Nobel Prize

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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Childhood I was born on June 22, 1943 in wartime Aberdeen, Scotland and lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. My parents, Hans Walter and Johanna Maria Kosterlitz (Gresshöner) had fled Hitler’s Germany in 1934 because my father, a non-practicing Jew, came from a Jewish family and was forbidden to marry a…

I was born in London in 1951, in a medical family who greatly valued science and education in general, but never tried to push their children to go into medicine, although my younger brother did choose that path. My father was a psychiatrist working in the newly-created National Health Service, and came from Scotland. He…

I was born on April 1, 1933 in Constantine, Algeria, which was then part of France. My family, originally from Tangier, settled in Tunisia and then in Algeria in the 16th century after having fled Spain during the Inquisition. In fact, our name, Cohen-Tannoudji, means simply the Cohen family from Tangiers. The Algerian Jews obtained…