The most popular Physics Today articles of 2018 Free

The year is nearly over, and I’m exhausted. At times during the whirlwind that was 2018, I felt determined to dig into the news and make sense of the big issues of the day. At other times I just wanted an escape from reality. Judging from the most popular stories on our website this year, many Physics Today readers felt similarly. They wanted to learn about important problems in their field, such as gender inequality and ineffective lab courses. Yet they also flocked to a primer on the rheology of a breakfast pastry.

Here is a roundup of the PT website’s most-read articles of 2018, both from the magazine and exclusively online. The top-10 list in the box includes only articles that were published since last December’s summary, but my recap also includes older stories that proved popular this year.

Gender matters. Much of this year’s media coverage of women in the workplace has focused on sexual harassment and misconduct—and for good reason. But it’s also important to zoom out and examine other, more innocuous yet still serious behaviors that can drive talented women away from a field, particularly an overwhelmingly male one like physics. In Physics Today’s March issue, Jennifer Blue, Adrienne Traxler, and Ximena Cid showed how both explicit and implicit biases persistently plague women pursuing science careers. The authors dedicated the second half of their piece to resources that can help individual physicists and entire departments minimize those biases and create welcoming environments for all students and faculty.

The story that best encapsulated the need for introspection was Melinda Baldwin’s analysis of the famously playful personality of Richard Feynman on what would have been the legendary physicist’s 100th birthday. Yes, wrote PT’s resident historian, Feynman did hilarious things like picking locks at Los Alamos and smuggling a peacock into a friend’s bedroom, but at times his behavior was “misogynistic even by the standards of its era.” Baldwin concluded that he was “a man whose faith in his own brilliance could veer into self-absorption and the mistreatment of others, particularly those whom Feynman didn’t consider his equals.”

Physics Today will continue to cover the important issues of bias and harassment in the physical sciences. Our latest issue includes a commentary by astrophysicist Emma Chapman on sexual misconduct in academia.

Other big issues in physics. Physics Today readers weren’t afraid to explore other complex issues relevant to their work. In the January issue, Natasha Holmes and Carl Wieman explained why many college physics lab courses are ineffective. They’ve found that students taking lab classes to complement their learning in lecture courses do no better than those who take only the lectures. Holmes and Wieman encouraged professors to design labs that allow students to make decisions on their own and that provide enough time to reflect on those decisions and their outcomes.

Readers also considered the uncertain future of fundamental physics. In her provocative 2018 book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder attributed the lack of progress in moving beyond the standard model to an overreliance on ideas such as supersymmetry, WIMP dark matter, and string theory—theories that are simple and elegant yet continue to lack observational support. In a book review for the September issue, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek praised the book but challenged part of its premise, arguing that it’s really self-satisfaction at the root of the problems Hossenfelder laid out. “We need more beautiful ideas, not fewer,” he wrote.

Readers also dug into thought-provoking articles on scientists’ intellectual property rights and the flaws of a scientific grant system that requires the formulation of hypotheses.

Lighter fare. A theory of everything is tantalizing, but so are the 18 to 32 alternating thin layers of dough and fat that constitute a croissant. As Braulio Macias Rodriguez and Alejandro Marangoni explained in their January Quick Study, the quality of the distinctive pastry depends largely on the rheological properties of the fat used in baking. “A fat that is too hard can break during lamination and can also rupture the dough. A fat that is too soft will absorb into the dough,” they explained. To help avoid an epidemic of “dense, crumbly, soulless” croissants, Rodriguez and Marangoni presented deformation and x-ray scattering analyses to identify the perfect fats for the job.

In addition, there’s always hunger for a good Albert Einstein anecdote. Late last year David Topper and Dwight Vincent described how in 1952 the aging physicist took a break from his pursuit of a unified field theory to help a California high schooler with her geometry homework. Einstein mailed a handwritten reply that provided clues but not the solution. The media jumped on the incident, complete with reports that Einstein had done the math wrong. The frenzy ended as most have over the years: with the realization that Einstein was right.

Readers also enjoyed diving into some archival gems, including a 2017 article on Feynman’s high school calculus notebook and a 2016 quantitative analysis of procrastination based on the submission habits of NSF grant applicants. It’s not too late to check out the article for yourself.

A story with something for everyone. On its face, Ashley Smart’s August feature article was about the complex behavior of pristine liquid water chilled far below its freezing point. But you didn’t need to understand isothermal compressibility or free-energy calculations to appreciate a story that hit on so many truths about the way science is done. Due to a disagreement that became personal, a lack of transparency, and a troublesome snippet of code, a discrepancy that could have been cleared up in a matter of months led to a seven-year cold war that paralyzed a field. Smart’s tale about the scientific process in all its messy glory was Physics Today’s most popular story of the year.

Andrew Grant is Physics Today’s online editor. He encourages readers to email story tips to [email protected].