More Interesting than Sci Fi

I am a suscriber to Physics News Update. It is a digest of physics news items delivered approximately once a week by free e-mail service from American Institute of Physics (AIP). The news sources cover physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and magazines, and so on. The purpose of this service is "broadly to disseminate information about physics and physicists," and each digest made by Phillip F. Schewe or Ben Stein starts with introductory words, which make the topic understandable to laypersons.

All the results of physics research mentioned in Physics News Update are at the cutting edge of this field, and reading it is often much more interesting and thrilling than reading science fictions. Some titles I liked recently are:

• The First Entanglement of Three Photons (12 Feb 1999)
• Direct CP Violation (29 Mar 199
• Does God Exist? (20 Apr 1999)
• Writing the Word "Optics" on a Single Atom (3 May 1999)
• Pi and Random Numbers (14 May 1999)

You can read these stories on the AIP Physics News Update Home Page, where you can also subscribe to the e-mail service. Being permitted by the generous words of AIP, "you are free to post it, if you like, where others can read it, providing only that you credit the American Institute of Physics," I will be posting the latest issue of Physics News Update on my home page.

Kaku and Thompson [1] gave the following plausible reason why science was always stranger than science fiction: Technological progress proceeds geometrically. On the other hand, science fiction is merely a linear extrapolation or extension of the contemporary state of technology.

1. M. Kaku and J. Thompson, "Beyond Einstein" (Oxford University Press, 1997; first edition by Bantam Books, 1987).