Nobel Prize

An unusual and unorthodox series of scientific discussions in a café led to Max von Laue’s ingenious experiment that unmasked the true identity of X-rays. In the years before the 1914–1918 War, Munich was one of the world’s great hubs of scientific and artistic innovation. Painting, poetry and physics flourished in the capital of Bavaria…

The 1914 Nobel Prize for Physics united two issues of identity that had been perplexing physicists in the early 1900s. One was understanding the true nature of the mysterious X-rays. The other was how to prove the theory that crystals consist of atoms arranged in a regular lattice structure. Max von Laue received the award…

The world first discovered the sensational news that Wilhelm Röntgen’s mysterious X-rays could penetrate clothing and human skin, not through scientists but through the press. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a physicist who had little time for publicity. Like all other scientists the professor from Würzburg University in Franconia always sought recognition from his peers, but…

On a dark November evening in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was perplexed by a fluorescent screen in his laboratory that was glowing for no apparent reason. Röntgen’s experiment on how cathode-ray tubes emit light appeared to be affecting something that was not part of the study. It took weeks spent eating and sleeping in his…

My father, Ju Chin Chu, came to the United States in 1943 to continue his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemical engineering, and two years later, my mother, Ching Chen Li, joined him to study economics. A generation earlier, my mother’s father earned his advanced degrees in civil engineering at Cornell while…

I was born on December 9, 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts. My parents were Henry P. Kendall, a Boston businessman, and Evelyn Way Kendall, originally from Canada. I lived in Boston until the early 1930s when the family – there were five, for by then I had a younger brother and a younger sister – moved…

Medicine Hat is a small town in Southwestern Alberta founded just over 100 years ago in a valley where the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the South Saskatchewan River. I was born there on November 2, 1929 and raised in comfortable if somewhat Spartan circumstances. My father was the son of a Northern Irish carpenter and…

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Rainer Weiss’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, 10 December 2017. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellences, Dear Laureates, Ladies and gentlemen. All three of us, Barry, Kip and I, represent about 1000 scientists, engineers, technicians, students and administrators who together made LIGO’s gravitational wave discoveries being celebrated here tonight. We also celebrate Ronald Drever,…

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