The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004 “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction” jointly to David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek
David J. Gross Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
H. David Politzer California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USA
Frank Wilczek Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA
A good start … Frank Wilczek and David Politzer were barely 20 years old and still PhD students when their discovery of asymptotic freedom was published. These were their very first scientific publications!
A colourful connection
The scientists awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics have solved a mystery surrounding the strongest of nature’s four fundamental forces. The three quarks within the proton can sometimes appear to be free, although no free quarks have ever been observed. The quarks have a quantum mechanical property called colour and interact with each other through the exchange of gluons – nature’s glue.
