The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics 156
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."
Where will this take us ? (Score:2, Insightful)
How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where will this take us ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Generally, by the time somebody receives the Nobel Prize for a discovery, the "short term" is already over.
Re:How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Begone, ye troll! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this comment aggrevate me so? Maybe it's because political correctness has run amok, Maybe it's because the importance of individual acheivement is being marginalized because we don't want others to feel "left out".
These prizes damned well should be awarded to individuals in recognition of their acheivement. Then, by proxy, their institutions will will receive their due recognition. Just my $.02
Re:Prize money?? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:These guys need to get out more (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:These guys need to get out more (Score:2, Insightful)
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
English (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Begone, ye troll! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well . . . (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:2, Insightful)
At a research university you will have many departments (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). And within those departments you will have many Professors each probably working on few topics, but mostly different from what other Professors are working on (or from a different perspective). So what one lab - The Professor, his post-docs, staff, and grad-students - works on is completely separate than what any one else in the institute works on, ignoring occassional collaborations.
Furthermore, the research university rarely gives the lab funding for the project. So each Professor is like an independent entrepeneur who needs to find agencies and organizations to fund his or her ideas.
The institution does receive a lot of glory and capitalizes on it as much as possible. However, its responsibility is to provide the framework and facilities for research. Everything else is done by the Professor and lab.
Therefore, most research is not a large scale enterprise. Exceptions are institutes like the Whitehead Institute at MIT. But still, if a Nobel Prize is given for the human genome project, Eric Lander of the Whitehead will deservedly be one of the recepients and not the whole institute because it was his leadership and key ideas which deserve recognition.
Re:Begone, ye troll! (Score:3, Insightful)
Group theory is not an obscure field of mathematics. It is mainstream and some of it is taught to math students in their first year. The obscure areas are where it takes you two decades to study just to get to the problem statement. There's lots of those and the potential for applications is often very small.
My take is that society does need mathematicians because hard theoretical problems do come up once in a while. Those mathematicians have to keep sharp even if they don't have anything "real" to do for the moment. In the meantime, they will push the theoretical boundaries in some obscure corner. As a bonus, something useful is produced occasionally.