2011 Nobel Prizes
30 min read
Dan Shechtman in Haifa, Israel, on Wednesday after winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering quasicrystals.
An Israeli scientist won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering quasicrystals, a material in which atoms were packed together in a well-defined pattern that never repeats.
An atomic model of an Ag-Al quasicrystal.
Recent Nobel prizes have generally split credit for scientific advances among two or three people, but this year’s chemistry prize and the accompanying 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million) went to a single scientist: Dan Shechtman, 70, a professor of materials science at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Dr. Shechtman is also a professor at Iowa State University and a researcher at the United States Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory.
The citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences states simply, “for the discovery of quasicrystals.”
Regular but nonrepeating patterns, defined by precise rules, have been known in mathematics since antiquity, and medieval Islamic artists made decorative, nonrepeating tile mosaics, but the phenomenon was thought impossible in the packing of atoms.
Yet Dr. Shechtman discovered the same type of structure in a mixture of aluminum and manganese. During a sabbatical in Maryland at the National Bureau of Standards, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he took a molten glob of the metals and chilled it rapidly. The expectation was that the atoms would have been a random jumble, like glass. Yet when he examined his metal with an electron microscope, Dr. Shechtman found that the atoms were not random.
His notebook recorded the exact date: April 8, 1982.
Scientists believed that crystals in materials all contained repeating patterns. For example, a square lattice has fourfold symmetry. Rotate it by 90 degrees, and it looks identical. A repeating lattice with fivefold symmetry, however, is impossible. On that morning in 1982, the electrons Dr. Shechtman bounced off his aluminum-manganese alloy formed a pattern that indicated tenfold symmetry. He could not quite believe it. He wrote in his notebook, “10 Fold???”
While a periodic lattice could not produce that pattern, a quasicrystal could.
It took years for Dr. Shechtman to convince others.
During the announcement, the Nobel committee noted that one colleague initially said, “Go away, Danny,” because he thought there was a simpler explanation for what Dr. Shechtman had observed. Many scientists — notably Linus Pauling, the Nobel-winning giant of chemistry — argued vehemently that Dr. Shechtman’s data could be explained by “twinning,” where two ordinary periodic crystals are fused together at an angle.
“That must have been intimidating,” said Nancy B. Jackson, president of the American Chemical Society. “When he first discovered these materials, nobody thought they could exist. It was one of these great scientific stories that his fellow scientists thought was impossible, but through time, people came to realize he was right.”
Even the definition of crystal had to be changed. Previously, a crystal had been defined as having “a regularly ordered, repeating three-dimensional pattern,” according to the International Union of Crystallography. The new definition, adopted in 1992, states that a crystal is simply a solid with a “discrete diffraction diagram” — that is, something that produces patterns like the ones Dr. Shechtman saw.
That leaves the door open for yet more different kinds of crystals in the future. Quasicrystals have since been found in many other materials, including a naturally occurring mineral from a Russian river. Materials scientists have been exploring quasicrystals because of their distinct properties — they are hard, brittle, slippery and, unlike most metals, poor conductors of electricity.
Quasicrystals have so far had a modest impact in the everyday world. For example, one kind of highly resilient steel, consisting of hard steel quasicrystals embedded within softer steel, is now used in razor blades and thin needles for eye surgery.
“The applications haven’t panned out,” said Patricia A. Thiel, a colleague of Dr. Shechtman at Iowa State and Ames Laboratory who also studies quasicrystals. “But they revolutionized our understanding of how atoms arrange themselves in solids. It was a scientific revolution.”
Israeli leaders expressed delight and pride at the 10th Nobel Prize won by a citizen of Israel, which has a population of less than eight million. Two years ago, Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, shared the award for chemistry as well.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, spoke by telephone to Dr. Shechtman at a news conference in Haifa and said, “Professor Shechtman, you today brought an enormous gift to the State of Israel, truly.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also called and told him, “Every Israeli is happy today, and every Jew in the world is proud.”
Dr. Shechtman was born and educated in Israel. At the news conference, he said, “The celebration is not only for the Technion and the State of Israel but also for science worldwide. There are today thousands of scientists around the world working in this field that I developed, and I am certain they all see this prize as their accomplishment and they really deserve it. Without these thousands, this science would not be where it is today.”
Dr. Shechtman added, “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he reads in the textbooks.”
Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Israeli wins chemistry Nobel for quasicrystals
By KARL RITTER and MALIN RISING – Associated Press STOCKHOLM (AP) — Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for a discovery that faced skepticism and mockery, even prompting his expulsion from his research team, before it won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough.
While doing research in the U.S. in 1982, Shechtman discovered a new chemical structure — quasicrystals — that researchers previously thought was impossible.
He was studying a mix of aluminum and manganese in an electron microscope when he found the atoms were arranged in a pattern — similar to one in some traditional Islamic mosaics — that appeared contrary to the laws of nature.
He concluded that science was wrong — but it would take years for him and other researchers to prove that he was right.
Since then, quasicrystals have been produced in laboratories and a Swedish company found them in one of the most durable kinds of steel, which is now used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Quasicrystals are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity. They were first discovered in nature in Russia in 2009.
Despite the initial reluctance in the scientific community to accept his discovery, it “fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter,” the academy said in its citation for the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award.
“The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman, 70, told a news conference Wednesday at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.
Shechtman is a professor there and at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He will receive the award along with the other Nobel Prize winners at a Dec. 10 ceremony in Stockholm.
Israel has won 10 Nobel prizes, a source of great pride in the country of just 7.8 million people. Shechtman was congratulated by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize as Israel’s foreign minister in 1994, and by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Every citizen of Israel is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud,” Netanyahu said.
In chemical terms, a crystal is traditionally defined as a regular and repeating arrangement of atoms within a material. As a results of these repeats, traditional crystals can have only certain shapes.
What Shechtman found was a material that seemed to have a forbidden shape. Eventually, scientists realized it was a new kind of matter, a quasicrystal, in which the atomic patterns show a more subtle kind of repetition that allows forbidden shapes.
“His battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter,” the academy said.
Nancy B. Jackson, president of the American Chemical Society called Shechtman’s discovery “one of these great scientific discoveries that go against the rules.” When Shechtman announced it, other experts hesitated.
“People didn’t think that this kind of crystal existed,” she said. “They thought it was against the rules of nature.”
Only later did some scientists go back to some of their own inexplicable findings and realized they had seen quasicrystals but not realized what they had, Jackson said.
“Anytime you have a discovery that changes the conventional wisdom that’s 200 years old, that’s something that’s really remarkable,” said Princeton University physicist Paul J. Steinhardt, who coined the term “quasicrystals” and had been doing theoretical work on them before Shechtman reported finding the real thing.
Steinhardt recalled the day when a fellow scientist showed him Shechtman’s paper in 1984, reporting the kind of result Steinhardt had predicted. “I sort of leapt in the air,” he said.
Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy, said Shechtman’s discovery was one of the few Nobel Prize-winning achievements that can be dated to a single day.
On April 8, 1982, while on a sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. — now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology — Shechtman first observed crystals with a shape most scientists considered impossible.
It had to do with the idea that a crystal shape can be rotated by a certain amount and still look the same.
A square contains fourfold symmetry, for example: If you turn it by 90 degrees, a quarter-turn, it still looks the same. For crystals, only certain degrees of such symmetry were thought possible. Shechtman had found a crystal that could be rotated one-fifth of a full turn and still look the same, which was thought to be impossible.
“I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me,” Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.
For months he tried to persuade his colleagues of his find, but they refused to accept it. Finally he was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the National Bureau of Standards, Shechtman said.
He returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected, but finally published in November 1984 — to uproar in the scientific world. Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the findings.
“He really was a great scientist, but he was wrong. It’s not the first time he was wrong,” Shechtman told reporters Wednesday.
In 1987, friends of Shechtman in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for x-rays to repeat and verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.
“The moment I presented that the community said, ‘OK Dani, now you are talking. Now we understand you, now we accept what you have found,'” Shechtman told reporters.
Cesar Pay Gomez, a structural chemistry expert at Uppsala University in Sweden and an adviser to the prize committee, said research on quasicrystals is ongoing “in the field of thermal-electric applications, where waste heat can be converted to electrical currents or energy.”
The Nobel Prize in chemistry announcement capped this year’s science awards.
Immune system researchers Bruce Beutler of the U.S. and Frenchman Jules Hoffmann shared the medicine prize Monday with Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, who died three days before the announcement. U.S.-born scientists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess won the physics prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.
The Nobel Prizes are handed out every year on Dec. 10, the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.
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Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm, Malcolm Ritter in New York and Aron Heller in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Follow Karl Ritter at www.twitter.com/karl(underscore)ritter
By ARON HELLER – Associated Press JERUSALEM (AP) — When Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman claimed to have stumbled upon a new crystalline chemical structure that seemed to violate the laws of nature, colleagues mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group.
After years in the scientific wilderness, though, he was proved right. And on Wednesday, he received the ultimate vindication: the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The lesson?
“A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman said.
The shy, 70-year-old Shechtman said he never doubted his findings and considered himself merely the latest in a long line of scientists who advanced their fields by challenging the conventional wisdom and were shunned by the establishment because of it.
In 1982, Shechtman discovered what are now called “quasicrystals” — atoms arranged in patterns that seemed forbidden by nature.
“I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying,” he recalled. “I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong.”
The discovery “fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in awarding the $1.5 million prize.
Since his discovery, quasicrystals have been produced in laboratories, and a Swedish company found them in one of the most durable kinds of steel, which is now used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery, the academy said. Quasicrystals are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity.
Shechtman is a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. He is the 10th Israeli Nobel winner, a great source of pride in a nation of just 7.8 million people. Shechtman fielded congratulatory calls from Israeli President Shimon Peres, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Every citizen of Israel is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud,” Netanyahu said.
Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy, said Shechtman’s discovery was one of the few Nobel Prize-winning achievements that can be dated to a single day.
On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington — now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology — Shechtman first observed crystals with a shape most scientists considered impossible.
The discovery had to do with the idea that a crystal shape can be rotated a certain amount and still look the same. A square contains four-fold symmetry, for example: If you turn it by 90 degrees, a quarter-turn, it still looks the same. For crystals, only certain degrees of such symmetry were thought possible. Shechtman had found a crystal that could be rotated one-fifth of a full turn and still look the same.
“I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me,” he said in an account released by his university.
He was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the National Bureau of Standards, Shechtman said. He eventually returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected but was finally published in November 1984 to an uproar in the scientific world.
In 1987, friends in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for X-rays to verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.
“The moment I presented that, the community said, ‘OK, Danny, now you are talking. Now we understand you. Now we accept what you have found,'” Shechtman told reporters.
Shechtman, who also teaches at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, said he never wavered even in the face of stiff criticism from double Nobel winner Linus Pauling, who never accepted Shechtman’s findings.
“He would stand on those platforms and declare, ‘Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.'” Shechtman said. “He really was a great scientist, but he was wrong. It’s not the first time he was wrong.”
Shechtman’s battle “eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter,” the academy said.
Nancy B. Jackson, president of the American Chemical Society, called Shechtman’s breakthrough “one of these great scientific discoveries that go against the rules.” Only later did some scientists go back to some of their own inexplicable findings and realize they had seen quasicrystals without understanding what were looking at, Jackson said.
“Anytime you have a discovery that changes the conventional wisdom that’s 200 years old, that’s something that’s really remarkable,” said Princeton University physicist Paul J. Steinhardt, who coined the term “quasicrystals” and had been doing theoretical work on them before Shechtman reported finding the real thing.
Steinhardt recalled the day a fellow scientist showed him Shechtman’s paper in 1984: “I sort of leapt in the air.”
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Science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York and Associated Press writers Karl Ritter, Malin Rising and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/vindicated-ridiculed-israeli-scientist-wins-nobel-183256852.html
Scientist wins Nobel for medicine days after death
STOCKHOLM (AP) — A pioneering researcher was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday, three days after dying of pancreatic cancer without ever knowing he was about to be honored for his immune system work that he had used to try to prolong his own life.
The Nobel committee said it was unaware that Canadian-born cell biologist Ralph Steinman had already died when it awarded the prize to him, American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann.
Since the committee is only supposed to consider living scientists, the Nobel Foundation held an emergency meeting Monday and said the decision on the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) prize will remain unchanged.
“The Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel laureate was alive,” the foundation said.
Steinman, 68, died Sept. 30, according to Rockefeller University in New York. He underwent therapy based on his discovery of the immune system’s dendritic cells, for which he won the prize, the university said.
“He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design,” the university said.
Beutler and Hoffmann were cited for their discoveries in the 1990s of receptor proteins that can recognize bacteria and other microorganisms as they enter the body, and activate the first line of defense in the immune system, known as innate immunity.
Nobel committee members said the work by the three is being used to develop better vaccines, and in the long run could also help treatment of diseases linked to abnormalities in the immune system, such as rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and chronic inflammatory diseases.
