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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."
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!
"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it."
- Niels Bohr
I could care less, but not without a lobotomy
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.
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!
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
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
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.