Videos get physical

I'm delighted to see that the team at physicsworld.com have made physics videos central to their impressive new website. First in the series is one with CERN boss Rolf-Dieter Heuer (pictured above).

Here's what they say about this initiative themselves (and I should mention that I've written for Physics World in the past and I'm a member of the Institute of Physics too - but that's not really a conflict of interest!):

The Institute of Physics Publishing has today relaunched physicsworld.com. Already established as the most popular news-based physics website in the world, the site now provides video content and webinars. The first video interview is with CERN’s director general Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who reveals that he will push for the linear collider – the next big experiment in particle physics after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – to be built at the Geneva lab. Click here to view the full interview http://physicsworld.com/cws/channel/multimedia ..

Although a design for the machine has not been finalized by the international particle-physics community, Heuer is keen to bring the collider to CERN. "I would be a bad director-general if I did not push for CERN at least bidding for the next global project," Heuer told physicsworld.com. "CERN is a fantastic place. [It] has proven that it can host such a project and therefore I think CERN should do it."

In the interview Heuer has also confirmed a mid-November switch-on date for the LHC, which should see the first collisions this year after months of extensive repair works following the electrical fault that occurred just nine days after the first protons were sent round the collider in September 2008.

The video interview with Heuer - as well as an interview with CERN’s head of communications James Gillies, and vox-pop interviews with seven CERN insiders - can be viewed on physicsworld.com at http://physicsworld.com/cws/channel/multimedia .. Apart from a sleek new look and the use of video content, the relaunched site also hosts a webinar channel, which will contain lectures from the world’s leading scientists and science writers, with the inaugural lecture from Graham Farmelo, author of an acclaimed new biography on Paul Dirac, due to be aired next month.