The work could also help efforts to make the immune system fight cancer, the committee said. A new treatment, Provenge, uses this concept to attack advanced prostate cancer.
Nobel committee member Goran Hansson told The Associated Press that hoped-for vaccines are in the pipeline.
“I am very touched. I’m thinking of all the people who worked with me, who gave everything,” Hoffmann said by telephone to a news conference in Paris. “I wasn’t sure this domain merited a Nobel.”
Beutler said he woke up in the middle of the night, glanced at his cellphone and realized he had a new email message.
“And, I squinted at it and I saw that the title line was ‘Nobel Prize,’ so I thought I should give close attention to that,” Beutler said in an interview posted on the Nobel website. “And, I opened it and it was from Goran Hansson, and it said that I had won the Nobel Prize, and so I was thrilled.”
Still, he was a “little disbelieving” until he checked his laptop, “and in a few minutes I saw my name there and so I knew it was real.”
Since 1974, the Nobel statutes don’t allow posthumous awards unless a laureate dies after the announcement but before the Dec. 10 award ceremony. That happened in 1996 when economics winner William Vickrey died a few days after the announcement.
Before the statutes were changed in 1974 two Nobel Prizes were given posthumously. In 1961, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize less than a month after he died in a plane crash during a peace mission to Congo. Swedish poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt won the Nobel in literature in 1931, although he had died in March of that year.
“The Nobel Foundation thus believes that what has occurred is more reminiscent of the example in the statutes concerning a person who has been named as a Nobel Laureate and has died before the actual Nobel Prize Award Ceremony,” the foundation said following its meeting.
Nobel officials said the situation was unprecedented, and that Steinman’s survivors would receive his share of the prize money. It wasn’t immediately clear who would represent him at the ceremony in Stockholm.
Nobel Foundation chairman Lars Heikensten, who started his job in June, said he was stunned when he found out that Steinman was dead.
“My first thought was: ‘Wow, this is a remarkable thing to happen now that I’m involved in this for the first time. How do we handle this now?'” he told AP.
Hansson said the medicine committee didn’t know Steinman was dead when it chose him.
“It is incredibly sad news,” he said. “We can only regret that he didn’t have the chance to receive the news he had won the Nobel Prize. Our thoughts are now with his family.”
Beutler, 53, holds dual appointments at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and as professor of genetics and immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. He will become a full-time faculty member at UT Southwestern on Dec. 1.
Hoffmann, 70, headed a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, between 1974 and 2009 and served as president of the French National Academy of Sciences between 2007-08.
Steinman had been head of Rockefeller University’s Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases.
“We are all so touched that our father’s many years of hard work are being recognized with a Nobel Prize,” Steinman’s daughter, Alexis Steinman, said in the Rockefeller University statement. “He devoted his life to his work and his family, and he would be truly honored.”
Hoffmann’s discovery came in 1996 during research on how fruit flies fight infections. Two years later, Beutler’s research on mice showed that fruit flies and mammals activate innate immunity in similar ways when attacked by germs.
Steinman’s discovery dates back to 1973, when he found a new cell type, the dendritic cell, which has a unique capacity to activate T-cells. Those cells have a key role in adaptive immunity, when antibodies and killer cells fight infections. They also develop a memory that helps the immune system mobilize its defenses next time it comes under a similar attack.
The medicine award kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements, and will be followed by the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The winners of the economics award will be announced on Oct. 10.
The coveted prizes were established by wealthy Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel — the inventor of dynamite — except for the economics award, which was created by Sweden’s central bank in 1968 in Nobel’s memory. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, on the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.
Last year’s medicine award went to British professor Robert Edwards for fertility research that led to the first test tube baby.
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Associated Press writer Malin Rising contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/scientist-wins-nobel-medicine-days-death-144736288.html
Speeding universe work wins Nobel
By Anna Ringstrom | ReutersSTOCKHOLM (Reuters) – The “astounding” discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up won the Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for three astronomers whose observations of exploding stars transformed our view of the world, and of how it may end.
Honouring two global teams of stargazers whose findings shook cosmology to its foundations in 1998, the Nobel Committee said Americans Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess showed how the universe that emerged from the Big Bang may fly apart so far, cooling as it goes, that it “will end in ice.”
Their work gave birth to the theory of dark energy, a kind of inverse gravity, that causes the expansion to accelerate. Up to three quarters of the universe seems to comprise dark energy — but just what it is is a matter of speculation, notably at facilities like the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva. Many hope an answer could reconcile apparent anomalies in physics.
