在诺丁汉特伦特大学举办的2025年物理学庆祝会上，来自各地的物理学家、创意人士和科学爱好者齐聚一堂。会议由物理学会（IOP）组织，重点展示了物理学在医疗、食品工业和人工智能等领域的应用。获奖者们分享了他们在光诊断、磁共振成像、可穿戴脑磁图等方面的创新成果，以及半导体聚合物在发光二极管中的应用。此外，会议还探讨了物理学与人工智能之间的密切关系，强调了物理学对人工智能的支撑作用。

💡 庆祝会上，埃克塞特大学的Nick Stone因其在医疗保健领域利用光进行诊断和治疗的先锋工作，荣获2024年罗莎琳德·富兰克林奖章。他开发的拉曼光谱工具和技术，为癌症的快速体内诊断和监测提供了新方法。

🍕 诺丁汉大学的Rob Morris介绍了磁共振成像（MRI）在食品工业中的应用，MRI技术有助于提高生产力、减少浪费，甚至改善食品的口感，比如制作更美味的猪肉馅饼。

🧠 Cerca Magnetics公司的Niall Holmes展示了其开发的用于测量大脑神经元活动产生的磁场的可穿戴脑磁图（MEG）传感器。Cerca Magnetics公司在2023年获得了IOP的商业和创新奖。

💡 剑桥大学的Richard Friend分享了自1990年发现半导体聚合物可用于发光二极管（LED）以来，该领域取得的诸多进展。他因此获得了IOP的艾萨克·牛顿奖章。

🤖 利物浦大学的Tara Shears介绍了IOP新报告《物理学与人工智能》的发现，该报告基于700份调查回复和专家研讨会。报告得出结论：物理学不仅受益于人工智能，而且是人工智能的基础。

With so much turmoil in the world at the moment, it’s always great to meet enthusiastic physicists celebrating all that their subject has to offer. That was certainly the case when I travelled with my colleague Tami Freeman to the 2025 Celebration of Physics at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) on 10 April.

Oganized by the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, the event was aimed at “physicists, creative thinkers, and anyone interested in science”. It also featured some of the many people who won IOP awards last year, including Nick Stone from the University of Exeter, who was awarded the 2024 Rosalind Franklin medal and prize.

Stone was honoured for his “pioneering use of light for diagnosis and therapy in healthcare”, including “developing novel Raman spectroscopic tools and techniques for rapid in vivo cancer diagnosis and monitoring”. Speaking in a Physics World Live chat, Stone explained just why Raman spectroscopy is such a useful technique for medical imaging.

Nottingham is, of course, a city famous for medical imaging, thanks in particular to the University of Nottingham Nobel laureate Peter Mansfield (1933-2017), who pioneered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In an entertaining talk, Rob Morris from NTU explained how MRI is also crucial for imaging foodstuffs, helping the food industry to boost productivity, reduce waste – and make tastier pork pies.

Still on the medical theme, Niall Holmes from Cerca Magnetics, which was spun out from the University of Nottingham, explained how his company has developed wearable magnetoencephalography (MEG) sensors that can measures magnetic fields generated by neuronal firings in the brain. In 2023 Cerca won one of the IOP’s business and innovation awards.

Richard Friend from the University of Cambridge, who won the IOP’s top Isaac Newton medal and prize, discussed some of the many recent developments that have followed from his seminal 1990 discovery that semiconducting polymers can be used in light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

The event ended with a talk from particle physicist Tara Shears from the University of Liverpool, who outlined some of the findings of the new IOP report Physics and AI, to which she was an advisor. Based on a survey with 700 responses and a workshop with experts from academia and industry, the report concludes that physics doesn’t only benefit from AI – but underpins it too.

I’m sure AI will be good for physics overall, but I hope it never removes the need for real-life meetings like the Celebration of Physics.

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