Looking back at 2024

This year marked the 70th anniversary of CERN, which we celebrated with a special issue in October. This project was led by Alison Wright, Senior Editor at the Reviews Cross-Journal Editorial Team, who curated a Viewpoint¹ on seven physics milestones. A broader collection of articles about CERN can be found in our Collection. Besides highlighting their physics contributions, we also showcase how the CERN community has embraced the arts. We published a Q&A with Mónica Bello², head of the Arts at CERN programme, which invites artists into residency programmes in Geneva. Another Q&A talks to Connie Potter and Rob Appleby³, editors of a collection of science fiction short stories that emerged from a collaboration with scientists and writers.

Several other anniversaries were also celebrated within our pages this year. To mark 20 years of the mechanical isolation of graphene, we published a Down to Business article⁴ looking at current trends in graphene commercialization and comparing them to the predictions that were made when graphene was first isolated and celebrated as a wonder-material (spoiler alert: the predictions were wrong). This year we also celebrated the long-running impact of Penrose tilings, 50 years since their introduction⁵, and Wigner crystals, 90 years since they were first predicted⁶. Our September issue marks 100 years of the Ising model, and includes a retrospective piece on the history of the model, as well as a series of Research Highlights on recent applications of the model in fields ranging from predicting elections to changing land use.

In April, we welcomed May Chiao as Senior Consulting Editor. May’s research background covers a broad range of condensed-matter physics and astronomy and she has many years of editorial experience, most recently as Chief Editor of Nature Astronomy. But May also brings her passion for promoting scientists’ engagement with politics. This interest has already resulted in an interview with Carlo Rovelli⁷, who helped launch an open letter to the world’s politicians calling for countries to spend a small proportion of their military budget to address climate change, poverty and pandemics. In this issue, she interviews Yangyang Cheng, a particle physicist now working on the history of science in China and US–China relations, who puts the current tensions between the two superpowers in context.

In July, our Senior Editors Ankita Anirban and Zoe Budrikis attended the annual conference of the British Society for the History of Science — certainly a change from our usual conferences! They went because one of our goals for 2024 was to explore the human side of physics. Who practices it? What topics count as physics and who decides? How does funding get allocated? We want to engage with what the humanities can tell us about these questions.

Some of the answers are gathered in a Collection. Highlights include an overview of how the role of abstracts has changed over the years⁸, an exploration of whether the ubiquity of technology is to blame for the relative paucity of popular science writing about condensed matter⁹, the story of the friendship between Wolfgang Pauli and psychoanalyst Carl Jung¹⁰ and, in this issue, an account of how in the 1920s, promoters of domestic electricity usage led a physics outreach programme for British women.

The change we as a journal team felt most keenly was the departure of Iulia Georgescu, who had been at the helm of Nature Reviews Physics from the beginning. Our new Chief Editor, Nina Meinzer, brings new scientific expertise to our team with a background in optical physics, and they are keen to give a voice to early-career researchers. Nina is still in their first 100 days, but we are excited to see what course they will chart for the future of the journal. We expect 2025 to mark the start of a new chapter for the journal, and we look forward to sharing it with our readers.