The teams studied dozens of exploding stars, or supernovae, expecting to confirm theories dating back to the 1920s that the universe has expanded for 14 billion years since Big Bang, but ever more slowly. Astonished, they found the opposite was true.
“We ended up telling the world we have this crazy result — the universe is speeding up,” the Montana-born Schmidt, based in Australia, said by telephone to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, where the 2011 prizewinners were announced.
“It seemed too crazy to be right, and I think we were a little scared,” added Schmidt, 44, who led the High-z Supernova Search Team that included the Baltimore-based Riess, 41. Schmidt is at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Perlmutter, 52, from the University of California at Berkeley, said: “The chain of analysis was so long that at first we were reluctant to believe our result.
“But the more we analyzed it, the more it wouldn’t go away … It was the longest ‘Aha!’ moment ever.”
If data continues to improve, he believed theorists may be able to understand dark energy within 10 to 15 years.
“ALL BETS OFF”
Riess told Reuters he was “stunned and incredibly honored” by the award. But he was cautious about predictions energy would propel the universe ever outward until it was spent and froze. “It is what we see,” he said. “But the truth is all bets are off. The universe could still recollapse.”
Before, it was thought gravity would eventually reverse its expansion, until a fiery collapse brought the end of the world.
Recalling how it felt to have assumptions confounded, Riess said he spent weeks thinking “I did something stupid” and looking for what he thought must be a mistake in his work: “If you tossed a ball into the air and it kept right on going up instead of falling to the ground, you’d be pretty surprised,” he said. “Well, that’s about how surprised we were.”
With the expectation that gravity would slow the expansion of the universe debunked, the fact that the opposite was true revived an idea Albert Einstein once rejected as his “biggest blunder” — that vacuum of space might create “anti-gravity.”
“Suddenly that idea made sense,” Riess said.
He and Schmidt will share half of the 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.5 million) prize money. Perlmutter won the rest.
Having turned theory on its head, Perlmutter viewed the world’s distant future with equanimity: “It is a tough choice between ending up in the cold or ending up in a fiery blast,” he told Reuters. “I tend not to dwell too much on ultimates.”
“CURIOSITY DRIVEN”
Swedish Academy member Lars Brink told Reuters practical developments from the findings were not obvious: “This is very curiosity driven research,” he said. “It tells us something about the basic laws of nature. We are putting together pieces of what are the basic laws of nature. This is one brick.
“It is not that we are going to use it for new gadgets.”
Mark Sullivan, a physicist at the University of Oxford, said: “Their … discovery … has rewritten textbooks, and was one of the landmark breakthroughs of 20th-century physics.”
Among exciting possible developments from the study of dark energy would be a way to reconcile anomalies between laws of physics observed at the subatomic level — quantum mechanics — with those Einstein described for the world we see.
Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, praised the prizewinners but criticized the Nobel Committee’s rules that a maximum of three people could share in an award: “It would have been fairer, and would send a less distorted message about how this kind of science is actually done, if the award had been made collectively to all members of the two groups,” he said.
There was no repeat of the drama in Stockholm on Monday, when the Nobel Committee, whose rules forbid posthumous awards, discovered it had just given a share of the prize for medicine to a man who had died three days earlier. In the end, the award was confirmed to Ralph Steinman, who used his own discoveries to treat his cancer but succumbed to the disease on Friday.
In keeping with many recent prizes, the Committee noted, the winners of the physics category were all relatively young.
At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Riess, who was still in his 20s when the research was published, joked to a colleague that he had been quick to react to a pre-dawn call from Stockholm: “When I picked up the phone early this morning and I heard Swedish voices,” he said, “I knew it wasn’t IKEA.”
(Additional reporting by Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin and Simon Johnson in Stockholm, Ben Hirschler and Kate Kelland in London, Ian Simpson in Baltimore, Michelle Nichols in New York and Jonathan Weber in San Francisco; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Myra MacDonald)
Studies of Universe’s Expansion Win Physics Nobel
From left, Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize in physics awarded Tuesday.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Three astronomers won the Nobel Prize on Tuesday for discovering that the universe is apparently being blown apart by a mysterious force that cosmologists now call dark energy, a finding that has thrown the fate of the universe and indeed the nature of physics into doubt.
NASA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
An exploding star known as Type 1a supernova. The Nobel prize winners used them to measure the expansion of the universe.
