Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Condensed matter is one of the largest and most prolific areas of physics, but it looms small in the public imagination. In this Comment, historian Joseph D. Martin argues that its relationship with technology might be to blame.
50 years ago Roger Penrose described a set of aperiodic tilings, now named after him, that have fascinated artists, mathematicians and physicists ever since.
Erica Goldman, Director of Day One and Policy Entrepreneurship at the Federation of American Scientists, discusses how scientists can go from communicating science to advocating for science and doing policy entrepreneurship.
Access to quantum computers has been democratized by the availability of cloud services from commercial providers, but the numbers of qubits users can exploit have remained modest, limited by noise and errors. What are these qubits used for and what can we expect next?
90 years after Eugene Wigner predicted the formation of an ordered electron state, direct observations of a lattice of electrons in bilayer graphene not only verify the existence of a Wigner crystal but find unexpected physics.
Petros Koumoutsakos argues that the intellectual space between AI and computational science is home to exciting opportunities for scientific discovery.
Doing physics and being a physicist is shaped by complex social factors. This month, we launch a Collection to explore the social and historical context of physics research.
In 1931, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung took on an unusual patient, the brilliant young physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Arthur I. Miller tells the story of their friendship, how they impacted each other’s work, and reflects on creativity.
Many everyday English words have a double meaning, being used as physics jargon. This month, we share some of our favourite stories of how physics terms came to be.
Science and society are inextricably entangled, but the discussion of social issues in optics and photonics is, at best, treated as peripheral to the field. A group of researchers, technicians, administrative staff, and clinical liaisons share how they came together to start a conversation recognizing these oft-disregarded issues.
Good writing is about having something interesting and original to say. Generative AI tools might provide technical help, but they are no substitute for your unique perspective.
Pietro Barabaschi, Director General of ITER, calls for measures and incentives to carefully document the entire research process, including dead ends and failures, instead of reporting just the successful final results.
Mónica Bello, Curator and Head of Arts at CERN talks about the programmes that have been fostering the dialogue between artists and physicists for over a decade with the aim of exploring the cultural significance of fundamental research.
In an age of expensive experiments and hype around new data-driven methods, researchers understandably want to ensure they are gleaning as much insight from their data as possible. Rachel C. Kurchin argues that there is still plenty to be learned from older approaches without turning to black boxes.
For Nature Reviews journals, the simplistic notion of high–low impact measured by citation-based metrics is inadequate. Instead, we should understand who is using these journals, and how.
The science of food is strongly connected to chemistry and sensory science, but chewing and swallowing is also governed by soft matter physics as it involves processing materials that are deformable, easily fractured or that melt at low temperatures. What can physics tell us about these processes, and what questions remain?
