist who is setting up a new National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center a…

While quantum computers show great promise for the future, today’s processors are small and noisy – and this makes it very difficult to do meaningful quantum calculations right now. To address this p…

Nuclear fusion is what powers the Sun, and if we could harness it here on Earth it would be a significant source of clean, carbon free energy. Fusion power plants were first proposed in the 1940s and…

It has been a very exciting week in the world of physics. The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics were announced on Tuesday and on Wednesday we learned that this year’s chemistry prize has a …

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast looks at how studying the deep-ocean floor could help scientists who are scanning the cosmos for signs of intelligent life. Our guest is Pablo Sobron …