How Physics is Fighting the Latest Pandemic?

Coronavirus Puts Physics in Turmoil!

COVID-19 has hit the international physics community hard, with meetings and conferences cancelled, including the showpiece events of the American Physical Society. 

Thousands of physicists around the world have had their lives disrupted as the effects of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 took hold last month. In addition to seeing many schools, colleges and universities closed to halt the spread of the virus, physicists have also had many of their conferences and travel plans disrupted. The biggest casualty to the physics community was the week-long March Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Denver, Colorado, which was cancelled less than 36 hours before it was meant to start on 2 March.

The meeting was due to be attended by about 11,000 physicists from around the world, including many from China, where the virus originated. Devoted to condensed-matter, quantum, optical and atomic physics, the APS March Meeting is one of the largest events in the physics calendar, featuring thousands of talks and an exhibition with more than 150 companies.

Its cancellation caused shock-waves but on 12 March – a day after the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic – the APS also abandoned its smaller April Meeting on particle physics and cosmology. It was due take place on 18–21 April in Washington DC, where a state of emergency had been declared.

Other major physics events that were lost included the three spring meetings of the German Physical Society in Bonn, Dresden and Hannover, as well as the 67th spring meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP). The Institute of Physics cancelled all national, branch and group events until the end of May and postponed any meetings due take place at its London headquarters over that period. The spring meeting of the European Materials Society, which was due to be held in Strasbourg, France, on 25–29 May, was postponed too.