Skip to main content

Physics World September 2020

Physics World September 2020

100 seconds to midnight: Doomsday Clocks ticks closer to disaster

Every year members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists meet to decide the time on the Doomsday Clock – a notional device created by physicists after the Second World War to surmise how close the world is to destruction. With the clock set in January 2020 at 100 seconds to midnight – the furthest forward it’s ever been – Rachel Brazil lifts the lid on how and why the time gets picked. Elsewhere in the issue, Sam Vennin shows how scientific modelling is critical to many aspects of medicine, including the spread of viruses, while Kate Ravilious finds out how COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions changed the climate, and Sean Ryan and Veronica Benson look at how to close the skills gap in physics.

Expand to full screen, bookmark pages or download to read offline using the icons beneath the screen. You can access the videos and audio clips if you read the emagazine online. Read it now


Or you can read selected content from the September 2020 issue of Physics World here

Chaoyang Lu interview

A quantum revolution

Graphene Hackathon prototype opinion

Hacking a path to innovation

Shanghai air pollution feature

Has the COVID-19 lockdown changed Earth’s climate?

Illustration of the Doomsday Clock feature

100 seconds to midnight

Samson Rogers with the Cellular Highways prototype opinion

First-hand insights

Linn Hobbs opinion

Linn Hobbs' material world

Model for microcirculatory blood flow feature

How modelling is transforming medicine

iCub robot review

Build a bot

Proxima film still review

Bonds beyond the bounds of Earth

Stock image of engineering apprenticeship careers

Closing the skills gap

Illustration of social distancing in a city park lateral thoughts

Lattice layabout in the park

Want even more from Physics World?

Get more from Physics World without waiting for the next issue. The same great journalism, but delivered to you daily. Read updates on the latest research as soon as they happen and access 20 years of online content, organised across 13 dedicated scientific areas. Visit the homepage to start exploring.

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors