Physics Society

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems” with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

The three laureates share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies of chaotic and apparently random phenomena. Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it. Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes.

Complex systems are characterised by randomness and disorder and are difficult to understand. This year’s prize recognises new methods for describing them and predicting their long-term behaviour.

One complex system of vital importance to humankind is Earth’s climate. Syukuro Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.

About ten years later, Klaus Hasselmann created a model that links together weather and climate, thus answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic. He also developed methods for identifying specific signals, fingerprints, that both natural phenomena and human activities imprint in the climate. His methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

Around 1980, Giorgio Parisi discovered hidden patterns in disordered complex materials. His discoveries are among the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems. They make it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena, not only in physics but also in other, very different areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

“The discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations. This year’s laureates have all contributed to us gaining deeper insight into the properties and evolution of complex physical systems,” says Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

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The announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics is coming one week today - and we'll be breaking the news live on our page and at nobelprize.org.

Quick facts about the physics prize:
- Number of physics prizes: 114
- Physics laureates: 216
- Youngest laureate: 25
- Oldest laureate: 96

On 30 April 1897, British physicist J. J. Thomson presented his research of cathode rays culminating in the discovery of the electron. The announcement took place during an evening lecture to the Royal Institution in London.

In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3thauNX

The first Nobel Prize in Physics, given in 1901, was awarded to Wilhelm Röntgen for the discovery of the X-ray.

Röntgen discovered a new type of radiation in 1895 that would be subsequently named after him, but he always preferred the term X-rays – from the mathematical designation for something unknown – as no one understood what these remarkable rays actually were.

Researchers worldwide could experiment on X-rays as Röntgen refused to patent his findings, convinced that his inventions and discoveries belonged to the world at large. X-ray radiation became a powerful tool for physical experiments and examining the body's interior.

We'll find out who has been awarded this year's prize in just a few weeks time.

See the full list of times and dates for this year's prizes: https://bit.ly/2QRp4Jp

The study of matter in relation to energy is best covered in PHYSICS!

Supernovae - star explosions - are common in the universe, but rare in our neighbourhood.

On 23 February 1987, in a nearby galaxy, the supernova SN 1987A became visible from the earth. In the space of a few seconds, gravitational energy was converted to neutrinos that were emitted in a gigantic burst. Approximately ten million billion (10,000,000,000,000,000) neutrinos from supernova SN 1987A reached physicist Masatoshi Koshiba's water tank, of which his research group detected 12, confirming theories of supernovae.

Koshiba was awarded the 2002 ‪‎Nobel Prize‬ in Physics for detecting cosmic neutrinos, the most elusive particles in the universe. He shared the prize with Raymond Davis Jr and Riccardo Giacconi.

Read the article 'mining mysterious particles' here: http://goo.gl/om8NzB

Image wiki commons: SN 1987A, one of the brightest stellar explosions detected since the invention of the telescope more than 400 years ago, Author: ESA/Hubble & NASA

At room temperature atoms and molecules in the air move about at breakneck speed. In order for them to be studied, they need to be slowed down or chilled.

During the 1980s, William Phillips (pictured), Steven Chu, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji developed different methods for this. When atoms come in contact with light particles with fixed energies, photons, their movement is affected as if they had been bumped. With the aid of laser light from different directions and adjustment of the photon's energy for Doppler effects, the atoms can be cooled to extremely low temperatures and captured in a trap.

Wishing a happy birthday to Phillips today!

In Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment he imagined a cat in a box together with a radioactive source. Alongside the cat would be a radiation detector which, upon registering a radioactive decay, would cause a hammer to fall and break open a flask of deadly poison that would kill the cat immediately.

The radioactive source would be selected to have a quantum mechanical probability of 50% to decay per hour. After one hour, it would be equally likely that the cat would be alive or dead. According to Max Born's interpretation of quantum mechanics, exactly one hour after this macabre experiment began, the box would contain a cat which is neither alive nor dead but rather in a mixture of these two states.

In the language of quantum mechanics, the cat's wave function is a superposition of the 'dead' and 'alive' wave functions. Schrödinger thought this made the probabilistic interpretation of his theory a nonsense! Born retorted that as soon as the lid on the box is lifted so we can observe the cat, the act of observation collapses the two possible wave functions into a single one, causing the cat to be definitely dead or alive. Despite his misgivings, Schrödinger shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Dirac for his work on formulating new theories of quantum mechanics.

The father of fiber optics: Charles Kao

The rapid transmission of signals over long distances is fundamental to the flow of information in our time. Since the 1930s thin filaments, or fibers, of glass have been used to see inside the body, but these long remained unusable for long-distance information transfer because too much light was lost along the way. In 1966, Charles Kao (born 1933) presented a solution: fibers of very pure glass transported sufficient light. Together with laser technology, his solution has made telecommunication using optical fibers possible.

Kao shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication."



Images: Charles Kao as a young scientist, 1960s. Optic fibers made of glass make up the circulatory system of our communication society. There is enough fiber to encircle the globe more than 25,000 times.

Today we're commemorating the 109th birthday of Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, the 'original starman' awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory on the evolution of stars.

The star cluster image shown below is taken from NASA's Chandra Observatory, named after Chandrasekhar. The data from Chandra is shown in purple, alongside infrared (orange) and optical data (blue) from other telescopes.

How much do you know about the father of nuclear physics, Ernest Rutherford?

The discovery of radioactivity in 1896 led to a series of more in-depth investigations. In 1899 Rutherford demonstrated that there were at least two distinct types of radiation: alpha radiation and beta radiation. He discovered that radioactive preparations gave rise to the formation of gases. Working with Frederick Soddy, Rutherford advanced the hypothesis that helium gas could be formed from radioactive substances. In 1902 they formulated a revolutionary theory: that elements could disintegrate and be transformed into other elements.

Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances."