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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."
Two American citizens and a Russian won the 2003 Nobel Prize (search) in physics for their work in the bizarre field of quantum physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said
It's interesting that the RSAS thinks that quantum physics is bizarre. Thanks Fox.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
Not that it really matters, but it's actually two Russians and a Brit (although two of them do hold dual citizenship with the US).
Point is, if you're going to bother mentioning it in the story, then get it right. Otherwise (maybe better) don't mention it as it doesn't really matter...
The technology of supraconductors is interrestingly enough used in the magnetic camera that gave the medical prize.
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?
The winners will continue their research into superfluidity this evening, at the bar.
Well GWB has been nominated for the Peace Nobel Prize 2003!
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 **
BOO! TERRO
Directly [clipped] from the article:
Alexei A. Abrikosov
Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, USA... born 1928 (75 years) in Moscow
Vitaly L. Ginzburg
P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia... born 1916 (87 years) in Moscow
Anthony J. Leggett
University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, USA... born 1938 (65 years) in London
So, yes, 2 Russians and a Brit... But also 2 Americans and a Russian. Don't be so picky. I was born in Erie Pennsylvania, but I tell everyone I'm from Cleveland Ohio because that's where I live and work now.
Karma: NaN
What's also astonishing is that one university (Dept of Physics and the Beckman Institute at University of Illinois at Urbana) can claim TWO nobel prizes this year -- Paul Lauterbur (Medicine, for MRI) and Tony Leggett (Physics). Quite impressing.
... got the subject wrong, they are from the same university...
Huh? I thought any remark on superfluidity would be redundant. Well, here I am...
Pure zero resistance would prevent electric fields from entering a block of superconductor (the change in magnetic fields will induce eddy currents) to counter any change in the local magnetic field) and this effect is called perfect diamagnetism.
The Meissner effect is different: it's a phase change effect -- it takes energy to expel the magnetic field. If the magnetic field is strong enough, the material may never superconduct. In any case, the transition temperature T_c is actually a function of the local magnetic field.
Furthermore, if you boost the field enough, you can quench the superconductivity and initiate resistance heating -- it can get nasty with high currents. Is the magnetic expulsion perfect? Sometimes it is, and sometimes not, because of flux pinning.
Since we often want to use superconductors to either make high magnetic fields (like in magnetic resonance imagers) or to carry large currents (that induce high magnetic fields) the Meissner Effect, and the magnetic dependence of the transition temperature are important considerations for practical superconductors.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
This year they will share 10,000,000 SEK, that is approx 1,300,000 USD or 1,100,000 EUR. Except from that they will get a medal presented by the Swedish king.
I thought modern Americans attend college only to learn about racial diversity and take up some Women Studies courses.
/. editors.
Basically, you're right. The "two Americans" were not educated in the USA, nor did they do their prizewinning research in the USA, nor were they US citizens when they did it. In other words, the original posting was up to the usual standard of
.. but I'm not sure why you included the other link. Just because buddy finds some of modern physics incomprehensible doesn't mean it's wrong.
Have a look at actual physics research over the last 30 years and you'll be reassured by its practicality, empirical backup and reasonability. Spend too much time reading pop science summaries (which are written to be entertaining, often by people with incomplete understanding) and you'll be convinced physicists are nutjobs.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
"What could you use this for?"
I don't know, but if you hum a few more bars, I'll fake it.
This begs the question: If John Williams gets an MRI, does he immediately become a super conductor?
Tim
On your other note: Personally, I only know Leggett (from my time at the UIUC). In my view, he represents what one can admire in a theoretician; in some sense, he is above this world: shy with other people and bold in developing new theories (and very british). Pure experimentalists may be useful, but without theoretical grasp they are no great physicists. As a physics PhD in condensed matter theory I am not impartial, of course.
Although I'm a bit upset. I thought SCO would win for their great leaps in temproal (god I hope I spelled that right) time travel.
It means that the guy who wrote that article does not have a clue. Or at least he has an agenda. The theories of 20th century physics, Special Relativity, General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quentum Electro Dynamics etc have stood up to ever exeriment. In the case of QED the theory agrees with the exeriments to some thing like 15 significant digits.
I just finished a BA in physics doing some research, and I can say this guy is full of it. Though some of the string theory is not verifiable. But I know someone who is working on it.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Well, not that surprising - Leggett joined in 1983, by which time he'd already done the work for which he has now been awarded the Nobel Prize. So if you're congratulating institutions, congratulate the University of Sussex, where he did the work.
