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2011 Nobel Prize In Physics
brindafella writes "Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. The two teams have now been recognized with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Half of the prize will go to Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project. The other half will be shared by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who led the High-z Supernova Search Team, and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who worked on High-z. In essence, they proved that Einstein's 'biggest mistake' (the cosmological constant, to create a 'stable universe') was actually a clever theoretical prediction that there was something else happening — dark energy."
Dark energy is the name of a problem, not a solution. It's embarrassing that 75% of the universe is made up of we-have-no-idea-what.
Until we have some understanding of the (assumed) new physics responsible, I don't think anyone can say.
You might be thinking of the Peace Prize. The scientific ones are awarded for work which has withstood the tests of time. Without checking, I think that to get a Nobel in physics for work done a mere decade ago is unusually fast.
I get that this is the Nobel prize - but these people appear to have already accomplished something. Indeed, the noteworthy achievement for which they are receiving the prize is over a decade in the past. I thought the Nobel prize was awarded to encourage responsible action?
As noted, this is the Nobel Prize in Physics, which is to be awarded to "the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics"
Look at the photo at the linked article - three white males.
OK, fine. Yeah, the physics prize has mostly gone to white males, but there's C. V. Raman (if "Indian" counts as "non-white"), Hideki Yukawa, Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen Ning Yang, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Leo Esaki, Samuel C. C. Ting, Abdus Salam (if "Pakistani" counts as "non-white"), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (see previous comments), Steven Chu, Daniel C. Tsui, Masatoshi Koshiba, Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa, Yoichiro Nambu, and Charles K. Kao. Oh, yeah, and Marie Skodowska Curie and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.
By the way, what the hell is up with "dividing" a Nobel prize like it's some sort of peach pie? Half for one white male, while the other two share the other half?
Not all "most important [discoveries] or [inventions] within the field of physics" - or any of the other fields for which there are Nobel prizes - can be uniquely credited to one individual. (And sometimes it's split between Asians, or between an Asian and a white guy, or.... :-))
Who comes up with this stuff?
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Hint: you may think that as a random geek with a /. account and an opinion, you're smarter than they all are. That is not necessarily the case. HTH.)
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [nobelprize.org]. (Hint: you may think that as a random geek with a /. account and an opinion, you're smarter than they all are. That is not necessarily the case. HTH.)
/. readers are a pretty well informed bunch (with a few notable exceptions, don't make me come down there and spank you) and given time to debate to a consensus would probably do just as well.
OTOH, it might be. As my Ph.D. advisor (Larry Biedenharn, a Nobel wannabe) used to ask me -- "How do you think they choose who gets the award?" Generally I think they do a pretty good job -- they have the same problem as the Oscar committee, they have to reward people for some specific piece of work but some people up are really being proposed (and perhaps occasionally awarded) for a lifetime of many submarginal contributions, so they'll sometimes grant a prize that at first glance seems "odd". But
Your remarks concerning color- and gender- blindness of the committee are dead on the money; the Nobel prize goes to the physics far more than the person, and we absolutely revere physicists of any color or gender who make "great" contributions. In physics especially people just don't really give a damn; brilliance is where you find it. If there is a fault leading to a disparity in the distribution of prizes in physics, it is in the general educational and social system that feeds graduate research programs and beyond -- in the US (and probably Europe) females and certain minorities are still underrepresented in the system in spite of decades (at this point) of active recruiting. However, this really is getting better, and I'd predict that in two more decades will be a non-issue. I've seen a huge shift in the time I've been teaching physics, from having basically one black physics major every decade (first decade) to having black majors every year, including black students who top out the class with the best overall score (in damn difficult classes!). In another decade those students will come online and we'll see prizes headed that way.
Attracting female majors is still behind -- we're still a long way from 50% in the intro-majors classes I've been teaching, more like 20-25% in a good year -- but the ones we're getting are great, I've had women nailing the top THREE slots in intro physics classes total scorewise, and again I think that they are "sticking" and going on to academic careers that will eventually lead to more prizes. Our department has certainly been actively recruiting female and nonwhite faculty -- our current department chair is both female and not white, although we are probably still a decade plus away from parity due to the fact that no matter what it takes time to roll over tenured physics positions and race/gender is only ONE consideration in hiring/recruiting, secondary to competence and ability to fund research and teach and all that.
I won't say that there are no bastions of white maleness out there in physics-land, but I would say that they are a rapidly diminishing population, and that the real place changes need to take place (and are taking place) is elementary school and high school. Physics requires serious math, and there has been an enormous female anti-math social bias entrenched across the teen years forever that is just recently starting to thaw. Math majoring has gotten to where it is very nearly general balanced (still not balanced at the faculty level, though -- the same decadal lag) and I think physics is not far behind as it is now "cool" and socially "feminine" for women to be good at math in high school. I may be dead before things are really level, but my kids won't be. rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Dark matter and dark energy are just our versions of the epicycles. Convent for expressing what we see but no basis in reality.
You can only be confident about something like that if you're incredibly impatient, and don't know much about how hard this stuff is. The earliest observational evidence of dark matter came from the 1930s, when Fritz Zwicky measured the line-of-sight velocities of galaxies in clusters and realized that there had to be more mass in clusters than could be attributed to the galaxies alone, or there wouldn't be enough gravity to keep them together as a cluster. It was another 30+ years later that we observed with X-ray telescopes a decent-sized chunk of that missing mass in clusters, in the form of a hot intracluster plasma at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees that fills the space between galaxies in clusters and, in rich clusters of galaxies, contributes several times more mass to the cluster than the galaxies within it. Thirty-plus years, for something that's fairly easy to see once you have the technology that can look there (X-ray telescopes); it took us a while to get it.
All our cosmological theories may turn out to be complete crap. But it's absurd to say so now on the basis of complaints like 'we haven't solved the dark matter problem yet' or 'we can't explain a nonzero vacuum energy.' There was a fair amount of time between Oersted and Maxwell, as well. In the meantime, the most plausible theories will get pursued, and we'll see.