Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs(nobelprize.org) |
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs(nobelprize.org) |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose
He was an interesting chap!
But, I'm not sure people know that a Boson is named after him at all and if they do I'd bet they assume (like I once did) that Bose was some German or Hungarian bloke.
(Mind you, I also thought that the Bose of Bose Corporation[1] would have been a European rather than Indian descent, too. Clearly, I have some prejudice I need to work out).
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/02/peter-higgs-p...
sorry to be so snarky, but i am genuinely interested, having long lost any trust in the peace prize comittee[0]. not to speak of the economics prize (which is not really a nobel prize [1])
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laure...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economi...
edit: formatting
Source: Me, a physics PhD student who has met a few Nobel laureates
P.S. It's amazing how much universities and people like to affiliate with Nobel laureates just because of their award, and not their science. When I was at a university where a professor won the Nobel prize, he gave a talk identical to one held the previous year. Before the prize, about 10 people showed up. After the prize, hundreds showed up and couldn't fit in the room.
http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/10/08/the-twists-and-turns...
I often saw him and Francois Anglert when doing my Ph.D. Robert Brout in particular struck me as the kindest man on earth, and was perhaps someone who though even deeper and more profoundly than Francois Anglert.
Sadly, I was expecting arguments by string theorists along the lines of the longbets.org bet for $2000 that no one is going to get a Nobel for anything related to string theory, but I guarantee we'll get ten times as much "Obama" instead.
Can't we please argue about that instead of making fun of our "concentration camp warmonger in chief", maybe just in one thread please?
I'm really not too happy about this because the Nobel prize has shunned deserving scientists again. The consensus is that this mechanism can be attributed to three papers, One from Englert and Brout, another from Higgs, and yet another from Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble.
The silly rule of having to give the award to at most three living authors rules out Brout and, as it would be a problem to choose one of GHK (because they signed in alphabetical order, good for them) it's too obvious why they're out, even when the current understanding of the theory can be traced back to their string of papers.
This is not the first time: for instance, nobody really understands why Cabibbo wasn't awarded some years ago along with Kobayashi and Maskawa... for the CKM matrix!
Just sayin'....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Peace
The economics price is much newer ("Memorial", as you cite), although also very prestigious in its own field, and Peace is not really a science.
There may yet be an experimental prize, especially once the experimental work at LHC is complete. From a physics perspective, LHC has only just begun. For the Higgs alone, its spin has not yet been conclusively measured; it's an important parameter.
The theory is so far ahead of the practice that things we think we understand just can't be tested in reasonable times. Look at what it took just to get the Boson data.
This means they're either really smart people who saw something the rest of the community didn't or lucked into something that they might not actually deserve. I'm not sure yet which is true.
Perhaps by "physics" you meant "particle physics"... but even in that field your statement would be hard to justify.
Not exactly. In condensed matter physics, theory and experiment are much more tightly coupled, and many experiments can be done on a table top with a few tens to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. Not all physics is multi-billion dollar colliders.
Edit: Ah, after reading the rest of the comments, I guess I have to agree with you.
In 1962 P.W. Anderson worked out that Nambu–Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a massive vector field (e.g. the so-called "higgs-mechanism", but in a non-relativistic context). In 1964 E&B,H,GHK showed that this is also possible in a relativistically invariant theory.
Here's a twitter comment from John Preskill (caltech): "The emphasis on finding a relativistic model may be misplaced, though. Anderson understood the mechanism well." https://twitter.com/preskill/status/387580651664191488
So maybe Anderson is more deserving of the last spot than GHK.
Source: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundatio...