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What Physics Has Done for Entrepreneurship and Industry
01 May 2003
Ten years ago, on 30 April 1993, CERN, the European Organisation for nuclear research, issued a statement declaring that a little known piece of software called the World Wide Web was in the public domain. This month a special week of celebration hosted by the Institute of Physics (IOP), 'Opening Doors On Physics' followed the launch of an IOP report comparing the importance of physics to industry over the past ten years.
The idea for the Web goes back to March 1989 when CERN Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a 'Distributed Information Management System' for the high-energy physics community. Back then, a new generation of physics experiments was just getting underway. They were performed by collaborations numbering hundreds of scientists from around the world - scientists who were ready for a new way of sharing information over the Internet.
The IOP report 'The Importance of Physics in the UK Economy' (http: //industry. iop. org), was launched in March and compares the importance of physics over the past ten years to both traditional manufacturing industries and also emerging technologies such as photonics. It reports both encouraging results and worrying trends in physics based industries (PBIs).
While employment in the manufacturing sector fell by 10% between 1992 and 2000, it remained constant in PBIs, which comprised 43% of manufacturing employment in the UK in 2000. The number of PBI enterprises in the UK increased by 165% between 1989 and 2000, and the UK has succeeded in out-performing international competitors such as Germany and Japan in PBI production growth.
However, the report calls for immediate action if the UK is to maintain a healthy PBI base and UK PBIs are to continue to contribute to economic growth. For example, there is currently limited support from industry for physics research in UK universities, and little exposure of undergraduates to the entrepreneurial culture - so there is real potential for an acceleration of commercialisation of physics based research in the future.
New materials for industrial applications are constantly being developed giving rise to intense competition.
The CEIT research team at the University of Navarre, in the Basque Country, will receive the Charles Hatchett Award on the 10 June in recognition of their work, which is highly important in the steel industrial sector. Their research investigated how to enhance the mechanical properties of steel containing niobium; 0.03-0.04% of the element is sufficient to double structural resistance.
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