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Nobel Prize in Physics 2023

 


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/science/nobel-prize-physics.html. 

A Nobel Prize was just awarded for the physics of attoseconds. This interests me because it represents an oft unmentioned frontier. 

Let me back up a bit. It is natural to think of two opposed frontiers in physics -- the very very big and the very very small. Physicists of one sort, cosmologists, talk about the universe as a whole, how quickly it is expanding, whether there is a possibility the expansion will halt at some point and be followed by retraction, how much "dark matter" it may all contain, and so forth. The very big big picture.

Physicists of another sort, particle physicists, talk about the very small, the fundamental particles. The ones we all learned about in elementary school as well a the more exotic creatures like muons. 

THOSE are the frontiers of knowledge. 

But, and here we arrive at the point, the attosecond work looks at a third frontier, that of really really fast events. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second. A decimal point followed by 17 zeroes and a 1. 

Three new Nobel Physics Laureates have won the prize for their work on lasers that produce ultrashort bursts of light, Attosecond bursts. Mind blown.  

This work may have practical consequences. Some of the media coverage of this particular award has focused on that. Personally, though as a pragmatist I empathize with that impulse, my mind links attoseconds to a philosophical Big Picture: Whitehead's process philosophy. Whitehead said that we should not regard the world as a bunch of things which are involved in processes, but as processes that our minds concretize as things. Entities are "complexes of occasions of experience," and experience is of process. 

The very very fast would be one pole of a process-based physics. The very, very slow would be the other. 

But enough of my stream of consciousness! Congratulations to the new Physics Nobel Laureates, Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier. 

That is Dr. L'Huillier, of Lund University in Sweden, pictured above.

Dr. L'Huillier, by the way, was born in 1958.  (So I share something with her.) 

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