A physicist out of academia

Bridging the Academia-Industry divide: Academics reach out!

Debate has persisted over the raison d’être of the Information Systems (IS) discipline. There are many facets to this complex issue, including two closely linked ones, namely rigour versus relevance, and the relationship between academics and professionals. While there has been much introspection from IS researchers as to the apparent state of play, there has been no empirical research conducte...

A Physicist Looks at Biology

A mature physicist, acquainting himself for the first time with the problems of biology, is puzzled by the circumstance that there are no "absolute phenomena" in biology. Everything is time bound and space bound. The animal or plant or micro-organism he is working with is but a link in an evolutionary chain of changing forms, none of which has any permanent validity. Even the molecular species ...

Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist

The most dramatic developments in theoretical physics in the next millennium are likely to come when we make progress on so far unresolved foundational questions. In this essay I consider two of the deepest problems confronting us, the measurement problem in quantum theory and the problem of relating consciousness to the rest of physics. I survey some recent promising ideas on possible solution...

A Call for the Structured Physicist Report.

Reclaiming academia from post-academia.

I s nanoscience the “first full embodiment of post-academic science”? Have many of the traditional core values of publicly funded university science been eroded to the point where they are now “part of a scientific mythology”? And is it “morally bankrupt” to draw a distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science? These claims, which were all made in a recent commentary in Nature Nanotechnology...