Category: Physics

UPDATE: Serge Haroche, Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and David J. Wineland, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA “for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems”.

The Physics Nobel Prize was just announced this morning, Tuesday 9th October (at about 10:45 UK time). The announcement will be made by Staffan Normark, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Is it too soon for Peter Higgs et al, re this year’s results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? Of course, the Nobel committee will have had nominations much earlier in the year than results emerged from LHC, but one never knows…they could easily accommodate it if they wanted to. Not sure whether Higgs would be the first Geordie Nobel Laureate…fairly sure that Marie Curie and Erwin Schrodinger were not.

Press release here.

Back in 1993, the then UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave (remember him?) launched a competition for the best lay explanation of the Higgs boson and how it might theoretically endow other particles with mass. The prize-winning Higgs analogy came from Professor David Miller of University College London and used the movements of a scientist in a room to explain how particles get mass.

I’ve taken huge liberties with Miller’s concept to bring it up to date for this week’s Higgs boson news from the LHC at CERN:

Picture the scene: Geordie boy Prof Peter Higgs steps out of the lecture theatre into the refreshments area, hoping to get to the coffee and those delicious chocolate cookies. Unfortunately, he is besieged by a throng of clamouring scientists, hacks and hangers-on. He keeps his eye on the biscuit tray but nods and chats to his peers as he proceeds slowly, attracting a bigger and bigger crowd, signing autographs, fielding questions as he goes. The “field” of hangers-on – the Higgs bosons – slows Prof Higgs in his quest to move from lecture theatre door to the refreshments it’s as if he is now so massive he can barely move, there are so many Higgs bosons surrounding the Prof.

Then, from the door comes CERN’s Professor Incandela, he’s famous, of course, well-respected, but not quite the heavyweight as the eminent Professor Higgs. Nevertheless, he attracts some hangers-on and interacts with the field too, but he has not gained so much mass and is eyeing up the rapidly dwindliny supply of chocolate cookies worriedly but moving steadily towards it.

Meanwhile, fast as light a lowly post-doc emerges from the lecture theatre having been released at the flick of a switch. Needless to say none of the bosons notice her despite her PhD and electromagnetic personality. There is no interaction with the field, it is as if she is the ultimate size-zero. With no mass to slow her she speeds through the field photonically heading straight for the last remaining chocolate cookie grabbing it in a flash, and it’s gone, photolysed into oblivion.

With apologies to the Profs and that lowly post-doc, who really took the biscuit!

You can read Prof Miller’s original prize-winning analogy from 1993 here.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae” with one half to Perlmutter and the other half jointly to Schmidt and Riess.

Perlmutter is at The Supernova Cosmology Project, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Schmidt is at The High-z Supernova Search Team, Australian National University, Weston Creek, Australia and Riess at The High-z Supernova Search Team, Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Basically, this is for the supernovae evidence for “dark energy” (the 2008 sciencebase feature on dark energy).

In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Riess was to play a crucial role. The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors (CCD, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009), opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

The teams used a particular kind of supernova, called type Ia supernova. It is an explosion of an old compact star that is as heavy as the Sun but as small as the Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. All in all, the two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected – this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

Full announcement – The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

UPDATE: 11:03 BST: Schmidt compares winning the Nobel to the birth of his children, in interview with Nobel committee broadcast live. Says he feels weak at the knees. Even though he was one of the favourites to win the 2011 Prize, it was unexpected. Looking forward to teaching his cosmology class on Wednesday on this very subject. Grew up in Alaska so looking forward to the medals in December in the Swedish winter.

Thought Perlmutter’s team were getting an answer that the universe is slowing down not speeding up, was with trepidation that revealed to the world that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. A little scared by their findings. Always looks to Einstein for explanation, the energy of space itself, the simplest reason for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. So despite, recent allegedly superluminal neutrinos, Einstein’s 1915 theory does predict the acceleration the supernovae data provide evidence for. Confirm Einstein’s cosmological constant published 1917.

There have been rough guides, books for dummies, even howtos for idiots, but Chad Orzel is probably the first to take explain an important corner of human endeavour solely to his dog in How to teach physics to your dog. Ironically, the subject on which he focuses, physics, is a realm usually the preserve of probabilistically ill-fated cats.

Nevertheless, Orzel uses humour and clarity to explain the ins and outs of black holes and quantum entanglement to his dog and along the way teaches us some of the fundamentals the vexed the greats, among them Bohr and Einstein.

