Comment

Scientists have long preferred the simplest possible explanation of their data. More recently, a worrying trend to favour unnecessarily complex interpretations has taken hold.

Methods for studying Bose–Einstein condensation in ultracold gases have been under development for over 40 years. A highly sophisticated suite of techniques has emerged from rapid technological advances that show no sign of slowing down.

Having long played the role of collaborators with other, more renowned, institutions, historically disadvantaged South African universities are now challenging the status quo — and emerging as leaders.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals outline a roadmap towards a more equitable future for humanity. Along with other scientists, physicists have long made valuable contributions to this endeavour.

Undergraduate labs are more effective and more positive for students if they encourage investigation and decision-making, not verification of textbook concepts.

Scientific progress has always been driven by the ability to build an instrument to answer a specific question. But spreading the news of how to replicate that tool is an evolving art, ripe for an open-source revolution.

Passing a supercurrent through a topological material can highlight the existence of higher-order boundary states, and may lead to applications in topological superconductivity.

Muon colliders offer enormous potential for the exploration of the particle physics frontier but are challenging to realize. A new international collaboration is forming to make such a muon collider a reality.

Methodology adapted from data science sparked the field of materials informatics, and materials databases are at the heart of it. Applying artificial intelligence to these databases will allow the prediction of the properties of complex organic crystals.

Physicists and biologists have different conceptions of beauty. A better appreciation of these differences may bring the disciplines closer and help develop a more integrated view of life.

#BlackInPhysics Week aimed to build community among physicists by celebrating, supporting and increasing the visibility of Black physicists. The week accomplished all of this, and more.

The uncertainty associated with epidemic forecasts is often simulated with ensembles of epidemic trajectories based on combinations of parameters. We show that the standard approach for summarizing such ensembles systematically suppresses critical epidemiological information.

Scaling arguments provide valuable analysis tools across physics and complex systems yet are often employed as one generic method, without explicit reference to the various mathematical concepts underlying them. A careful understanding of these concepts empowers us to unlock their full potential.

The particle physics community refreshes the roadmap for the field in Europe, taking into account the worldwide context, in the so-called European Strategy for Particle Physics update, which happens every seven years.

Since the 1950s, international cooperation has been the driving force behind fusion research. Here, we discuss how the International Atomic Energy Agency has shaped the field and the events that have produced fusion’s global signature partnership.

Automated learning from data by means of deep neural networks is finding use in an ever-increasing number of applications, yet key theoretical questions about how it works remain unanswered. A physics-based approach may help to bridge this gap.

Astrophysical neutrinos could originate from blazars, but their modelling is challenging. Instead, the source of cosmic neutrinos could be a special yet unidentified class in which jets burrow through stellar material and produce neutrinos.

In 1985, experiments revealed the quantum behaviour of a macroscopic degree of freedom: the phase difference across a Josephson junction. The authors recount the history of this milestone for the development of superconducting quantum circuits.

Lack of reproducibility is not necessarily bad news; it may herald new discoveries and signal scientific progress.

Physics is formulated in terms of timeless, axiomatic mathematics. A formulation on the basis of intuitionist mathematics, built on time-evolving processes, would offer a perspective that is closer to our experience of physical reality.