Physics World

• 1. Introduction

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  Physics World launched in 1988 with Philip Campbell as its founding editor, and it has spent nearly four decades turning the most demanding science on Earth into something a general reader can follow. It is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world, and it reaches physicists in research, industry, education, and outreach across every continent. The circulation sits at just under 35,000 audited copies. Members of the Institute of Physics receive it free; selected articles are open to anyone online.

  What does a magazine do when its subject keeps rewriting itself? Physics does not stand still. The years since 1988 have brought gravitational wave detectors, Higgs bosons, topological insulators, quantum computers, and the first photograph of a black hole. Every issue of Physics World has had to absorb these shifts and translate them without losing the thread. The story of how the magazine does that is also the story of what modern physics looks like from the inside.

• 2. The Magazine's Shape

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  Matin Durrani now holds the editor's chair that Philip Campbell occupied at the launch in 1988. The editorial team includes Michael Banks as news editor, Tushna Commissariat and Sarah Teah as features editors, and Hamish Johnston, Margaret Harris, and Tami Freeman covering the online operation. That division between print and web reflects a structural change that the magazine absorbed after its redesign in September 2005.

  The magazine covers all areas of physics, pure and applied, in a monthly cycle. Alongside the print and digital editions, the operation now produces films and two podcasts. The Physics World Stories podcast is hosted by Andrew Glester and goes out monthly. The Physics World Weekly podcast is hosted by James Dacey. Members of the Institute of Physics can access the full digital edition at no extra cost, while the print copy travels to just under 35,000 verified recipients worldwide.

• 3. Breakthrough of the Year

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  In 2009, the magazine began naming a Physics World Breakthrough of the Year, and it has made the award every year since. The 2009 winner went to August Jonathan Home and colleagues at NIST for a small-scale device that could be described as a complete quantum computer. That was the starting point for a sequence of annual judgments that reads, in hindsight, as a map of where physics was moving.

  The 2012 award recognised the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN for their joint discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the Large Hadron Collider. The year 2016 went to LIGO for its gravitational wave discovery. In 2017, the first multimessenger observation of a neutron star merger took the prize. The 2019 winner was the Event Horizon Telescope for the first direct observation of a black hole and its shadow.

  The 2022 breakthrough was the deflection of a near-Earth asteroid by the DART satellite. A year later, in 2023, the award went to a brain-computer interface that allowed a paralysed man to walk. The 2024 winner recognised quantum error correction with 48 logical qubits, and independently, performance below the surface code threshold. Each year the magazine assembles a top ten alongside the winner, capturing the texture of a field that rarely moves in a single direction at once.

• 4. Physics and the Body

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  Across several Breakthrough of the Year top-ten lists, one recurring thread is physics applied directly to the human body. In 2015, a portable battlefield MRI came out of the lab. In 2017, particle-free quantum communication was achieved in a laboratory setting. In 2019, neuroprosthetic devices that translate brain activity into speech appeared in the top ten alongside a wearable MEG scanner used with children for the first time.

  The 2021 list included restoring speech in a paralysed man, and the 2023 winner itself described a brain-computer interface that let a paralysed man walk. The 2022 top ten recorded the first-in-human application of FLASH proton therapy. A 2024 entry described modelling lung cells to personalise radiotherapy. What the list shows, year after year, is that the boundary between fundamental physics and clinical medicine is not fixed.

• 5. Book of the Year

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  The Book of the Year award, running alongside the Breakthrough prize since 2009, tracks a parallel conversation about how physics gets explained to the public. Graham Farmelo's biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, took the inaugural prize in 2009. Lawrence Krauss won in 2011 for Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, representing Case Western Reserve University. David Kaiser from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won in 2012 for How the Hippies Saved Physics.

  Angela Saini's Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story won in 2017, a book whose subject sits as much in the sociology of science as in the physics itself. Philip Ball's Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different took the 2018 award. Paul Davies won in 2019 for The Demon in the Machine. The range of winners shows that the magazine does not define physics narrowly; history, biography, gender, and epistemology all qualify when the book is strong enough.

• 6. Watching the Frontier

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  The Breakthrough of the Year top-ten lists function as something close to a real-time audit of the field. The 2011 list included Aephraim M. Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto using weak measurement to track the average paths of single photons through a Young's interference experiment, that year's overall winner. The same year's list also noted a complete quantum computer on a single chip and the first detection of Pauli blocking in ultracold fermionic gases appeared in the 2021 list.

  Some entries anticipate technologies that took years to mature. A room-temperature maser entered the top ten in 2012. Hydrogen sulphide was named the warmest ever superconductor at 203 K in 2015. The first room-temperature superconductor appeared in the 2020 list. The 2018 list included the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change, placing a policy document inside a physics award framework. Twistronics, which adjusts the electronic properties of graphene by rotating adjacent layers, won the 2018 breakthrough prize, and expanding twistronics to photons appeared in the 2020 top ten.