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)"
Re:Smart people eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:title : dumbest ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Peaceful? I bet it's not hard to find people who wouldn't describe Theodore Roosevelt ("No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war"), Henry Kissinger or Yasser Arafat as peaceful...
Re:title : dumbest ever (Score:0, Insightful)
The leaders of a country that's occupying another get a peace prize... ridiculous.
Re:Richard Feynman used to boast. . . (Score:0, Insightful)
In addition to the geometric, mathematical and linguistic skills the IQ test should include tests for emotional IQ (empathy), non-logical IQ (intuition) and ethical IQ (religion).
What's the point in having an IQ of 200 if you're an unfeeling logic machine with only secular morals that are always flawed at best?
Re:The Legacy of Einstein (Score:2, Insightful)
Fix IQ tests? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody thinks there is any point to a standard metric of 'beauty' or 'virtue', oh wait maybe they do ...
Re:Richard Feynman used to boast. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Richard Feynman used to boast. . . (Score:1, Insightful)
> What's the point in having an IQ of 200 if you're an unfeeling logic machine with only secular morals that are always flawed at best?
I'd say if you had no sense of ethics at all, but IQ of 200 you could still do fundamental work on mathematics, physics and what not. You don't need ethics doing hard science.
Re:Serendipity! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense. Neutron collapse is an everyday thing. You don't need anywhere near the size of apparatus Kamiokande was to observe it. *Proton* decay, now that's a different story altogether. Detector setups like Kamiokande can be used to try and observer it. And they are.
Anyway, this is exactly the kind of thing you fully deserve a Nobel for: to see what a lesser mind would interpret as a disturbing influence on your experimental reading, as an interesting result in its own right. That's how most of the truly spectacular results are made. Think Penicillin or the Michelson interferometer.
Re:Serendipity! (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean proton decay. Neutron decay is easy.
Yes, it didn't see proton decay - but in that, oddly enough, it succeeded in ruling out the prevailing Grand Unified Theory of the day ("SU5"). That's one way how science works, theorists come up with a good idea, experimentalists go looking for it, and often as not it's back to the drawing board for the theorists. And, by the way, there's little doubt that if a proton had decayed, theyd've seen it (decaying protons are also hard to miss). Proton decay at some very low rate is a feature of most GUT's, and lots of people are still actively looking for it.
However, the same apparatus turned out to be useful at seeing neutrinos (the background in the proton decay search). Koshiba saw how this could be applied to the solar neutrino puzzle that Davis had found, and modified his detector to be sensitive to these low energy neutrinos. This not only confirmed the presence of these suspected solar neutrinos but pointed them back at the Sun, proving their origin. More science at work - following up on other people's odd measurements to see what really might be going on.
Lastly, Koshiba had little to do with Super-K's tube implosion accident. Which, by the way, happened after 5 years of incredibly successful data taking. Everyone should be so lucky as to make such a "mistake". And by the way, the first water started flowing back into the newly repaired Super-K last week. It will be back on the air come January.