Foreword by Philip Ball

The papers in these two volumes are drawn from the selection that appeared in Nature: The Living Record of Science, a multi-volume compilation of the most important contributions to the international science journal Nature from 1869, when it began, until 2007. Progress in Physics collects together the papers specifically in the discipline of physics, ranging from the theoretical foundations of the discipline to astronomy and applications in areas such as semiconductor microelectronics. Nature has had a particularly strong tradition of publishing in this field; in the early part of the twentieth century especially, it was the regular journal of choice for physicists presenting their new discoveries. This selection therefore offers a picture of how physics has changed from the era of James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin to today. These papers are made readily accessible here to readers in China for the first time by simultaneous publication in English and in Mandarin Chinese, as well as being accompanied by short introductions that explain the context and implications of the work described.　　中文

When Nature began, physics was still relatively new as a recognized discipline. Of course, what we now regard as physics has a much longer history. Aristotle’s wide-ranging treatise on the natural world in the 4th century BCE is simply given that one-word title today, and the studies of the laws of motion by Galileo and Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century sit at the heart of the so-called Scientific Revolution. In a sense, one might argue that it was the character of physics as the foundation for all natural philosophy that delayed for so long its being recognized as a distinct discipline: physics seems to be about everything. It is often noted that the laws governing the interactions of atoms and fundamental particles are ultimately responsible for all of chemistry and biology, and that physical law also defines and constrains our view of the entire cosmos and how it has evolved since the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.　　中文

But the recognition that physics needs to be both pursued as a distinct fundamental and experimental science, and that its applications are central to the development of socially transformative technologies, was reflected in the inauguration, just a few years after Nature began, of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge—which, with Maxwell as its first director, quickly became and has remained one of the most important centres of academic study in the discipline. Maxwell’s kinetic theory of gases was presented and discussed in the journal in 1873.　　中文

In the late nineteenth century, some of the important contributions to physics in Nature concerned questions in astronomy: from where, for example, do stars like the sun get their enormous, seemingly inexhaustible energy? It was only through the discoveries in fundamental physics—the identification of X-rays in 1895 and then, very soon after, of radioactivity—that an answer to this question began to emerge, via the discovery of the energy residing in the atomic nucleus. And the particles emitted by radioactive decay could be used to probe the internal structure of atoms themselves, leading to a rationalization of the properties of the chemical elements as well as to the invention of the first of the devices—particle accelerators—that today supply the principal tools for exploring the laws that govern the properties and composition of matter at scales far smaller than those of atoms.　　中文

That we needed to understand the atomic nucleus before we could understand the sun is a perfect illustration of the unity that physics often reveals. It is now clear that understanding the cosmos at the grandest scales requires deeper theoretical insight into its constitution at the smallest. In fact, a unification of the theories that provide the conceptual frameworks at the former and the latter scales—general relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which developed in the early twentieth century (and both being discussed in Nature at that time)—now represents one of the most important goals in physics.　　中文

It is sometimes said that physics was the foremost science of the first half of the twentieth century, while biology claimed that role in the second half. But much of the current understanding in the life sciences has been, and continues to be, dependent on advances in physics. X-rays become the primary tool for probing the structure of proteins and other biomolecules, most notably revealing the chemical nature of DNA in 1953. Measuring signals from magnetic atomic nuclei in the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance has also been vital for studying the structure of biological matter. The use of this technique for imaging, reported in Nature in 1973 and rewarded with a Nobel prize, is now essential for advances in neuroscience and for biomedical research and clinical medicine.　　中文

Nature followed closely developments in the application of physics, not least in telecommunications technologies such as the telephone and television. The equivalent today is the application of physics to microelectronics, leading first to digital solid-state integrated circuits and computers and now to the implementation of quantum-mechanical rules of information processing in quantum computing and cryptography. Information technology and artificial intelligence look sure to become one of the most transformative physics-based technologies of the twenty-first century.　　中文

Well before achieving its current global prominence, China established a solid presence in physics. Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee won the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for showing theoretically how the conservation principle governing the property of parity—a kind of symmetry exhibited by fundamental particles—could be violated. They proposed an experiment for testing their ideas using nuclear physics, specifically by looking at the particles emitted in a radioactive decay process. This experiment was conducted in 1956 by Chinese-born physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, and it was her success in verifying Lee and Yang’s predictions that opened the door for their Nobel prize. If it were being awarded today, Wu would surely have shared it.　　中文

Among the more recent Chinese-born Nobel laureates is Daniel Chee Tsui, whose award in 1998 recognized his work in identifying a fundamental quantum-mechanical effect in semiconductor microstructures. That blend of quantum fundamentals and device engineering, with potentially powerful applications, is found too in the work in China today on quantum information technologies, an area in which Chinese scientists have become world leaders. The Micius satellite, launched in 2016 and operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the first of its kind dedicated to the transmission of quantum-encrypted data for secure telecommunications, and is a key component of the project Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS).　　中文

This collection of physics papers from Nature will be valuable for physicists both in academia and industry, and for science historians. The short editorial introductions will also help to make the papers accessible to and useful for students of physics, as well as to more general audiences. It is a necessarily incomplete sample of physics in from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, but we hope that the selection of papers here will contain something to satisfy and interest all tastes. It includes papers of historical interest as well as those whose conclusions remain relevant to the subject today. What emerges, we hope, is more than a record of a discipline; it is a portrait of the development of some of the most profound ideas in intellectual global culture over the past 150 years.　　中文

Former Consultant Editor for Nature