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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."
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
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.
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).
Excuse me? "Considering these guys were just doing there job"? What does that have to do with anything?
1. Your grammar needs improvement: you should have written "their" and "jobs".
2. Anyone that wins the Nobel prize in physics is an awful lot smarter and has done an awful lot more work than "just doing his job".
3. You imply that a prizewinner would deserve a larger sum if he was an amateur working in his shed. Can you justify yourself?
In fact, the original name (and one that is still used by many physicists) for the top and bottom quarks were Truth and Beauty. Now, of course, joykillers like you say that's not technical enough and that it can't be serious. As if Top and Bottom meant something more....If you want to do any anything technical, they should be called 1,2,3,4,5, and 6. Otherwise, give any name you want, they're just names.
If anyone deserves to be a little whimsical from time to time, it's the guys who sit around and figure out why the Universe is the way it is. I wasn't saying that the names aren't technical or serious enough, there's enough complexity in the name Quantum Chromodynamics to make most undergrads head's spin, they don't need the names of the elementry particles to be alpha, beta, gamma, etc.
I just find it funny that in trying to discover a theory of everything, we use a phrase from Finnegan's Wake
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
QED agrees with experiment to about 12 digits. QCD agrees (at low energies) to about 1 digit (10% accuracy). However, a lot of that is due to the fact that we can only do calculations in QCD to that level; if we could do them more accurately, QCD would probably agree better with experiment.
Theoretically, it ought to, at ridiculously high energies that we'll probably never reach, but we have no evidence of that. As far as explaining what we can actually observe, that's not a problem.
It is both an experimental fact and a prediction of QCD, although that prediction has not yet been rigorously proven (i.e., to the satisfaction of a mathematician; physicists are convinced, although a proof would still be a big deal).
I have no idea what that means. Quarks are no more nor less a "label", and no more nor less a "particle", than, say, electrons.