The crooner is featured on Pentatonix’s new single ‘I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm’

The UK art world is finally becoming more inclusive. But greater support must be given to the organisations that enable disabled artists to flourish

The Turner prize is no stranger to sparking debate or pushing boundaries. This year it has achieved both. For the first time, an artist with learning disabilities has won. Glasgow-born Nnena Kalu took the award for her colourful, cocoon-like sculptures made from VHS tape, clingfilm and other abandoned materials, along with her large swirling vortex drawings. Kalu is autistic, with limited verbal communication. In an acceptance speech on her behalf, Kalu’s facilitator, Charlotte Hollinshead, said that “a very stubborn glass ceiling” had been broken.

Kalu’s win is a high-profile symbol of a shift towards greater inclusivity that has been happening in the UK arts world over the past five years. Last month, Beyond the Visual opened at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in which everything is curated or created by blind and partially sighted artists. The exhibits range from Moore sculptures (which visitors are encouraged to touch) to David Johnson’s 10,000 stone-plaster digestive biscuits stamped with braille. Design and Disability at the V&A South Kensington is showcasing the ways in which disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people have shaped culture from the 1940s to now.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

As the classic album hits 50, Nick Mason talks about the often difficult process of making it and how it has since fit into their larger catalogue

By almost every measure, from commercial reward to creative reach, Pink Floyd scaled its peak on Dark Side of the Moon. But, when I asked drummer Nick Mason how he would rank the album in their catalogue, he slotted it below the set that came next, Wish You Were Here. Speaking of Dark Side, he said, “the idea of it is almost more attractive than the individual songs on it. I feel slightly the same about Sgt. Pepper. It’s an amazing album that taught us a hell of a lot, but the individual parts are not quite as exciting, or as good, as some of the other Beatles’ albums.”

By contrast, he says of Wish You Were Here, “there’s something in the general atmosphere it generates – the space of it, the air around it, that’s really special,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I view it so affectionately.”

The brutalist arts-and-towers complex, where even great explorers get lost, is showing its age. Let’s hope the 50th anniversary upgrade is better than the ‘pointillist stippling’ tried in the 1990s

The Barbican is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the outer line of defence to a city or castle. London’s Barbican marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architecture was designed to repel. Some might argue, as they stumble out of Barbican tube station and gaze upwards, not much has changed in the interim.

The use of the word “barbican” was in decline in this country until the opening in 1982 of the Barbican Arts Centre. Taking 20 years to build, it completed the modernist megastructure of the Barbican Estate, grafted on to a huge tract of land devastated by wartime bombing. The aim was to bring life back to the City through swish new housing, energised by the presence of culture. Nonetheless, the arts centre, the elusive minotaur at the heart of the concrete labyrinth, was always farcically difficult to locate. To this day, visitors are obliged to trundle along the Ariadne’s thread of the famous yellow line, inscribed in what seemed like an act of institutional desperation, across concrete hill and dale.

He’ll soon be going back on the hunt for bent coppers – but not before a wild revenge tale of divorcees going rogue. The star talks feeling inferior to Meera Syal, his life in the US and why he’s thrilled to be typecast

While we embark on the inhumanly long wait for the new season of Line of Duty, which starts shooting in January, you’ll see Martin Compston – the show’s hero and true north – a number of times. Twice as you’ve never seen him before, and once, in Red Eye, in the form that you’ve come to know and love him: brisk and taciturn, brave and speedy, the man you’d trust to save the world while the dopes all around him can’t even see it needs saving.

But first, The Revenge Club, in which he is a revelation. The setting is a support group for divorcees, a ragtag gang united by nothing but the fact that they’ve been summarily dismissed by their spouses. “There’s no other reason for these characters to be in each other’s lives,” Compston says from his home in Las Vegas (more on that later – much more). “They’re all desperate and lonely and in dire need of companionship. They’re all, in their own ways, broken, which makes for this explosive mix.”

This Trinidadian family saga blurs the line between real and imagined to create a multilayered history of an island and its people

Ever Since We Small opens in Bihar, India in 1899. Jayanti dreams of a woman offering her bracelets. Within days, her husband becomes sick and dies. Widowhood is not an option and Jayanti prepares for her own sati. Determined to apply the “godly might of English justice” and uphold a law banning the practice, an English doctor and magistrate muscle in to stop her. In an 11th-hour volte face, Jayanti, desiring life over the afterlife, allows herself to be saved. Triumphant, the magistrate suggests she become his mistress, but instead she opts to be shipped off to Trinidad. The island, she’s told, is a place where the shame of her choice will be forgotten.

