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.

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."