Nobel Prize

Interview, December 2017 https://youtu.be/qUAB3Zn4bK0 Interview with Physics Laureate Rainer Weiss on 6 December 2017 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden. Rainer Weiss answers the following questions (the links below lead to clip on YouTube): – What do you enjoy about science? – How did you become interested in science? – What advice would you…

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If you’re reading this online, and if you have just been surveying portraits of the new Nobel Laureates, then it’s safe to say that you’re benefitting directly from the two achievements rewarded with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. The optical fibers along which this Speed read is travelling, and the digital imaging which underlies…

Luckily for us, the Universe is not symmetrical, at least at the subatomic level. If it was, the newly formed matter at the Universe’s birth would have been annihilated by an equal and opposite amount of antimatter, and nothingness would have resulted. Instead, a small imbalance, or asymmetry, in the amount of matter and antimatter…

Lying at the heart of the computer which you are using to read this article is a memory retrieval system based on the discoveries for which the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg. They discovered, quite independently, a new way of using magnetism to control the flow of…

The 100th Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for recording faint echoes of the birth of the universe. Their precise satellite measurements of the cosmic background radiation, remnants of the sea of light emitted by the new universe, have confirmed fundamental predictions arising from the Big Bang theory, leading…

Mining mysterious particles Raymond Davis Jr and Masatoshi Koshiba, 1/2 of the prize Stars like the Sun shine because they release vast supplies of heat and light as a result of squeezing tiny hydrogen atoms together to produce larger helium atoms. In theory, these fusion reactions also shoot out ghostly particles with almost no mass…

For a second time, the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1993 was awarded to the discovery of a burnt-out star remnant known as a pulsar. Awarding the Prize to Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor not only rewarded their discovery of two pulsars dancing around each other but also acknowledged their discovery of a space laboratory…

As Ernst Ruska discovered, having an ingenious idea like the electron microscope can occur in the blink of an eye, but overcoming the finer details to create a successfully working instrument can take years. Two incredible circles closed for in December 1986, at the age of 80. The first was that Ruska was finally receiving…

The concept that matter is made up of tiny atoms has been proposed for millennia, but we rely on our five senses to provide the ultimate truth. The 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics rewarded two radical leaps in microscope technology that finally allowed us to witness life at the atomic level. The light microscope, invented…