Meanwhile, Sean Carroll takes us on a journey from Eternity to Here. This book offers a provocatively different view of time, that most elusive and fundamental of notions. Carroll points out that Einstein treated time as simply a fourth dimension in the universe a perpendicular component of spacetime. However, that assumption ignores the fact that unlike the x, y, z of space, t has a direction, heading from the Big Bang to now and into the future. Could that fact be explained by looking at what happened before the Big Bang?

Inventors and Inventions is a big book full of big ideas. It basically does what it says on the tin, in classic style. There are nice big pictures of fountain pen nibs, universal joints, lightbulbs, and band aids, all tied up with the context of their history and the lives of their inventors. In this age of Wikis and 140-character limits, it’s nice to know that someone can still produce a traditional non-fiction book of substance.

Also landing on the Sciencebase desk this month, one of those idiots books I mentioned earlier. This time it’s The complete idiot’s guide to phobias. As the name would suggest, this is a tour of an area of psychology of which many of us know a little, but few understand a lot (Psychologists aside, that is). The term phobia is too big an umbrella for a whole spectrum of mental conditions from the mild panic that some people suffer on seeing a truly harmless spider in the bath to the debilitating effects of anxiety disorders fixated on social interactions, say. Gregory Korgeski gives us a full-colour view of this spectrum.

Finally, here’s a title that will undoubtedly get the so-called intelligent design crowd What Darwin Got Wrong chomping at the bit and baying for evolutionary blood. But, it shouldn’t. This is not a book about god nor intelligent design (creationism), the authors assert. Instead, they claim to have found a fatal flaw in the science of Darwin’s approach to natural selection that should provide biology with a new perspective on evolution.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini suggest that the evidence does not point to evolution taking place through a single survival of the fittest mechanism, rather that there are countless biological causes that totally eradicate “intention” from biology and evolution. If the ID crowd were perturbed by Darwin, then they should be very scared of the new guys as they remove the last vestiges of metaphysical guidance from our creation. There are no gods, no mother nature, and no grand design.

The Nobel Prize for Physics 2008 is announced here Tuesday, October 7.

The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Yoichiro Nambu (born 1921) of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and to Makoto Kobayashi (b. 1944) of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa (b. 1940) of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University Kyoto, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”. You can read the full press release from the Nobel org here.

As I mentioned in my previous post on the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology item, yesterday, the team, led by Simon Frantz have been using modern web 2.0 type technologies, including RSS and twitter to get the word out to journalists as fast as they can. Part of the reason, apparently, was to save journalists from suffering serious F5 button finger strain at announcement time.

Anyway, here’s the twitter update page – Nobel tweets. They also created a neat little widget so that we could embed the timetable into a website (see left). As you can see, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be announced Wednesday October 8. I’m hoping once again for some straight chemistry, rather than bio-flavoured molecules, as this will give me a chance to get my teeth into my journalistic alma mater as it were.

I’m not sure what to make of this, but Don Mueller, of William Paterson University, New Jersey, who goes by the nickname Dr Bones sent me some video clips of what is, essentially, a new sport he invented – two-racquet tennis. Now, my first thought was: “what the flip?” But, apparently his service velocity is higher than that of most tennis professionals, although I don’t think that has anything to do with using a racquet in each hand.

Anyway, he has posted a selection of videos on Youtube to demonstrate his prowess at this new sport:

Tennis Serve (a), Tennis Serve (b), Groundstrokes (a), Groundstrokes (b), Drills-righthand (a), Drills-lefthand (b)

Mueller tells me that he combined his understanding of basic physics to devise the “Whip-Grip”, which gives him the higher velocity. He says there are other advantages of playing tennis with a racquet in each hand: “It’s really great at the net and no more tennis elbow pain from hitting backhands, the cause of most tennis injuries,” he explains, “Where most people say, Why?, I say, Why not?”

Mueller is a teaching adjunct at WPU and this semester he tells me he’s teaching mathematics. “I’ve taught chemistry, physics and math at WPU and that’s the way I like it,” he says, “With a PhD in chemical physics, I enjoy teaching all of these subjects. Not being tied down allows me to do other things, which in my case means performing science and health shows for the public along with my promotion of two-racquet tennis.”

The notion of reinventing a well-known and popular sport by the novel application of physics is not entirely new. Just think of the football (soccer) players on the fields of Rugby School in England, when William Webb Ellis during the early nineteenth century famously made the ball defy gravity and invented the eponymous team sport – rugby – from which American football was ultimately to evolve. Perhaps in 100 years’ time two-racquet tennis will have its own name, ambibat, perhaps and be just as common. One has to wonder how a McEnroe of the future might cope though, with two racquets to fling at the umpire!