For many moons, I’ve been a member of both the ACS (American Chemical Society) and APS (American Physical Society), the former for ten or more, the latter for a few.  As a theoretical chemist, having a membership to these societies was quite useful. You get a subscription to a very good “popular” magazine, Chemical and Engineering News and Physics Today, discounted registration at conferences, and, perhaps most importantly, access to the respective job banks.

All this, though, comes at a cost. When you are a grad student and recent postdoc, the membership cost isn’t too expensive and the benefits well outweigh the costs.  But once you are a “professional member” the costs double–I think–at least to $140 and $118 per annum.

Okay, that’s not bad, not great, but not horrible. *But*, I am no longer a practicing chemist/physicist. I’m a code monkey. A membership to IEEE or ACM would make more sense, really. Heck, I’m kind of attending SC09, the supercomputing conference, next weekend.

But, but, but. I am a chemist. I am a physicist (according to Feynman, no less). I still think of myself as such and I suppose a part of me thinks one day I might be a practicing chemist/physicist again.

I’m not sure what to do.

And if there was ever an issue of Contemp Phys to read this is the one.  It’s the 50th Anniversary Issue.

For those who’ve never read Contemp Phys, it’s a journal which is dedicated to making current, sometimes bleeding-edge, physics intelligible to a wider audience.  That often includes other physicists and, quite often, one certain theoretical chemist.

In this issue, you’ll find works by many of the big names of physics.  No, wait, this is Physics.  Names like Salam, Peierls, Hawking, and Chandrasekhar. But many of the articles are written by names just as big, just not as well known.  No matter what, though, ALL of the papers in this Issue are uniformly great.

That said, I was happy to see that one of my all-time favorite papers was included.  This is Otto Frisch’s famous “Take a photon…” paper. In this paper, Frisch presents a series of Gedankenexperiment (thought experiments) as a dialogue between various characters in regards to the interference of a single photon.  If you love great quantum physics, this is the paper for you.  If you love the freakiness of quantum mechanics, this is for you.  Heck, if you are interested in the quantum computing and information, one of modern physics’ big fields, this is a paper for you.

But, really, all of the papers in this issue (and remember there is a second page of papers…which isn’t quite apparent on InformaWorld’s site) are for you.  Read them all.  You will learn something in one of them. Probably in all of them.