The astronomers are Saul Perlmutter, 52, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley; Brian P. Schmidt, 44, of the Australian National University in Canberra, and Adam G. Riess, 41, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“I’m stunned,” Dr. Riess said by e-mail, after learning of his prize by reading about it on The New York Times’s Web site.
The three men led two competing teams of astronomers who were trying to use the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to limn the expansion of the universe. The goal of both groups was to measure how fast the cosmos, which has been expanding since its fiery birth in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, was slowing down, and thus to find out if its ultimate fate was to fall back together in what is called a Big Crunch or to drift apart into the darkness.
Instead, the two groups found in 1998 that the expansion of the universe was actually speeding up, a conclusion that nobody would have believed if not for the fact that both sets of scientists wound up with the same answer. It was as if, when you tossed your car keys in the air, instead of coming down, they flew faster and faster to the ceiling.
Subsequent cosmological measurements have confirmed that roughly 70 percent of the universe by mass or energy consists of this antigravitational dark energy that is pushing the galaxies apart, though astronomers and physicists have no conclusive evidence of what it is.
The most likely explanation for this bizarre behavior is a fudge factor that Albert Einstein introduced into his equations in 1917 to stabilize the universe against collapse and then abandoned as his greatest blunder.
Quantum theory predicts that empty space should exert a repulsive force, like dark energy, but one that is 10 to the 120th power times stronger than what the astronomers have measured, leaving some physicists mumbling about multiple universes. Abandoning the Einsteinian dream of a single final theory of nature, they speculate that there are a multitude of universes with different properties. We live in one, the argument goes, that is suitable for life.
“Every test we have made has come out perfectly in line with Einstein’s original cosmological constant in 1917,” Dr. Schmidt said.
If the universe continues accelerating, astronomers say, rather than coasting gently into the night, distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another and all the energy would be sucked out of the universe.
Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein’s old stomping grounds, called dark energy “the most startling discovery in physics since I have been in the field.” Dr. Witten continued, “It was so startling, in fact, that I personally took quite a while to become convinced that it was right.”
He went on, “This discovery definitely changed the way physicists look at the universe, and we probably still haven’t fully come to grips with the implications.”
Dr. Perlmutter, who led the Supernova Cosmology Project out of Berkeley, will get half of the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.4 million). The other half will go to Dr. Schmidt, leader of the rival High-Z Supernova Search Team, and Dr. Riess, who was the lead author of the 1998 paper in The Astronomical Journal, in which the dark energy result was first published.
All three astronomers were born and raised in the United States; Dr. Schmidt is also a citizen of Australia. They will get their prizes in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Since the fate of the universe is in question, astronomers would love to do more detailed tests using supernovas and other observations. So they were dispirited last year when NASA announced that cost overruns and delays on the James Webb Space Telescope had left no room in the budget until the next decade for an American satellite mission to investigate dark energy that Dr. Perlmutter and others had been promoting for almost a decade. Indeed on Tuesday the European Space Agency announced that it would launch a mission called Euclid to study dark energy in 2019.
Cosmic expansion was discovered by Edwin Hubble, an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, Calif., in 1929, but the quest for precision measurements of the universe has been hindered by a lack of reliable standard candles, objects whose distance can be inferred by their brightness or some other observable characteristic. Type 1a supernovae, which are thought to result from explosions of small stars known as white dwarfs, have long been considered uniform enough to fill the bill, as well as bright enough to be seen across the universe.
In the late 1980s Dr. Perlmutter, who had just gotten a Ph.D. in physics, devised an elaborate plan involving networks of telescopes tied together by the Internet to detect and study such supernovae and use them to measure the presumed deceleration of the universe. The Supernova Cosmology Project endured criticism from other astronomers, particularly supernova experts, who doubted that particle physicists could do it right.
Indeed, it took seven years before Dr. Perlmutter’s team began harvesting supernovae in the numbers they needed. Meanwhile, the other astronomers had formed their own team, the High-Z team, to do the same work.
“Hey, what’s the strongest force in the universe?” asked Robert P. Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a mentor to many of the astronomers on the new team, told a reporter from this newspaper once, “It’s not gravity, it’s jealousy.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. Perlmutter described the subsequent work of the teams as “a long aha.” The presence of dark energy showed up in an expected faintness on the part of some distant supernovas: the universe had sped up and carried them farther away from us than conventional cosmology suggested.
