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The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics
azatht writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" jointly to
David J. Gross,
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA,
H. David Politzer
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USThe 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and
Frank Wilczek
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA."
Asymptotic freedom in the theory of the Strong Interaction
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
BBC Article
This discovery cemented the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the interactions of quarks and other subatomic particles inside the atomic nucleus.
It also filled a critical remaining gap in what physicists refer to as the Standard Model, the theory that governs physics at the microscopic scale. It accounts for the behavior of three out of nature's four fundamental forces - electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, which governs radioactive decay. Which brings us a few step forwards towards the answer of 42.
Is it some 100% theoretical stuff or will it have technical repercussions in the short term ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It just seems to me,with what little I know of research and physics, that these things are now such large scale enterprises that the awards should actually go to the institions and not the people.
http://www.geocities.com/sethseekstruth/great_out
It always amazes me how little I know when I look at what these folks do. http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty /frank_wilczek.html/
Interesting reading.
Umm, mods... That one wasn't coralized...
a tes/2004/press.html
Try this instead:
http://nobelprize.org.nyud.net:8090/physics/laure
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
If you want a good description of what Superstrings is all about, read Brian Greene's book "The Elegant Universe". It's about superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory. His book was also made into a PBS special a few months ago. Brian Greene is a master at making these complex issues understandable. And he's fun to watch too. I'm not sure how much pure research he does anymore, but he's probably one of the best things that's ever happened to science because he helps people like me understand what people like him do - and tells us why we should care!
It is long waited prize in the the High Energy Physics comunity. It wasn't awarded before because some dispute about the original idea claimed by Gerard T'Hooft but never published. Only after T'Hooft got the nobel prize in 1999 the path to the "QCD nobel prize" was really open.
... I'm glad to see freedom is alive SOMEWHERE.
http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty /frank_wilczek.html
.html
The parent's URL won't/didn't work cause it's got a slash after
As much as I'd love to have a "Theory of Everything" I think the scientific community needs to do something about the names given to the different "flavors" of quarks before we move any further with this theory. For those of you who don't know, there are six flavors of quarks that we know of, their names are (and I swear I am not making this up) Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom. Charm and Strange? Do you ever think this was a joke among physicists that just got out of hand
Although this is slightly offtopic, I recommend spending three hours behind your computer to watch Greene's NOVA program The Elegant Universe
The full history is here: Gerardus 't Hooft - Autobiography:
"At CERN, I became interested in the quark confinement problem. I could not understand why none of the expert theoreticians would embrace quantum field theories for quarks. When I asked them, why not just a pure Yang-Mills theory?, they said that field theories were inconsistent with what J.D. Bjorken had found out about scaling in the strong interactions. This puzzled me, because when I computed the scaling properties of Yang-Mills fields, they seemed to be just what one needs. I simply could not believe that no-one besides me knew how Yang-Mills theories scale. I mentioned my result verbally at a small conference at Marseille, in 1972. The only person who listened to what I said was Kurt Symanzik. He urged me to publish my result about scaling. 1f you don't, someone else will", he warned. I ignored his sensible advice. I had also made a remark about scaling in my 1971 paper on massive Yang-Mills fields. No-one had taken notice.
Veltman told me that my theory would be worthless if I could not explain why quarks cannot be isolated. He attached more importance to another project we had embarked upon: we had started a lengthy calculation concerning the renormalizability of quantum gravity models. Although complete renormalization would never be possible, it was still worth-while to study these theories at the one-loop level, and there were some important things to be learned. Our work would be continued by Stanley Deser and a fellow PhD student of Veltman's, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, who discovered patterns in the renormalization counter terms that would lead to the discovery of supergravity theories.
But I also continued to think of gauge theories for the strong interaction. Quark confinement was indeed a problem, and I started to work on it. It was this question that led me to discover the magnetic monopole solutions in Higgs theories, the large N behaviour for theories with N colours (instead of 3, the physical number), and later the very important effects due to instantons. In the mean time, the scaling properties were rediscovered by H. David Politzer and by David Gross and Frank Wilczek in 1973, who now realized that this invalidated the age-old objections against simple, pure Yang-Mills theories for the strong interactions. The pure Yang-Mills theory with gauge group SU (3) was finally being accepted as the most likely explanation for the strong interactions, and it received the beautiful name "Quantum Chromodynamics" (QCD). "
I hadn't realised that the Nobel Prize actually had a cash prize. Considering these guys were just doing there job, the payout is not bad. 10M swedish krona (763K GBP or 1.36M USD).
"for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" It's her way of saying you can approach freedom, but you will never quite get there. - not as long as I'm around.
Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago, and I actually _remember_ his explanation of asymptotic freedom to us (even though I am a only a biology guy)! I also remember Feynman's guest lecture on numerical methods for "solving" otherwise impossible problems in Quantum Mechanics (which he demonstrated with a hand calculator!). We (the undergrads) were for the most part cocky know-it-alls with no clue what a privilege it was to have these folks (and many others of their caliber) teaching us up close and personal. Now, I look back with amazement at being able to discuss/joke/plead with these folks like it was no big deal. Seriously, if there are any gung-ho Slashlings out there looking for an intense science education, Caltech is hard to beat. Of course, if hazy memory serves in this matter, more than half the class flunked that first Phys1 midterm, so this is not for the faint of heart...
