Nobel Prizes for Physics Awarded to Smart People 140
bobol6 writes "The 2002 Nobel Prize for Physics is out. The $1 Million is split two ways: Riccardo Giacconi gets half for building the first X-Ray telescopes, and Raymond Davis, Jr and Masatoshi Koshiba split the other half. Davis invented the water tank neutrino detector, and Koshiba used a more sophisticated one to discover neutrino oscillation. The original press release is available . News articles can be found at Science Daily and The New York Times. (Free Blah di Blah)"
Chemistry prize shared between (Score:5, Informative)
With these methods researcher can now quickly reveal what proteins are present in a sample.
It's also possible to visualise proteins in 3D with these methods.
The methods have revolutionised the development of new drugs and show promise in areas as food qualit control and diagnosing breast cancer and prostate cancer.
(all according to a Swedish on-line article)
google (Score:3, Informative)
Re:lets have more winners (Score:5, Informative)
Not possible. Paragraph four of the statutes of the Nobel foundation clearly states that a maximum of three people can share a prize.
It's even been mentioned in the television series (where the laureates of the year are interviewed) by some US physicists that they did indeed have that in mind when applying for grants etc. I.e. not to be more than tree eligible researchers not to spoilt their chanses.
Check out the statues of the Nobel Foundation [nobel.se].
Kamiokande (Score:5, Informative)
Famous quote at the time of the incident: Thank goodness we got our Nobel already cooking [caltech.edu]
Re:Chemistry prize shared between (Score:5, Informative)
Motivations: "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules" (John B Fenn, Koichi Tanaka) and "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution" (Kurt Wüthrich).
get the experiments right! (Score:5, Informative)
Kamiokande (Koshiba's experiment)was a water-Cerenkov experiment, however the IMB experiment (another water-Cerenkov experiment, near Cleveland) also saw the neutrinos from supernova 1987A *and* IMB had an atomic clock, so they could get accurate arrival times, which the japanese experiment couldn't.
Kamiokande confirmed Davis' results, but so did gallium experiments in what was then the USSR and in Italy.
Go to the source! (Score:5, Informative)
Davis and Koshiba (Score:2, Informative)
Koshiba started Kamiokande which begat Super-Kamiokande, which (along with IMB) confirmed Ray's results but also showed oscillations in atmospheric neutrinos and pushed proton decay lifetime limits further than any other experiment.
These experiments fundamentally changed our view of neutrinos. So, yes, I think their originators each deserve a Nobel of their own, let alone 1/4 of one.
Re:get the experiments right! (Score:2, Informative)
The neutrino events were found on the data tapes some days (or weeks) later. The Kamiokande experiment just had a drifting computer clock to tell the time. No GPS. No NTP. IIRC, they were several minutes off and had no way to correct.
There are important results that hinge on having the correct time (to within milliseconds) of the neutrino burst (neutrino mass limits, supernova models, etc.), and Kamiokande had to try and match their events with IMBs to try and get the time.
Frankly, I think IMB and Kamiokande should have gotten the prize for 1987A, but they don't like to split Nobel's too many ways...
Re:The Nobels lost their innocence in 1969 (Score:5, Informative)
Kudos to Riccardo Giacconi (Score:4, Informative)
It was his research with sounding rockets, the UHURU satellite and the Einstein satellite that made it possible to study unusual astronomical objects such as black holes and pulsars and allow us to peer much more closely at nebulas and other astronomical objects that have befuddled astronomers before Giacconi's pioneering work. It was his work that made it possible for the development of the NASA Chandra and ESA XMM-Newton X-ray observatory satellites.
Davis didn't invent a 'water tank detector' (Score:2, Informative)
Re:get the experiments right! (Score:2, Informative)
disclaimer: IANA astrophysicist.
I am simply asking what the arrival times are good for. To the unitiated, it does not seem to matter if the precision is by the second rather than the microsecond, and that it doesn't really matter if the computer clock is off by several minutes and has the precision of a wristwatch.
This is in the context of the uspernova event, I guess.
IIRC neutrino bursts from SN tell us about events deep inside the supernova, since EM radiation interacts with the plasma the star is made of, it is absorbed and reemited, and therefore all the efects are slower than c. IIRC the shockwave is about 2 orders of magnitude slower.
Neutrinos, however, (almost) do not interact, so they leave the star at c. To get the speed of the shockwave, you need to compare the time of nutrino and EM bursts.
The radius of the sun is about 3 light-seconds. A SN star is typicaly not very much larger, so comparing the time of neutrino-burst with the time of EM radiation pulse needs to be done at seconds, or tens of seconds accuracy, so mircoseconds will not help you, but OTOH minutes will probably hurt you.
Re:Richard Feynman used to boast. . . (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Legacy of Einstein (Score:2, Informative)
Well, currently the prize can't be split by more than three people.
However, there are some discussion about changing that. The reason is that more and more often new discoveries come through joint efforts among many groups. The lone theoretician whith a blackboard is not so common any more.
Swedish Tor
Re:The Legacy of Einstein (Score:2, Informative)
first was Michelson-Morley experiment (Michelson 1881, Morley 1887) with the goal of measuring the drift speed of the ether with respect to the Earth.
The result, if I remember correctly, could not really be explained by either moving or immobile ether (ether was believed to be a light carrying medium).
That was when Lorentz came up with his famous Lorentz transformations to explain the results (1892) - I don't know why so many people believe Einstein developed everything in relativity theory alone and from scratch. It was Lorentz of course who came up with the Lorentz transformations, as the name suggests, i.e. he was the first to suggest that the time and the dimensions contract/expand for the moving objects.
What Einstein essentially did was to take all the largely empirical formulae, and tie them up in one beautiful theory which explained them all. He said that the Lorentz transformations are themselves only a direct result of the fact that the space is not Galilean, it is in fact not space, but space-time, one and unseparable.
Einstein abolished the idea of ether, postulated that the speed of light in vacuum is constant (natural explanation for M-M experiment). Basicly Einstein managed to explain all the weirdness seen in the experimental results with a beautiful theory that not only answered the questions of 'how' (Lorentz almost did it) but most importantly the question of 'why'.
Einstein was also the first to trash the electric and magnetic fields and say that they too were one single entity, an electromagnetic field.
so yes, Einstein based his theory on experimental evidence - most notably, M-M experiment and the fact that the Maxwell laws (confirmed experimentally) didn't want to obey the usual Galilean transformations.
Sadly, the Nobel Foundation Obscures This Fact (Score:3, Informative)
The great economist Gunnar Myrdal, who sat on the board of the Bank of Sweden, argued for the prize's abolition. In 1974 Myrdal shared the award with Freidrich Hayek. Basically, Myrdal felt that if ideologue hacks like Freidman and Hayek won the prize it was meaningless.