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.