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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.
The winners will continue their research into superfluidity this evening, at the bar.
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
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!
Let me elaborate a bit on your rather narrow-minded comment: superconductivity (SC) was discovered 1911 by K. Onnes. Not until 1935 F. London came up with a macroscopic description of the effect which explained the magnetic part of the problem, but not much further than that. 18 years leater in 1953 Ginzburg and Landau came up with a phenomenological approach (GL theory) which actually explained MANY things without the knowledge of the underlying microscopic mechanism. This was a great breaktrough because you could actually start to PREDICT things without knowing how it really worked in the guts. In particular they were of great importance in realizing that there are two types of SCs (I and II) from which only type II are relevant for industry. Type I "die" soon with small fields and have transition temperatures which are only a few K. Even though in 1957 Bardeen, Cooper and Shriffer (BCS) explained the microscopic theory of SC, GL theory remained one of the most important approaches to understand novel phases, such as the intermediate (Abrikosov) vortex phase in type II SCs. Type II SCs are important in industry because they remain superconducting for high fields. Problem is, you get vortices in the system. Abrikosov (who got also a Nobel medal) was the first to predict that these vortices make a lattice and constitute a NOVEL state of matter (within matter). In the meantime one has als high-T_c superconductors (the stuff MRI machines use) and for these NEW materials there is NO understanding on how SC works. BUT for these materials the Ginzburg Landau theory still applies and often makes predictions on how things will behave. Therefore THEORY IS IMPORTANT and these gentlemen deserve the award. As for Legett: he made important contributions in the world of superfluids as well as Bose Einstein condensation. IMHO his work on quantum tunneling with dissipation is the best. To summarize: no MRI with no GL theory.
As for your little rant: Theory and Experiment (and today also computational physics) should be COMPLEMENTARY to each other. You find many theory papers which do not seem to be close to reality. This does not mean they are garbage. It means that they are ahead of industrial applications. Often one sees experimental papers which simply say: "I measured this and look how cute it is". but they lack of ANY physical understanding. Now you tell me, which one is worse? Clearly Math is the language of Physics. But you need to know how to write in a languagel before you can create a nice poem... If as an experimentalist you do not even know how to "write", how can you then understand the theory pertinent to your experiment? All you are at that stage is an observer... and as we all know: everyone can observe.
It seems as if some experimentalists carry a large chip on the shoulder???
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."