Nobel
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Nobel 2008: Broken Symmetry
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The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa. Nambu, although not exactly famous outside of physics circles, is one of the most influential theoretical particle physicists of the last half-century. He proposed the basis of quantum chromodynamics, which is the theory of how quarks interact to form subatomic particles…
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Scientific Illiteracy
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The Observer featured a lengthy article by Tim Adams bemoaning the generic scientific illiteracy of society today, tracing a line from CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” through Natalie Angier’s new book, The Canon:A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. It concentrates a bit too heavily on uber-agent John Brockman’s somewhat pretentious “Third Culture, a…
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NASA’s Nobel: small, medium and big science
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The New York Times opines on the physics Nobel: …The award is richly deserved, and the agency deserves great credit for making the work possible. Too bad the program that yielded these pioneering discoveries was reined in not long ago so that NASA could pour billions of dollars into resuming shuttle flights, finishing the international…
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Nobel Prize 2006: The Cosmic Microwave Background
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News flash: John Mather and George Smoot, two of the scientists behind the COBE Satellite, have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their measurements of the average temperature of the CMB and the fluctuations about that average. (Here’s one self-aggrandizing reason why I find this particularly exciting.) The average, measured by the FIRAS…
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