Physics in a New Era An Overview (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Introduction
Introduction
Pages 9-16
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From page 9... ...
In 1947, Bell Laboratories physicists working on a new amplifier built the first prototype transistor; subsequent exploration of semiconductors led to a dramatically new atomic understanding of condensed matter physics. That new atomic understanding, in turn, fed back into the massive industry that has placed microelectronics at the center of today's economy.
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From page 10... ...
One way to cast a first glance over the landscape is to think of the different distance scales of nature. A few years ago, Sebastian Junger wrote A Perfect Storm, a moving account of a few small boats caught in the harsh fall Atlantic during the extraordinarily violent storm of October 1991.
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From page 11... ...
At this scale there are the observable objects, the so-called elementary particles, that leave tracks in cloud chambers, bubble chambers, or the vast electronic detectors that populate Fermilab, SLAC, and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
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From page 12... ...
Using electromagnetic fields to flip nuclei led to nuclear magnetic resonance, a technique that definitively sorts different substances one from the other. It has become not only a key instrument for chemistry and biochemistry but also, under the name MRI, perhaps the single most powerful medical diagnostic advance of the last half-century.
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From page 13... ...
For in this domain researchers are seeking order at the size of planets and stars: What are their dynamics, how do they evolve, how are chemical elements produced, how do stars exchange mass-energy with the surrounding interstellar media? Astrophysicists continue into the domain of cosmic sizes beyond planets and stars as they confront the zoo of novel phenomena discovered over the last decades: gas disks, cosmic jets, pulsars, quasars, black holes, gamma-ray bursts.
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From page 14... ...
Soon to come are new uses for these biomaterials in molecular motors, DNA computers, and biological elastics produced in macroscopic quantities. Reflecting on the new relation between physics and biology, Harold varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIHy, summed up some of the key directions for future research: an improved use of micro-manipulative methods like optical tweezers, a new and vastly more sophisticated form of data analysis closer to the work astrophysicists undertake in their deep space searches than to traditional biological research, ancl, finally, a biophysical attack on the signaling pathways by which cells tell each other how to respond a task that will draw on the experience physicists have with the feedback mechanisms of complex machines.
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From page 15... ...
In the absence of nuclear testing, modeling the realistic characteristics of nuclear weapons is key to reliability of the arsenal. In addition to stockpile stewardship, the reduction of the global nuclear danger involves nonproliferation and arms control and the restoration of environments damaged by the production and testing of nuclear weapons.
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From page 16... ...
16 PHYSICS 1N A NEW ERA the links between topics studied in the unlversky/ at national labo[atorles/ and in lndus~lal sehlngs. And we must create modes of lnternaBonal cooperatlon that will make rational and cost-e~ctlve use of facllltles too large and complex for any single nation to construct and operate.
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