Nobel Prize

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…

Death of a star What happens to a star when it runs out of fuel and dies? In the 1920s, scientists assumed that when a star burns off all its energy supply its light fades, leaving behind the burnt-out and dense remains known as a white dwarf. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was the first to show how…

Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, 1/2 of the prize The interference you see on an analogue television screen as you try to tune in to channels might seem an unlikely form of time travel, but within this static hiss lies a glimpse of the first moments of the universe. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson’s…

The 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish for their pioneering efforts to tune in to radio broadcasts from the stars. Their development and use of radio-based versions of telescopes has broadened our view of the universe by revealing information about stars in remarkable detail. Sir Martin Ryle…