Who Will Win the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Physics?

[ZeroPivot]

I didnt find a thread here on the subject so I thought i would create one.

The medicine prizes are out its 2 americans and a german for discovering how cells transport nutrients/information. the swedish professor explaining seemed very excited and made it sound very vital.
Any predictions on the other prizes? Chemistry? Physics?

 

[dipole]

Not Higgs. :)

 

[ZeroPivot]

Not Higgs. :)

well he got it. i didnt know the higgs boson was proven i thought it was still undecided.
so many people were behind this discovery its weird that only 2 got it and how do you pick which ones deserve it?

 

[JorisL]

They gave it to Higgs and Englert because they were the first to derive equations from which the hypothesis of the Higgs boson followed. Englert (and Brout) was actually first. Brout died in 2011 otherwise there were 3 laureates I suppose.
Another rule is that maximally 3 persons can share the price. That's why the prize is attributed to the discoverers. Although there was a third group that produced nearly simultaneous analogous results Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen, and Tom Kibble.
The timeline of publications was august, october and november. Would've been nice to see the third group get some credit as well.

 

[fourier jr]

that was a shocker today!

 

[dipole]

I think the decision was rushed because they wanted to get the award out before someone died, honestly.

 

[ZombieFeynman]

Anderson got there first...

In an article published in 1963 in the Physical Review:

It is likely, then, considering the superconducting analog, that the way is now open for a degenerate-vacuum theory of the Nambu type without any difficulties involving either zero-mass Yang-Mills gauge bosons or zero-mass Goldstone bosons. These two types of bosons seem capable of “canceling each other out” and leaving finite mass bosons only.

What Philip Anderson realized and worked out in the summer of 1962 was that, when you have both gauge symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking, the Nambu-Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a physical massive vector field.

Recall that Higgs himself discovered the boson with his name in 1964...

Perhaps it should have been Anderson-Higgs-Englert?

 

[atyy]

Anderson's deserving but he already got the prize.

GHK next year:) Or maybe George Zweig.

 

[ZombieFeynman]

Anderson's deserving but he already got the prize.

That didn't stop the '72 prize to go to Bardeen after he already had one for his invention of the transistor.

 

[atyy]

That didn't stop the '72 prize to go to Bardeen after he already had one for his invention of the transistor.

I think the transistor and BCS were super super brilliant.

 

[ZeroPivot]

something that bothers me is that brout-engelert wrote the thesis 2 months before higgs but the particle is calle higgs boson? how do we know that Higgs didnt copy the brouth-engelert paper?

 

[atyy]

something that bothers me is that brout-engelert wrote the thesis 2 months before higgs but the particle is calle higgs boson? how do we know that Higgs didnt copy the brouth-engelert paper?

The dates the journals received and published the various papers are described here http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/brief-history .

You can check the dates of some of the papers from the free links provided by http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/2013-nobel-prize-in-physics .

 

[lisab]

Anderson's deserving but he already got the prize.

GHK next year:) Or maybe George Zweig.

That didn't stop the '72 prize to go to Bardeen after he already had one for his invention of the transistor.

Andre Geim won two, also.

Well OK one of them was an Ig Nobel...close enough .

 

[Demystifier]

I think the decision was rushed because they wanted to get the award out before someone died, honestly.

I think you are right.

But I still don't understand why is it called Higgs particle and Higgs mechanism? Did he better develop the idea than the guys before him? Or had better PR? Or been famous already? Or just being lucky?

 

[dipole]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

 

[Demystifier]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

:thumbs:

 

[DrClaude]

The chemistry prize goes to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

 

[Naty1]

NY Times: Nobel Prize and Higgs History

For those interested in snippets of Higgs theory, a bit of politics, but more interesting I think for the history of which theoretical physicists contributed what in developing the theory, check out:

For Nobel, They Can Thank the ‘God Particle’
Higgs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/s...ggs-win-nobel-physics-prize.html?pagewanted=2

Sounds like there was a 'race to the finish' suggesting the early theory struck gold in the eyes of many.

 

[atyy]

I think you are right.

But I still don't understand why is it called Higgs particle and Higgs mechanism? Did he better develop the idea than the guys before him? Or had better PR? Or been famous already? Or just being lucky?

The "Higgs particle" is right, since Higgs alone predicted it. The "Higgs mechanism" is, I think, a little lucky. Also its easier to pronounce than BEHGHK or whatever. I know some condensed matter physicists who say Anderson-Higgs mechanism, just like they say Wegner-Wilson loop.

For those interested in snippets of Higgs theory, a bit of politics, but more interesting I think for the history of which theoretical physicists contributed what in developing the theory, check out:

For Nobel, They Can Thank the ‘God Particle’
Higgs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/s...ggs-win-nobel-physics-prize.html?pagewanted=2

Sounds like there was a 'race to the finish' suggesting the early theory struck gold in the eyes of many.

As far as I know there was no race, and the 3 groups were independent and unaware of any competition.

 

[ZombieFeynman]

I know some condensed matter physicists who say Anderson-Higgs mechanism

You caught me

 

[AlephZero]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

A good example is Murphy's law, which was not discovered by Murphy, but by somebody else with the same name.

 

[dipole]

So one of the Chemistry winners this year is a Professor at my school, there was a crowd of people outside his office today! I wonder if I can find some free food around. :P

 

[lisab]

So one of the Chemistry winners this year is a Professor at my school, there was a crowd of people outside his office today! I wonder if I can find some free food around. :P

talk about a non sequitur that makes perfect sense to poor struggling students!

 

[Demystifier]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/s...ggs-win-nobel-physics-prize.html?pagewanted=2

There one can find links to all the 3 independent papers. After taking a look at them, now I can see why it is called Higgs mechanism. The presentation in the Higgs's paper is the most similar to the presentation in modern textbooks, based essentially on classical field theory alone. That seems to be the simplest way to present the idea, which is probably why the Higgs's paper has been the most influential one.

The moral is: If you can present an idea in two ways, one simple and another rigorous, prefer the former over the latter (unless you are a pure mathematician).

 

[Astronuc]

No Physicist Is an Island
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/opinion/no-physicist-is-an-island.html (limited access after Oct 19)
By SEAN CARROLL

THE physicist Richard Feynman liked to gripe about what he called “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.” The first mistake was the invention of dynamite. The second was creating the Nobel Prizes. Mr. Feynman thought it was ridiculous that something as material as a cash prize should be awarded to something as grand and open-ended as scientific research. . . . This year’s physics Nobel has just been awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs, for what is simply called “the Higgs mechanism.” But while Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs undoubtedly deserve acclaim, bestowing an award on them alone distorts the nature of modern physics research.
. . . .
The Higgs mechanism was proposed on the basis of imagination and rigorous thinking, with only crude guidance from experimental data. Finally, in 2012 — after 48 years, billions of dollars and the work of thousands of talented experimental physicists — we finally saw a tiny bump in data plots obtained at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. That bump, evidence that the collider was producing Higgs bosons, was an amazing vindication of the work of Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs years before.

Except that it wasn’t only Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs. Like many ideas in physics, the Higgs mechanism came together with contributions from many different people, including renowned physicists like Philip Anderson, Robert Brout, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble. But only Mr. Englert and Mr. Higgs are sharing the Nobel.

. . .

Good article.

 

[member 392791]

The physiology and medicine Nobel Prize went to a professor at my university, it's sort of a big deal here :P

We have parking spacing specifically for nobel laureates.

 

[Tornado Dragon]

Doesn't that further prove what the great Feyman said about "elite" clubs. Giving preffential treatment to individuals who have attained a certain status etc.?