The Physical Society located in Taipei - Recent Activities

PS Taipei

Our society joined AAPPS as The Physical Society located in Taipei. Our society continues to grow - we have around 1,800 members consisting of 45% of faculties and 55% of students, in 2020, which is more than doubled than in 2001.

The annual meeting is the most important event for our society. It is also one of largest academic meetings in Taiwan. It provides a unique platform for physicists from Taiwan and the rest of the world to communicate their latest research results to a broad audience. In the past few years, the annual meeting has attracted more than 2,000 participants each year. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 annual meeting was canceled. We hope that the COVID-19 pandemic will end in the near future. The 2022 Annual Meeting of our society will be held from January 24 to 26, 2022, in National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.

To increase the visibility of each specialized field, promote international collaboration and participate international affairs, our society started establishing the divisions for specialized fields. The first division, the Particle and Field (DPF), was founded on September 9, 2020 and the first executive committee of DPF was elected. DPF has 246 members in 2021. Other specialized field divisions are being planned. The society also set up the Student Chapter under the Division of Academics on February 2, 2021. Its mission is to provide students opportunities to participate in physics-related affairs and to strengthen connection with physics students abroad.

Our society runs two regular publications: the Chinese Journal of Physics (CJP, an academic journal founded in 1963) and the Physics Bimonthly (a magazine founded in 1979). CJP (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/chinese-journal-of-physics/) publishes important advances in various branches in physics. The impact factor of CJP has grown from 0.464 in 2015 to 3.237 in 2020. Its rank is 29/85 (Q2) in physics and astronomy (miscellaneous). The Physics Bimonthly (https://pb.ps-taiwan.org) targets at promoting physics and popular science education in Taiwan. This year its main topics include black hole, neutron beam applications, synthesis of super heavy elements, computational physics, geophysics and spectroscopy.

The Committee on Women in Physics was established in 2001. A major function of the committee is to provide guidance, assistance, exchange of experience and professional support to female researchers in the hopes to inspire more females to actively participate in research fields of science and engineering. Since 2002, the committee has been organizing a conference, primarily for female physicists, every even year and a joint conference for both female physicists and chemists every odd year. In 2020, the meeting was held in Chung-li, Taiwan; 68 faculties and students from chemistry, electronics, atmospheric science, and geoscience attended the meeting. The latest joint conference was held in Yilan on October 29 and 30, 2021; more than 100 scientists participated the conference. The Director General of Department of Natural Sciences and Sustainable Development of Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), who is also the current President, Meng-Fan Luo, participated the conference as well. MOST takes into account conclusions of these conferences when it makes policies associated with female scientists.

The new Curriculum Guidelines of the 12 Year Basic Education in Taiwan, the so-called "108 Curriculum", were put into action in 2019. The idea of this brand-new curriculum aims to make students develop a passion for life-long learning in three manners: spontaneity, interaction and communication, and social participation. The reform is expected to better realize the talents of every student and boost their global competitiveness. This implementation brings several challenges to students, teachers and parents. To respond to this significant change and to provide advices to senior high school students for their scientific studies and preparing learning portfolios for their college application, and to teachers, the Committee of Public Affairs has run regular discussions since the spring of 2020. Two press conferences were held on February 4, 2021 and March 29, 2021, respectively; the officials from the Ministry of Education and the representatives from senior high schools and the societies of chemistry, mathematics and geoscience were invited to attend the conferences to provide their advices and share their experiences.

To improve student's scientific literacy and to help strengthen teacher preparation when facing the new curriculum, and also to promote the physics education, we establish the Taiwan Physics Hub (TPH, https://sites.google.com/view/tps2highschool/home) to initiate a collaboration with senior high schools in Taiwan. TPH was launched in the end of 2020; it offers the senior high schools joining TPH scientific activities of various kinds which include (1) popular science talks on frontier physics researches (given by the society faculty members locally and remotely), (2) the Physics Bimonthly magazines for free, (3) all articles ever published in the Physics Bimonthly (integrated and categorized according to the curriculum into a web site) for free, (4) animations to introduce interesting little-known stories of physicists and physics, (5) 5-min's podcasts (suitable for students at all levels) to introduce physicists, and (6) short films to introduce stories of people who used to study physics but succeed in other areas. In addition, the Platform for Physics Practice (https://www.tps-ppp.org) was also set up in February 2020 to share experiences in and exchange ideas on developing physics practical courses (Figs. 6, 7 and 8).

Fig. 6. The inaugurating meeting of the first division (the Division of Particle and Field) at National Taiwan University on September 9, 2020

Fig. 7. The second press conference to respond to the "108 Curriculum" was held at Taipei, Taiwan on March 29, 2021

Fig. 8. The popular science talk, one of the events of Taiwan Physics Hub, to introduce senior high school students in Taoyuan how to perform VPython simulation for physics studies. Students in Hsinchu participated the talk remotely