Nobel Prize

Short biography Tranmæl, Martin Olsen 1879 -1967 Politician, Newspaper EditorLabour Martin Tranmæl had little formal education, but he took great interest in reading, especially history. He became a member of a trade union that was associated with the Labour Party in 1896. Three years later, he was one of the founders of the newspaper Ny…

by Øyvind Tønnesson Nobelprize.org Peace Editor, 1998-2000 1 December 1999 The Norwegian Nobel Institute building in Oslo, bought by the Nobel Foundation in 1903. The building (inset) as it looks today. Copyright © The Norwegian Nobel Institute The Norwegian Nobel Institute was established in 1904, and moved into its present building in central Oslo, close…

by Geir LundestadSecretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, 1990-2014 Introduction This article is intended to serve as a basic survey of the history of the Nobel Peace Prize during its first 100 years. Since all the 107 Laureates selected from 1901 to 2000 are to be mentioned, the emphasis will be on facts and names.…

by Michael W. Doyle Peace and democracy are just two sides of the same coin, it has often been said. In a speech before the British parliament in June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. He then,…

by John N. Bahcall What makes the sun shine? How does the sun produce the vast amount of energy necessary to support life on earth? These questions challenged scientists for a hundred and fifty years, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Theoretical physicists battled geologists and evolutionary biologists in a heated controversy over…

l. F.W. Aston, “The Mass-Spectra of Chemical Elements,” Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 39, 611-625 (1920). In the course of a systematic program to measure the masses of atoms, Aston found that four hydrogen nuclei (protons) are heavier than a helium nucleus (an alpha particle) and two positive electrons [see Eq. (1)]. This fundamental…

By Klaus Biedermann* Prize-awarded methods Among the Nobel Prizes in Physics, two scientists have been honored for their remarkable methods to record and present images: , awarded in 1908 “for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference,” and , awarded in 1971, “for his invention and development of the holographic…

by Gösta Ekspong The research leading to an understanding of the nature of light and the emission and absorption processes has been of paramount importance. It led from a beginning in 1900 to the development of quantum physics, reaching a high peak in the 1920s and a fruition towards the mid-century years with the completion…

by Sven Kullander Why accelerators Particle accelerators are devices producing beams of energetic ions and electrons which are employed for many different purposes, one being ultra-precision microscopy. As is well known objects with dimensions down to the size of a living cell are investigated by optical microscopes and those down to atomic dimensions by electron…

By Lars Brink Forces One of the basic features in physics is the occurrence of forces that keep matter together. There are for example, the forces that keep the cells together to build up the human body, and there is the gravitational force that keeps us on the ground and the moon in orbit around…