According to Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, it is a tea kettle.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The winners of the Physics prize are all old men, the youngest being 65 and the oldest 87. They did their groundbreaking research during the Cold War environment, when governments invested heavily in basic science research. One wonders if the same caliber of science research is being conducted today that are worthy of future Nobels. Physics research was dealt a heavy blow when Congress decided to kill the Superconducting Supercollider Project in 1990, which still remains, unfinished and abandoned, in Texas, as a kind of a modern-day Stonehenge. Many of the famous institutions, such as Bell Labs, are a shell of their former selves. Private industry labs, such as those of IBM, which used to support basic science research without qualms, are now hesitant to fund research that does not bear any immediate commercial benefits. The federal goverment does not have any well-stated policy for insuring the scientific leadership of the nation. The young people of today do not aspire to become scientists or engineers, having been brain-damaged by an MTV culture. The current state of research itself has become ridiculous. Whereas, in the past, people were interested in lasers, superconductors, and fusion, now, serious science has been reduced to the level of how to bake a better cookie from the oven.
-- I hereby announce, on behalf of my great ancester Oog, a retroactive patent on THE WHEEL.
I find it ironic that the author talks about how knowledge is only gained through hard work, and today's physicists are just lazy - yet quantum mechanics represents a collosal achievement that resists all attempts at falsification.
To wit - Tony Leggett, today's nobel prize winner for superfluidity, began his research as an attempt to discredit quantum mechanics. His final results, instead, became (yet another) stunning confirmation of the quantum theory's incredible accuracy in describing the physical world.
Slightly offtopic, but did you hear who won the Nobel Literature Prize this year? I was listening to the radio and heard the announcer say this man's name over and over again, and could have sworn he was saying something else... something much more sinister and horrifying.
The winner? Mr. Coetzee. I'm not making this up.
Now that's one body of work I'd think twice about perusing.
I can't wait to eat that monkey...
I noticed the signs at Loomis this morning when I went to my Physics 114 lecture (which just happens to be about quantum physics ^_^). I agree, this is very cool.
And an outstanding football team. Oh, no, that's right, we suck ass.
We do have the world's largest fraternity system, though.
It's interesting that one of America's top universities (overall, number 42, IIRC, according to the US News report, in the top 10 in most engineering disciplines, and is/has recently been the number 1 econ/accounting/finance school) is also the number 4 party school. The mix of both work and play is one of the reasons I love it here so much.
I don't know if anyone cares on bit, but I would just like to say that I go to the same high school that Anthony J. Leggett, attended, in Sidney, Ohio. Actually, there are 2 schools, the public and private one. I go to the private one...same thing ;)
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.
So you want two things: 1) for the discovery to be a fundamental theory, and 2) for there to be applications available. But applications doesn't mean something you buy off the shelves. There are a NUMBER of situations where the phenomena involved for the award have been used for products or other research.
Fundamental research doesn't usually end up with an off-the-shelf product in one step.
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?
Because if you don't understand what's going on, you're not doing science. This doesn't mean you need an endless string of differential equations, but unless you arrange your data in some fashion that it obeys some underlying theory or rule, then you aren't a scientist, you're a technician.
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?
It didn't. I don't know of any time in the last 50 years where you could submit a bunch of data and experimental descriptions without an understanding of what happened and get published. Now that's not to say that doing theory without data is a good idea either (what would be the point)?
Ultimately, science is the (1) formulation of a theory that fits data, then the testing of that theory, and if the new data doesn't fit the theory, GOTO (1).
Also, if you're trying to publish something, and you keep getting the same response from a number of different reviewers, that might tell you something, no offense. If you like, post a link to whatever you are trying to publish, and hell, I'll look at it.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Interesting comment. I have personally noticed a difference in the quality of the material written by Ayn Rand herself, and by that written by some of her modern followers.
Amazing magic tricks
Isn't the only way to lose US citizenship (except perhaps death) through the Patriot Act II, where you can be stripped of it?
And the other university that can claim two Nobels this year is the University is Nottingham. Having already celebrated Sir Peter Mansfield's Nobel Prize in Medicine, can now celebrate one of their graduates and ex employees (worked there until nine years ago) being awarded the Economics prize.