Physics Spinoffs

Many of the products we surround ourselves with in everyday life, and take for granted, actually began as scientific studies and experiments before they ended as products for ordinary people. On this page we describe some of them.

PET-scanner

11 June 2010

PET-scanner
In 1928, Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter, which 45 years later is used to perform advanced brain scans.

The Transistor

11 June 2010

THE TRANSISTOR
A single computer chip may contain several million transistors, each of which controls a small electrical signal in the computer.

World Wide Web

10 June 2010

World Wide Web
The idea for a powerful beam of light, which you could direct towards very precise targets, was fascinating to physicists.

Laser

8 June 2010

LASER
The idea for a powerful beam of light, which you could direct towards very precise targets, was fascinating to physicists.

GPS: Global Positioning System

7 June 2010

GPS: Global Positioning System
When the American military developed the GPS system, they had to take into account the effects of the theory of relativity.

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Sara Buch

Sara Buch is cand. mag. in literature, film and European studies from Aarhus University, and is writing about science history at the Niels Bohr Institute.

About Physics Spinoffs

THERE IS PHYSICS IN EVERYTHING
30 percent of the world's gross national product would not be possible without quantum physics. You cannot make modern electronics or mobile telephones without knowledge of quantum physics, and GPS would not function without Einstein's theory of relativity.

But all of the modern technical solutions we surround ourselves with in everyday life, were often not invented for that purpose - they are by-products, derived from physics research, which actually had a completely different aim.

World Wide Web was, for example, invented by physicists at CERN, who needed to be able to share all of the data being created by experiments with nuclear collisions in the particle accelerator.