Month: March 2011

CAPS is the new conference for UK & Ireland students of physics, astronomy and related subjects, to gather, meet, discuss and share. It will be held at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland from Friday 17 to Sunday 19 June 2011.

It gives students the opportunity to present a short lecture about their project work or area of interest, includes a guest lecture by Prof. Miles Padgett, head of the optics group at the University of Glasgow and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a student debate on a current hot topic and social events in the evenings.

Representatives from student societies are particularly encouraged to attend, as this is an excellent opportunity to meet other society representatives, forge links, exchange experiences and get new ideas for your society. The conference incorporates the annual Student Society Awards for student societies in the areas of physics and astronomy within the UK and Ireland. Selected societies will give short presentations on Saturday in a bid to win one of the awards presented later that evening.

Find out more at www.caps2011.info.

Students from outside the British Isles are very welcome to join.

The first issue of jIAPS in 2011 is online, and can be downloaded on this website (high quality, 25 MB, low quality, 3 MB) or read here. We welcome four new editors to the jIAPS team this year, and you can find out about them, as well as the IAPS EC, in this issue. We also announce the winner of the jIAPS writing contest, Stephanie Walton, for her article “The Physical State”, on the idea of a stereotypical physicist. You can also read about the uses of Youtube, the Golden Ratio, quantum computing, a climate summer school at the University of Malta, and read a poem about holographic microscopy.

If you would like to write for jIAPS, contact the editors at jiaps@iaps.info, as we are always looking for contributions.

The jIAPS editors