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Nobel Prizes for Physics Awarded to Smart People
bobol6 writes "The 2002 Nobel Prize for Physics is out. The $1 Million is split two ways: Riccardo Giacconi gets half for building the first X-Ray telescopes, and Raymond Davis, Jr and Masatoshi Koshiba split the other half. Davis invented the water tank neutrino detector, and Koshiba used a more sophisticated one to discover neutrino oscillation. The original press release is available . News articles can be found at Science Daily and The New York Times. (Free Blah di Blah)"
With these methods researcher can now quickly reveal what proteins are present in a sample.
It's also possible to visualise proteins in 3D with these methods.
The methods have revolutionised the development of new drugs and show promise in areas as food qualit control and diagnosing breast cancer and prostate cancer.
(all according to a Swedish on-line article)
Googlefied NYT article for your enjoyment
Who run Barter Town?
Not possible. Paragraph four of the statutes of the Nobel foundation clearly states that a maximum of three people can share a prize.
It's even been mentioned in the television series (where the laureates of the year are interviewed) by some US physicists that they did indeed have that in mind when applying for grants etc. I.e. not to be more than tree eligible researchers not to spoilt their chanses.
Check out the statues of the Nobel Foundation.
Stefan Axelsson
I believe the Japanese guy that received the prize worked at the Super-Kamiokande detector that damaged half of its photo-multiplyer tubes in a big implosion.
Famous quote at the time of the incident: Thank goodness we got our Nobel already cooking
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Davis built the Homestake experiment, which was a radiochemical experiment to look for solar neutrinos. NOT a water-Cerenkov experiment.
Kamiokande (Koshiba's experiment)was a water-Cerenkov experiment, however the IMB experiment (another water-Cerenkov experiment, near Cleveland) also saw the neutrinos from supernova 1987A *and* IMB had an atomic clock, so they could get accurate arrival times, which the japanese experiment couldn't.
Kamiokande confirmed Davis' results, but so did gallium experiments in what was then the USSR and in Italy.
Reality or nothing.
For a very long time, Ray Davis stood alone in saying there was a deficit of electron type neutrinos coming from the sun, despite criticisms that his experiment must be wrong.
Koshiba started Kamiokande which begat Super-Kamiokande, which (along with IMB) confirmed Ray's results but also showed oscillations in atmospheric neutrinos and pushed proton decay lifetime limits further than any other experiment.
These experiments fundamentally changed our view of neutrinos. So, yes, I think their originators each deserve a Nobel of their own, let alone 1/4 of one.
Simple explanation: There isn't any Nobel Prize in Economics. There is, however, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel -- but while people call it a Nobel prize, it isn't, and the money for it comes from the Bank of Sweden (not from the Nobel trust).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Congrats to Mr. Giacconi for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research into X-ray emissions in outer space.
It was his research with sounding rockets, the UHURU satellite and the Einstein satellite that made it possible to study unusual astronomical objects such as black holes and pulsars and allow us to peer much more closely at nebulas and other astronomical objects that have befuddled astronomers before Giacconi's pioneering work. It was his work that made it possible for the development of the NASA Chandra and ESA XMM-Newton X-ray observatory satellites.
Davis's detector was a tank of perchloroethylene. Neutrinos occassionally transmuted chlorine atoms into radioactive argon atoms, which could be swept out by helium sparging and their individual decays detected separately.
The history of the world argues rather strongly against the proposition that there is any correlation between religion and "ethical IQ" at all.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I see it coming: "Our next speaker, Prof. Inodoro Pereyra, 1/8th of the Nobel Prize 2004"
Well, currently the prize can't be split by more than three people.
However, there are some discussion about changing that. The reason is that more and more often new discoveries come through joint efforts among many groups. The lone theoretician whith a blackboard is not so common any more.
Swedish Tor
first was Michelson-Morley experiment (Michelson 1881, Morley 1887) with the goal of measuring the drift speed of the ether with respect to the Earth.
The result, if I remember correctly, could not really be explained by either moving or immobile ether (ether was believed to be a light carrying medium).
That was when Lorentz came up with his famous Lorentz transformations to explain the results (1892) - I don't know why so many people believe Einstein developed everything in relativity theory alone and from scratch. It was Lorentz of course who came up with the Lorentz transformations, as the name suggests, i.e. he was the first to suggest that the time and the dimensions contract/expand for the moving objects.
What Einstein essentially did was to take all the largely empirical formulae, and tie them up in one beautiful theory which explained them all. He said that the Lorentz transformations are themselves only a direct result of the fact that the space is not Galilean, it is in fact not space, but space-time, one and unseparable.
Einstein abolished the idea of ether, postulated that the speed of light in vacuum is constant (natural explanation for M-M experiment). Basicly Einstein managed to explain all the weirdness seen in the experimental results with a beautiful theory that not only answered the questions of 'how' (Lorentz almost did it) but most importantly the question of 'why'.
Einstein was also the first to trash the electric and magnetic fields and say that they too were one single entity, an electromagnetic field.
so yes, Einstein based his theory on experimental evidence - most notably, M-M experiment and the fact that the Maxwell laws (confirmed experimentally) didn't want to obey the usual Galilean transformations.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
You are absolutely correct. However, the Nobel Foundation corruptly obscures this fact and treats the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" just like a real Nobel Prize on its web site. The award is totally politicized, disproportionately awarded to the U of Chicago school, and frequently goes to fringe cranks like Ronald Coase.
The great economist Gunnar Myrdal, who sat on the board of the Bank of Sweden, argued for the prize's abolition. In 1974 Myrdal shared the award with Freidrich Hayek. Basically, Myrdal felt that if ideologue hacks like Freidman and Hayek won the prize it was meaningless.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin