2007 Physics Year in Review

As the year winds up, I find myself looking through various magazines, websites, and television shows, to see how well About.com Physics covered some of the top stories discussed in those sources. We did okay, but we'll try next year to cover even more of these topical issues as they arise. For now, look at some of my personal favorite About.com Physics stories of the year ... in no particular order:

• Nano-Transistor - Theory predicts that a transistor could be built at the nano-scale - four times smaller than current transistors.
• Hawking to Go Zero-G! and Hawking Flight Follow-Up relate the story of how renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking was taken on an airplane trip to experience free-fall by the space tourism company Zero Gravity.
• Printable Circuit Board - imagine being able to print an electrical circuit using a regular computer printer ... well, you don't have to imagine anymore.
• WiTricity - Power Without Wires - the new field of WiTricity allows for the transmission of electrical power at distances without the need for wires. This presents a wide number of possibilities for technological innovation.
• Galaxy Zoo - 2007 marks the year when the force of the internet is leveraged to help at a task that would take astrophysicists an insanely long amounts of time - visually inspecting images of galaxies and evaluating them qualitatively so that they can be classified.
• Very Precise Measurements outlines findings that help define the realistic boundaries of where current science and technology can interact with the material world before quantum fluctuations become dominant.

Other 2007 Top Science Lists:

• Scientific American - Top 25 Science Stories of 2007
• Scientific American - The Year in Robots
• Discover - Top 100 Science Stories of 2007
• Popular Science - PopSci's Best of What's New 2007
• ScienceNow - A Few of Our Favorite Things
• Nature - News 2007 (subscription or payment required by Nature)
• Nature - 2007 Images of the Year (subscription or payment required by Nature)
• New Scientist - Top 10 Inventions of 2007
• New Scientist - Top 5 Science Videos

In an interesting twist on the 2007 lists, Popular Science has offered the Your Guide to the Year in Science: 2008, which is a look at expected released technological advancements in 2008. It's broken down month-by-month when possible, or just has some general guidelines of about when a certain technology is expected to be completed or released to the public. Of course, most physical discoveries can't be anticipated to this degree ... so we'll just have to wait to see what happens on that front.