Nobel Prize for Physics Announced

what_the_frell writes "According to this Fox News article, two Americans and a Russian won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics for research in the field of quantum physics. The trio conducted research in superconductivity and superfluidity, detailed in this official Nobel article."

Comments

Connected to the other prize

[TripleA]

The technology of supraconductors is interrestingly enough used in the magnetic camera that gave the medical prize.

MRI week?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just yesterday: Nobel Prize for medicine awarded for MRI technology.

Today, from the article:

Superconducting material is used, as an example, to produce powerful magnetic fields for the standard body scanning technique called magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.

Is this a theme this year?

Re:Bizarre huh?

[waitigetit]

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."

- Niels Bohr

Benefitted the mankind?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Nobel Prize winners should be people whose invention "benefitted the whole mankind". Did these guys theoretical research achieve that?

MRI is a great application but how much it is due to the actual theory? Incidently, the inventors of MRI already got their prize this year.

I think this prize was given out too early anyway. The jury is still out when it comes to the widespread applicability of high temperature superconductors.

** BEGIN RANT **

On a completely another note, I must confess that it often feels like that the term Physics has come to mean - at least in the layman's mind - a theoretician scribbling away on a blackboard or crunching numbers. I keep running into 3rd-4th year Physics majors who think that you're not doing real Physics unless you write and solve equations. As an experimentalist this annoys me to no end. Maths is only a language and the most elegant Physics papers are those in which the experimental results themselves speak for themselves. What is the added-value in complicated calculations in such studies? Yet, if you submit good purely experimental papers to respected journals the reviewers will bitch at you for not doing any theoretical calculations "to gain a holistic view". That's total bullshit. When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?

** END RANT **

Re:Benefitted the mankind?

[Smedrick]

I suggest you take a look at End of Science by John Horgan. I'm reading it now and most of the book is about exactly what you're ranting on. What's happening is we're getting to the point where empirical science is becoming impossible (either finacially or practically) in the field of physics. Because of this, a great deal of physics is headed towards philosophy. Everyone's conjecturing, but no one can (dis)prove anything.

I don't know if I agree with everything in the book, but it's a great read.

Re:Benefitted the mankind?

[karolo]

I think the point of asking for a theoretical treatment is very important. The theoretical treatment allows to generalise the results, and a well developed theoretical analysis of the results within the relevant framework is allways helpful to reveal new patterns, if there are any.

Anyhow, theoretical representation will most likely come after the empirical work. In the three major physical divisions (newtonian physics, electromagnetism/relativity and quantum mechanics) each theoretical framework became consistent after years of refinement to fit the empirical observations.

Re:Benefitted the mankind?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

Thanks for the book tip.

I haven't read the book, but at first glance it sounds rather odd thing to say that physical science is becoming impossible. There are vast gaps in the very fundamentals of even a venerable field such as the solid state physics. New techniques have such as femtosecond laser spectroscopy and coincidence electron spectroscopies are being developed. I do not see any practical reasons to say that empirical science is dying. If there are practical problems with the more esoteric fields such as cosmology or fundamental particles research, they've probably surfaced simply because our instrumentation has not yet matured to the required level.

One financial threat that I've personally seen and felt is that all physical science is accountable for what has been achieved by the given funding. In other words: scientists must be able to show "profitability". The problem is that scientific profitability is hard to measure in an objective way. In practise, it is often calculated by summing the number of your publications, supervised theses and various other activity such as organizing conferences with ad hoc weight factors. In more enlightened systems the number of publications is weighed by a quality factor such as journal's impact factor (again one may argue that impact factors do not tell the whole truth) but not everywhere.

The trouble here is that how can you compare the profitability of a theoretical and an experimental group? It's hard to measure anything today without spending several millions of USD on hardware and salaries. Computing, on the other hand, is cheap and most theoretically oriented groups simply have to worry about their salaries - the local university or a national computing centre will give them all the CPU time in the world for small change. Basically it boils down to this: if you do theoretical work you don't have to pay for the infrastructure.

So, when an empirical group and a theoretical group apply for money how do you compare the proposals fairly? The empirical group may require the salaries for, let's say, 5 scientists and they need $800,000 for new hardware to publish anything at all. That's over 1 million USD. Theoretical group's infrastructure, on the other hand, will require funding for the salaries and a few inexpensive Linux PCs ($500-$1000) to submit jobs to the supercomputer.

Which group do you think will be the first one to publish anything, which one will produce more papers per year and which one of them has more potential for growth in the near future?

Re:Benefitted the mankind?

[menscher]

First off, congrats to Tony. The locals have been saying it was only a matter of time before he was awarded a Nobel.

Nobel Prize winners should be people whose invention "benefitted the whole mankind". Did these guys theoretical research achieve that?

Do you think the experimentalists would be doing anything other than flailing about without great theorists like Anthony Leggett? In an awards ceremony for Tony in the physics department at UIUC a few months ago, I heard experimentalists telling of how important their interaction with him was. How most of their major contributions to science stemmed from discussions with him. How he'd politely tell them when they were wasting their time (but were welcome to continue, since they might discover something new and unexpected, like that the 0th law of thermodynamics was wrong).

When the condensed matter theory group was moved to a different building, the experimentalists were happy that they'd have theorists walking past their labs. There was even a video [warning, 156M] of them trying to catch the theorists in big nets and force them to do calculations.

When did Physics change from an empirical science into a theoretical one?

Physics has always been about understanding. From my theorist perspective, it pisses me off to see all the experimentalists that get PhDs without having the slightest clue of what they've done. They have something strange happen in an experiment, manage to reproduce it, and they've gotten themselves a PhD. It's then a theorist's job to figure out why. Of course, I'm exaggerating here. I know several good experimentalists.

Now for my own little rant:
Why does everyone constrain physics into Theory and Experiment? What about those of us that do Computational Physics? You know, like lattice QCD? Our work is necessary and important, but I can guarantee it'll never get a Nobel.

Hrmm... now I'm gonna have to listen to one of my friends say "My advisor got the Nobel Prize and yours didn't."

Re:superconductivity ain't just zero resistance

[Mac Scientist]

Possibly because superconductivity is purely a quantum mechanical phenomena, applications don't get reported a lot, because it's hard to explain how such devices work to the general public.

Superconductivity also encompasses the Josephson effect. This is where paired electrons in a superconductor, when driven by microwave frequency radio signals, can pass through a thin insulating layer. The voltage generated across this layer is proportional to the microwave frequency. Thus, the unit of voltage is now determined by Josephson effect reference standards in labs all over the world.

An additional Josephson effect is an extreme sensitivity to magnetic fields. This is employed in SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices). SQUIDS are used in detecting the magnetic fields from nerve currents in the brain, internal flaws in metal structures, or submerged submarines.

Brian Josephson won the Nobel in physics in 1973, after figuring this weird, electron tunneling effect out as a grad student in 1962.