I realise I may be feeding a troll, but too many people have that serious opinion. Let me jsut layout some coutner arguements:
Relativity is not 'useless' satalite communication would not be work if we didn't make relitivistic corrections. So unless you consider cellphones "worthless", then the theory is worthwhile. Not only does cellphone technology rely on satalites, but also on the precise atomic clocks contained with in them. And those atomic clocks rely on our quantum mechanical understanding of atoms. Thats not to say that this particular research directly led to our widespread cellphone usage, but its just an example of how much basic research affects our daily lives.
Now, every now and then pure mathematicians will come up with an obscure field that they will decalre as being unaplicable to anything ever ( see group theory). Then a few years later a group of physicsists will discover that it has a real application in physics. Then they will speculate wildly about the potential applications in an attempt to gain greater funding, while privately thinking that it has no possible use. Then some crazy engineer will discover some such use ( usually one the physicists never thought of) and whoila it has a real world benifit to all of mankind. The more tools we have to solve problems, the easier the problems become. The tools have a trickle down effect. More mathematical tools lead to more physics tools which lead to more engineering tools which lead to more solutions to our everyday problems.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Sure, no problem, we'll let you off as soon as you donate all your money to charity, then we'll let you go!
Top and Bottom were originally known as Truth and Beauty. Okay maybe not originally, but I've sure seen them presented that way. Hell I even saw Feynman refuse to name them in his QED Lecture Series, and I'm betting it's because he couldn't bring himself to call them Truth and Beauty.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
I hear that eating geek liver increases ones life expectancy by an average of 1 year per pound.
Not for the geek, of course... for the consumer...
A Politzer prize!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is where we pretend we care about the nobel prize in physics for a day.
Now back to Linux.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The closer the quarks are, the more free they reign.
:-)
The farther apart the more force is exerted on them.
They describe it as an elastic band. It sound more like the 'proximity' provides some kind of countering effect, which is removed when they drift apart, or indeed, merely they reach the boundary of thier movement (this is me know knows nothing about all this stuff)
But it does say that we know nothing about gravity, where it comes form, what its favourite colour is, or, perhaps topically, who it will vote for.
It says something about humanity, they don't see something until it falls on thier head (literally).
I used to think that gravity shouldn't be explained, but bouyancy. If you know why things float, you know why things fall.
c'mon I was like 4 years old. The only rubber sheet I had heard of was my matress. Yes, I wet the bed. *hands head in shame*
I stopped well before my 22nd birthday though
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Currently all of our engineering physics is based on electricity and magnetism which depends on electrons and whole protons & their anti-particles (PET scans), plus radioactivity which depends on the weak force. However the math of the strong force was worked out first due to the weird large hadron zoo particle physicists discovered in the 1950s and 1960s. Then this mathematics was extended to unify two of the other forces- weak with E&M.
Big engineering breakthroughs are anticipated if gravitation can be added to this mix. This predicts blackholes, wormholes, non-inertial acceleration and other possibilities. So far standard unification mathematics hasnt worked. And exotic math like strings hasnt made a testable prediction yet.
Don't attribute the theory of the strong interaction to these guys! That mostly already went to Gell-Mann in 1969. What these guys did was explain asymptotic freedom, which explains why, in the already-invented theory of the strong interaction, free quarks can't be seen. (Before them, everyone knew experimentally that they couldn't be seen, and we had a theory which supposedly could explain it, but nobody actually knew how to extract that particular prediction from the theory.)
Actually, Gell-Mann originally decided to call them red, white, and blue, in honor of the French flag. (Not sure why; he's American!) But it made more sense to change it to red, green, and blue, which (as light) combine to a neutral color (white), suggestive of the fact that quarks are bound into color-neutral configurations.
Two of the winners are in their mid 50's. But the work they won the prize for was done over 30 years ago. That means they were in their early to mid 20's at the time!
-"It seems like you're trying to exploit a security hole. Would you like help?"
All comments and, especially, corrections, greatly welcomed.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
The article at this time has an extra phrase, "The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics" stuck in between Politzer and Wilczek. It's missing some commas, too. At this point it appears that the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics went to, among others, the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. It will be interesting to hear the Prize give its own acceptance speech. Perhaps the medal itself will be carried to the podium and placed by the microphone so we can learn about its insights into quantum theory. At least it's better than having the winner be an inanimate carbon rod.
Back when I was at CalTech in the early 80's (studying physics myself), a friend named Scott Lewicki, and his friend Doug Priest got David Politzer to record a rap song called The Simple Harmonic Oscillator Rap.
Google doesn't find me an MP3 of it, but the lyrics are in this PDF document. Search in the text of the document for "Politzer" and you'll find the lyrics.