Ever Since We Small, Celeste Mohammed’s second novel-in-stories, is a more cohesive work than Pleasantview, which won the Bocas prize for Caribbean literature in 2022. The opening chapter follows on from an academic introduction and Mohammed’s style is more reverent, less ballsy and humorous, than the warts-and-all portraits drawn in Pleasantview; but casting characters from the distant past often has that effect on novelists. The tone is appropriate, however; Mohammed here is the sober observer taking in the fate of women like Jayanti, who if they have choices at all, they are between bad and worse.

This Netflix show starts off feeling like a documentary, and winds up as another attempt to recreate The X-Factor. It really cannot be overstated how much of a rehash this boyband contest is

Ladies and gentlemen, the most cynical bait and switch of the year has finally arrived. To the casual viewer, Netflix’s new series Simon Cowell: The Next Act may appear to be yet another quasi-unvarnished authorised documentary series.

And that would make sense, because those things are everywhere at the moment. Everyone from David Beckham to Robbie Williams to Charlie Sheen has made one, allowing a film crew into their lives to offer just enough grit to fool people into thinking they are watching anything other than a heavily sanitised publicity project. And, really, who deserves one of these more than Simon Cowell?

On Tuesday 7 October the winner(s) of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced. The process of choosing the winners is highly secretive, so looking for hints about who will be this year’s laureates is futile. Indeed, in the immediate run-up to announcement, only members of the Nobel Committee for Physics and the Class for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences know who will be minted as the latest Nobel laureates. What is more, recent prizes provide little guidance because the deliberations and nominations are kept secret for 50 years. So we really are in the dark when it comes to predicting who will be named next week.

If you would like to learn more about how the Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded, check out this profile of Lars Brink, who served on the Nobel Committee for Physics on eight occasions.

But this level of secrecy doesn’t stop people like me from speculating about this year’s winners. Before I explain the rather lovely infographic that illustrates this article – and how it could be used to predict future Nobel winners – I am going to share my first prediction for next week.

Inspired by last year’s physics Nobel prize, which went to two computer scientists for their work on artificial intelligence, I am predicting that the 2025 laureates will be honoured for their work on quantum information and algorithms. Much of the pioneering work in this field was done several decades ago, and has come to fruition in functioning quantum computers and cryptography systems. So the time seems right for an award and I have four people in mind. They are Peter Shor, Gilles Brassard, Charles Bennett and David Deutsch. However, only three can share the prize.

Moving on to our infographic, which gives a bit of pseudoscientific credibility to my next predictions! It charts the history of the physics Nobel prize in terms of field of endeavour. One thing that is apparent from the infographic is that since about 1990 there have been clear gaps between awards in certain fields. If you look at “atomic, molecular and optical physics”, for example, there are gaps between awards of about 5–10 years. One might conclude, therefore, that the Nobel committee considers the field of an award and tries to avoid bunching together awards in the same field.

Looking at the infographic, it looks like we are long overdue a prize in nuclear and particle physics – the last being 10 years ago. However, we haven’t had many big breakthroughs in this field lately. Two aspects of particle physics that have been very fruitful in the 21st century have been the study of the quark–gluon plasma formed when heavy nuclei collide; and the precise study of antimatter – observing how it behaves under gravity, for example. But I think it might be a bit too early for Nobels in these fields.

One possibility for a particle-physics Nobel is the development of the theory of cosmic inflation, which seeks to explain the observed nature of the current universe by invoking an exponential expansion of the universe in its very early history. If an award were given for inflation, it would most certainly go to Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. A natural for the third slot would have been Alexei Starobinsky, who sadly died in 2023 – and Nobels are not awarded posthumously. If there was a third winner for inflation, it would probably be Paul Steinhardt.

Invisibility cloaks

2016 was the last year when we had a Nobel prize in condensed-matter physics, so what work in that field would be worthy of an award this year? There has been a lot of very interesting research done in the field of metamaterials – materials that are engineered to have specific properties, particularly in terms of how they interact with light or sound.

A Nobel prize for metamaterials would surely go to the theorist John Pendry, who pioneered the concept of transformation optics. This simplifies our understanding of how light interacts with metamaterials and helps with the design of objects and devices with amazing properties. These include invisibility cloaks –the first of which was built in 2006 by the experimentalist David Smith, who I think is also a contender for this year’s Nobel prize. Smith’s cloak works at microwave frequencies, but my nomination for the third slot has done an amazing amount of work on developing metamaterials for practical applications in optics. If you follow this field, you know that I am thinking of the applied physicist Federico Capasso – who is also known for the invention of the quantum cascade laser.

The post Quantum information or metamaterials: our predictions for this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics appeared first on Physics World.