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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
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.
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
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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). "
Einstein never won a Nobel prize for Relativity, he won it for the photoelectric effect.
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.)
Is it some 100% theoretical stuff or will it have technical repercussions in the short term ?
I just attended Frank Wilczek's press conference. He was asked this very question. His answer, in short, was "No." In medium, "The are no real-world applications I can think of." In long, "Maybe, someday, it could benefit nuclear power production because we better understand the nucleus. And there are side-benefits: the WWW was developed at CERN, and young people are inspired to science-related careers."
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