You can purchase it on a CD called Physics Pholk Songs for $15.00.
Here's the first verse:
Enjoy!Request your free CD of my piano music.
The physics person sees...
...(uuuhhh words, words, words, uh... blah).
azatht writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" jointly to David J. Gross, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, H. David Politzer California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USThe 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Frank Wilczek Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA."
The others see...
azatht writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Click here to watch it.
What is this crap and why do you use it.
That link is completely slashdotted, or down in some other way, while the original link is fine.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
Asymptotic freedom
In the early 1970s several theorists working independently discovered that the strong force between quarks becomes weaker at smaller distances and that it becomes stronger as the quarks move apart, thus preventing the separation of an individual quark. This is completely unlike the behaviour of the electromagnetic force. The quarks have been compared to prisoners on a chain gang. When they are close together, they can move freely and do not notice the chains binding them. If one quark/prisoner tries to move away, however, the strength of the chains is felt and escape is prevented. This behaviour has been attributed to the fact that the virtual gluons that flit between the quarks within a hadron are not neutral but carry mixtures of colour and anticolour. The farther away a quark moves, the more gluons appear, each contributing to the net force. When the quarks are close together, they exchange fewer gluons and the force is weaker. Only at infinitely close distances are quarks free, an effect known as asymptotic freedom.
The strong coupling between the quarks and gluons makes QCD a difficult theory to study. Mathematical procedures that work in QED cannot be used in QCD. The theory has nevertheless had a number of successes in describing the observed behaviour of particles in experiments, and theorists are confident that it is the correct theory to use for describing the strong nuclear force.
----
quantum chromodynamics
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
the theory that describes the action of the strong nuclear force. QCD was constructed on analogy to quantum electrodynamics (QED), the quantum theory of the electromagnetic force. In QED, the electromagnetic interactions of charged particles are described through the emission and subsequent absorption of massless photons, best known as the "particles" of light; such interactions are not possible between uncharged, electrically neutral particles. The strong force is observed to behave in a similar way, acting only upon certain particles, principally quarks that are bound together in the protons and neutrons of the atomic nucleus, as well as in less stable, more exotic forms of matter. So by analogy with QED, quantum chromodynamics has been built upon the concept that quarks interact via the strong force because they carry a form of "strong charge," which has been given the name of colour; other particles, such as the electron, which do not carry the colour charge, do not interact in this way.
In QED there are only two values for electric charge, positive and negative, or charge and anticharge. To explain the behaviour of quarks in QCD, by contrast, there need to be three different types of colour charge, each of which can occur as colour or anticolour. The three types of charge are called red, green, and blue in analogy to the primary colours of light, although there is no connection whatsoever with colour in the usual sense.
Colour-neutral particles occur in one of two ways. In baryons (i.e., particles built from three quarks, as, for example, protons and neutrons), the three quarks are each of a different colour, and a mixture of the three colours produces a particle that is neutral. Mesons, on the other hand, are built from pairs of quarks and antiquarks, and in these the anticolour of the antiquark neutralizes the colour of the quark, much as positive and negative electric charges cancel each other to produce an electrically neutral object.
Quarks interact via the strong force by exchanging particles called gluons. In contrast to QED, where the photons exchanged are electrically neutral, the gluons of QCD also carry colour charges. To allow all the possible interactions between the three colours of quarks, there must be eight gluons, each of which generally carries a mixture of a colour and an anticolour of a different kind.
Because gluons carry colour, they can interact among the
After you left, Politzer became famous at Caltech for other reasons: Sloth.
As of the early 90s, he had done literally nothing of interest besides his teaching. There was a lot of grumbling on the part his fellow faculty members -- to the point that Politzer circulated a (locally) famous memo about 1990, where he announced he'd be returning to research. But just barely -- I think he's done a half-dozen papers in the past 10 years.
Moral of the story: If your graduate work is brilliant enough, you can demand tenure at a prestigious university spend three decades coasting to a Nobel. Wish I could have pulled that of....
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
The Nobel was given for QCD, i.e. a real physical theory.
... unless you remember that String Theory was once a theory of Hadrons ... but then again you might also remember that there was a string theory (unrelated) for atoms that was thought to explain the periodic table.
String Theory is an unfinished, unfalsifiable, and unaccomplished Theory of Everything that combines Gravity with the 3 particle forces. This has no relation to the point of topic
Mondo mistake on "le Monde", France's #1 newspaper:
1 3-0,36-381840,0.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_articleweb/1,
Quote: "David Gross, 63 ans, physicien de l'université de Californie à Berkeley, David Politzer, professeur à Pasadena, au California Institute of Technology, et Frank Wilczek, 53 ans, professeur au Massachusetts Institute of Technology, se partageront le prix, doté comme chaque Nobel de 10 millions de couronnes suédoises (1,1 million d'euros)."
According to them, Dr. Gross was from UC Berkeley and not UCSB.
They get accolades for reverse engineering, but others get....well okay I guess the building blocks aren't protected under the DMCA, yet.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236