Andre Geim won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 "for ground-breaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene." He is in the news again, 15 years later, because the country whose citizenship he claimed when he won that award, Holland, says he is no longer a citizen there. The Dutch have very strict standards for dual citizenship and he, trying to play both sides of the English Channel, seems to have violated them. Geim fascinates me in part for the silliest of reasons, our birthdays are very close. I was born on October 18, 1958 and Geim was born three days later, on the 21st of that month and year. He received news of his Nobel when he and I each had just entered the month of our 52d birthdays. But the news that he is no longer officially Dutch? Speaks, I think, to the developing incoherence of the whole concept of national citizenship. If he gains rights by being Dutch that he wouldn't otherwise have by virtue of being a Brit (rights w...
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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 even...
The Nobel Prize for Physics was split three ways this year: one theoretical cosmologist and (as a duo) two observational astronomers. Theory and observation nicely balanced out, like matter and anti-matter, each getting half the prize money. That meant that the astronomers each got one-quarter of the money. James Peebles, then, the theoretician, was rewarded for his "theoretical discoveries on physical cosmology." He has worked on the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, etc., and has written influential textbooks teaching the future aspirants to be Nobel-Prize-level Physicists what all of those phrases mean. I've never taken the courses that use such textbooks, so I won't try to say any more, except that Peebles, a Canadian, is widely credited with turning the "Big Bang" from a speculative and somewhat woolly concept into something precise and quantitative. The more interesting half of the award, to my mind, went to the founders of a new b...