Physics Today

About Physics Today

Overview

Physics Today is the membership magazine of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the most widely read publication devoted to the physics community in the world. First published in May 1948, it appears monthly from College Park, Maryland, and reaches the members of ten physics societies — including the American Physical Society — along with students, institutional subscribers, and individual readers around the globe. Its ISSN is 0031-9228. BPA-audited circulation stood at 134,146 copies as of December 2012, a figure that makes it by far the largest-circulation physics publication in the United States.

The magazine's self-described mission is to be a unifying influence on the physical sciences: informing readers in plain but authoritative language about important research developments, the shared experience of being a physical scientist, and the interactions of physics with politics, education, and society at large. Since its debut, it has been distributed as a benefit of membership in the professional societies of the AIP federation, and it is also sent to members of the Society of Physics Students. Physics, the magazine likes to say, is everywhere — and so is Physics Today.

Founding in 1948

Physics Today was born out of a postwar anxiety. In the late 1940s, as American physics exploded in scale and funding on the strength of its wartime achievements, leaders of the field worried that the discipline was becoming too specialized and too fractionated — that the very successes of physics were pulling its practitioners apart. Within the American Institute of Physics and its five founding member societies, there was a call for a "unifying influence" to counter those forces. Physics Today was the answer.

The magazine's first editor, David Katcher, introduced the new publication in May 1948 with an editorial that remains the magazine's mission statement nearly eight decades later. "Physics Today," he wrote, "is for the physicist, to inform him in comfortable, everyday language, of what goes on and why and who goes where. But it is also for the chemist, the biologist, and the engineer... it is for the student, the teacher, the lawyer, the doctor, and all who are curious about physics." When the magazine marked its 75th anniversary in May 2023, it reprinted Katcher's words and concluded that his description still held true.

The Publisher: American Institute of Physics

Physics Today is published by the American Institute of Physics, a membership corporation created in 1931 to promote the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics and its applications. AIP is an umbrella organization for ten member societies, including the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America (now Optica), the Acoustical Society of America, the Society of Rheology, and the American Association of Physics Teachers. It is one of the world's largest publishers of physics journals, with titles including Applied Physics Letters, the Journal of Applied Physics, the Journal of Chemical Physics, and Physics of Fluids.

AIP is headquartered at the American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, in College Park, Maryland — the same campus that now houses Physics Today's editorial offices. The magazine's LinkedIn presence describes it as the flagship publication of AIP, "the most influential and closely followed physics magazine in the world," staffed by a team of 11 to 50 employees at its nonprofit headquarters.

What Physics Today Covers

The magazine's content mix is designed to serve a community that spans research specialties. Each issue carries overview articles written by outside experts on important developments in physics, shorter review and news articles written internally by the magazine's own staff, and coverage of issues and events of importance to the science community — in politics, education, and other fields. Recurring departments have included the monthly "Search and Discovery" news section, opinion pieces, letters, and obituaries of notable physicists.

Because it has published continuously since 1948, Physics Today is also an irreplaceable historical resource on the physics of the past 75-plus years. Its pages have tracked the feasibility debates over the Strategic Defense Initiative — the "Star Wars" program — of the 1980s, the state of physics in China and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1970s, and nearly every major development in the field from the transistor era to the age of quantum information. The magazine's 2017 impact factor of 4.370 attests to its standing as a cited and respected publication, not merely a membership perk.

Authors and Voices

Few magazines in any field can match the roster of authors Physics Today has published. Luminary contributors over the decades have included dozens of Nobel laureates and scores of international leaders in research, education, and policy. Among the past authors named by AIP itself: Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, and Steven Chu. To publish in Physics Today is to address the entire physics community at once — a reach that has made the magazine the forum of choice for debates about the direction of the field, the ethics of science, and the relationship between physics and society.

The magazine also serves as a professional commons: its letters pages and opinion sections give working physicists a place to argue about funding priorities, education reform, and the culture of science itself. In that sense it functions less like a journal and more like the common room of the physics profession.

Editors Through the Decades

Physics Today has had a remarkably stable editorial lineage. David Katcher, the first editor, set the tone in 1948. Stephen G. Benka led the magazine from 1994 until 2015 — more than two decades that spanned the rise of the internet and the transformation of science publishing. In October 2015, AIP announced that Charles Day, a physicist, editor, and science writer who had joined AIP 18 years earlier after postdoctoral fellowships at Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, would become the seventh editor-in-chief.

Day, who held a PhD in X-ray astronomy from the University of Cambridge, had edited obituaries and feature articles, written news stories, run the "Search and Discovery" department, and built the magazine's online community — work that AIP's CEO credited with giving Physics Today a large following on social media. The current editor is Richard Fitzgerald, who continues the magazine's mission of authoritative, engaging coverage of the physical sciences and their applications.

Circulation and Readership

Physics Today's distribution model is one of its defining features. Rather than depending primarily on newsstand sales or individual subscriptions, it is provided as a membership benefit to the members of the ten societies in the AIP federation — including the American Physical Society, the largest physics organization in the world — as well as to members of the Society of Physics Students. It is also available to non-members as a paid annual subscription, and to institutions worldwide.

This model gives the magazine an extraordinary and stable reach: the December 2012 BPA Worldwide circulation statement put total circulation at 134,146. That audience spans research universities, national laboratories, industry, and government — essentially the entire professional physics enterprise in the United States, plus a substantial international readership. For an advertiser, a job poster, or a university announcing a program, there is no more efficient way to reach American physicists.

The Magazine Online

Physics Today has been on the web at physicstoday.org for decades, and its digital presence has grown steadily in importance. The site carries breaking news stories and in-depth features that do not originate in the monthly print magazine, alongside the full archive of print content. Under Charles Day's tenure as online editor, the magazine invested heavily in its web content and social media strategy, building what AIP described as a huge following on Facebook and Twitter — an unusual achievement for a society membership magazine.

The website extends the magazine's historical function as well: decades of back issues constitute a searchable record of physics as it happened, from Cold War science policy to the discovery of the Higgs boson. For historians of science, the Physics Today archive is a primary source of the first rank.

75 Years and Counting

In May 2023, Physics Today marked its 75th anniversary — three-quarters of a century of continuous monthly publication. The anniversary was an occasion for the magazine to reflect on how profoundly the physical sciences had been transformed since 1948, and on how persistent the community's needs had remained: the same desire Katcher identified in the first issue for a shared language, a common forum, and a sense of belonging among scientists.

Few publications in any field survive 75 years without interruption; fewer still remain central to their profession's identity. Physics Today has done both, adapting from a print-only membership bulletin to a multimedia science publication while holding fast to its founding purpose. As long as physics remains a community as well as a discipline, the magazine that community reads in common is likely to endure.

Reading Physics Today

Members of the AIP federation's societies receive Physics Today as part of their membership. Non-members can purchase an annual subscription, and institutions worldwide subscribe as well. The magazine's website, physicstoday.org, offers news, features, and archival content to all readers.

For the working physicist, it is the profession's shared newspaper; for the student, an accessible window into the breadth of the field; for the curious outsider, Katcher's 1948 invitation still stands — it is for "all who are curious about physics." After more than 75 years, Physics Today remains the single publication that the physics community reads together.

Visit the official Physics Today website.