Skip to main content

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics

Logo

The Nobel Prize went to two physicists honored for the discovery that neutrinos have mass.

Their discovery was a major contribution to what is now known as the "standard model" of the elementary particles. Until their turn-of-the-millennium work, the widely shared opinion was that neutrinos (like photons) don't have mass. This consensus had led -- don't ask me why-- to a further consensus on how many of them ought to be detectable on earth. And that, in turn led to some confusion because the quantities actually detected were much smaller than what they 'should' be.

So these are experimenters who managed to clear up a split between other experimenters and theorists. The theory had to be revised so that the experimental results, the actual quantity detected, could be accommodated, and their work showed how that could be done.  A victory for pragmatism in science, the hospitable homeland of pragmatism.

I enjoy this time of year for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that this is the time of the announcement of all the Nobels, when we get to read and think about issues we ordinarily wouldn't, and get updated on the names of the giants in the various fields.

As regulars here know, I regularly mine the awards for at least a couple of blog entries every year.

So: the physicists in question are:  Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada  They've followed the usual, "shucks folks, do they mean me?" script. Kajita told a news conference is Japan, "I'm still so shocked I don't really know what to say."

Well, I know what to say. A hearty congratulations to you both.

------------------------

Not worth a post of its own, but something I can't help mentioning -- the prize committee seems to have been split between two different candidates for the Medicine Prize this year, which would explain why the Chemistry Prize ended up going to the development of therapy-oriented genetics. Two Medicine awards, so to speak.

And I'll say something about the Peace Prize later this month.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more