I’m writing this from Berlin, in my room at Harnack-Haus, a meeting center and guest house owned by the Max Planck Society. The institute itself has a fascinating history, of which I just found the following spellbinding
Immediately upon opening its doors, the Harnack-House began to feed the “Dahlem Legend.” Nobel Prize winners and their students met here in social exchange and for academic discussion, holding lectures and colloquia. The House served as a club for members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Here they could lunch, read the international press, drink coffee in the garden, engage in sports, and play music. Foreign scholars were lodged in the guest apartments. The list of guests and lecturers reads like a “Who’s Who of Science”: Albert Einstein, Peter Deybe, Werner Heisenberg, Fritz Haber, Adolf Butenandt, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Otto Meyerhof, Max Planck, Max von Laue and Otto Warburg. One Nobel Prize winner, the biologist Hans Fischer, even received the news of his award during his stay at the Harnack-House.
I’m here on an extremely short visit (arrived in Berlin around 1pm yesterday and fly out early tomorrow morning) for the annual meeting of the editorial board of New Journal of Physics (NJP). While quite a trek, and a not inconsequential amount of work, this is nevertheless a fun meeting (even though I didn’t get to watch World cup games in London, like last year.)
One thing that NJP likes to do is publish a number of focus issues each year. These involve enlisting one or more guest editors and getting them to corral a group of experts to contribute original research to a volume tightly concentrated on a particular topic. Sean and I (and our students) contributed a paper to one last year (for which Sean was the guest editor), but there are many others across all fields (which is what NJP covers). A full list, going back to 2000, when focus issues began is
- Focus on Measurement-Based Quantum Information Processing
- Focus on Complex Networked Systems: Theory and Application
- Focus on Interference in Mesoscopic Systems
- Focus on Dark Energy
- Focus on Accelerator and Beam Physics
- Focus on Casimir Forces
- Focus on Nanophotonics
- Focus on Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Superconductivity in High Magnetic Fields
- Focus on Cold Atoms in Optical Lattices
- Focus on Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era
- Focus on Nano-electromechanical Systems
- Focus on Spacetime 100 Years Later
- Focus on Solid State Quantum Information
- Focus on Negative Refraction
- Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure
- Focus on Brownian Motion and Diffusion in the 21st Century
- Focus on Ultrafast Optics
- Focus on Orbital Physics
- Focus on Single Photons on Demand
- Focus on Turbulence
- Focus on Neutrino Physics
- Focus on Nanostructured Soft Matter
- Focus on Carbon Nanotubes
- Focus on Pattern Formation
- Focus on Quantum Gases
- Focus on Complex (Dusty) Plasmas
- Focus on Clusters at Surfaces
- Focus on Quantum Cryptography
- Focus on Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas
- Focus on Supersymmetry in Physics
- Focus on Quark Gluon Plasma Searches in Heavy Ion Collisions
- Focus on Microlaser and Cavity QED
- Focus on Dark Matter
You can find links to all these at the focus issues site, and I hope you’ll take a look if interested, because anyone can read them, since open access is one of NJP’s raisons d’être.
I particularly enjoy the part of our meeting in which we brainstorm about possible future focus issues, and there are a couple coming out relatively soon that I am quite proud to have been either the originator or co-originator of. And, at today’s meeting, I suggested one specific focus issue to be initiated that was well received and which I think, when it comes out, will be of particular interest to many of our readers. It wouldn’t be right to go into details here (and I won’t in the comments), but I really hope it works out, and assuming it does, I’ll link to it here with a covering discussion.
Anyway, time for bed – my taxi will arrive ridiculously early tomorrow.