As recounted by the science writer Richard Panek in his recent book, “The 4% Universe, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality,” neither team was eager to report such a strange result.
In January 1998, Dr. Riess interrupted preparations for his honeymoon to buck up his comrades. “Approach these results not with your heart or head but with your eyes,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We are observers after all!”
In the years since, the three astronomers have shared a number of awards, sometimes giving lectures in which they completed each other’s sentences. A Nobel was expected eventually.
“No more waiting!” Dr. Kirshner said Tuesday.
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Quest for Dark Energy May Fade to Black (January 4, 2011)
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Dark, Perhaps Forever (June 3, 2008)
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Essay: The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding (June 5, 2007)
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From Space, A New View Of Doomsday (February 17, 2004)
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One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers (September 02, 2003)
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Scientist at Work: Adam Reiss; His Prey: Dark Energy In the Cosmic Abyss (February 18, 2003)
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In the Beginning… (July 23, 2002)
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The End of Everything (January 01, 2002)
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In the Light of Dying Stars, Astronomers See Intimations Of Cosmic Immortality (April 21, 1998)
Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer at his home in Stockholm on Thursday after receiving the news that he won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Transtromer, saying that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”
The assembled journalists cheered upon hearing that Mr. Transtromer, who was born in Stockholm, had won the prize.
Mr. Transtromer, 80, has written more than 15 collections of poetry, many of which have been translated into English and 60 other languages.
Critics have praised Mr. Transtromer’s poems for their accessibility, even in translation, noting his elegant descriptions of long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature.
“So much poetry, not only in this country but everywhere, is small and personal and it doesn’t look outward, it looks inward,” said Daniel Halpern, the president and publisher of Ecco, the imprint of HarperCollins that has published English translations of Mr. Transtromer’s work. “But there are some poets who write true international poetry. It’s the sensibility that runs through his poems that is so seductive. He is such a curious and open and intelligent writer.”
Neil Astley, the editor of Bloodaxe Books in Britain, called Mr. Transtromer “a metaphysical visionary poet.”
“He’s worked for much of his life as a psychologist, and the work is characterized by very strong psychological insight into humanity,” Mr. Astley said.
Mr. Transtromer was born in Stockholm in 1931. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a journalist. He studied literature, history, religion and psychology at Stockholm University, graduating in 1956, and worked as a psychologist at a youth correctional facility.
In 1990, Mr. Transtromer suffered a stroke that left him mostly unable to speak, but he eventually began to write again.
On Thursday afternoon, the stairwell in Mr. Transtromer’s apartment building filled with journalists from all over the world seeking reaction, the Swedish news media reported.
Visibly overwhelmed, Mr. Transtromer finally appeared, accompanied by his wife, Monica. Speaking on his behalf, she said her husband was most happy that the prize was awarded for poetry. “That you happened to receive it is a great joy and happy surprise, but the fact the prize went to poetry felt very good,” she said, addressing him at a gathering that quickly moved into the vestibule of their home in Stockholm.
There was also a celebration among Swedes, many of whom have read Mr. Transtromer since his first book of poems, “17 Poems,” placed him on Sweden’s literary map when he was just 23.
“To be quite honest it was a relief because people have been hoping for this for a long time,” said Ola Larsmo, a novelist and the president of the Swedish Pen association. “Some thought the train might have left the station already because he is old and not quite well. It felt great that he was confirmed in this role of national and international poet.”
John Freeman, the editor of the literary magazine Granta, said: “He is to Sweden what Robert Frost was to America. The national character, if you can say one exists, and the landscape of Sweden are very much reflected in his work. It’s easy because of that to overlook the abiding strangeness and mysteriousness of his poems.”
But in the United States, Mr. Transtromer is a virtual unknown, even to many readers of poetry, despite the fact that he has been published in English by several widely known publishers.
Mr. Halpern said that “Selected Poems,” originally published in 2000 by Ecco, part of HarperCollins, would be rereleased within days. On Thursday morning, print copies of his books were already backordered on online retailer sites, and electronic versions were difficult to find. New Directions, an independent publisher, released “The Great Enigma,” a poetry collection, in 2006; Graywolf Press, a publisher based in Minneapolis, released “The Half-Finished Heaven” in 2001.
Jeff Seroy, a spokesman for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, part of Macmillan, said Thursday that the imprint had acquired a volume of Mr. Transtromer’s work, translated by Robin Robertson, called “The Deleted World,” originally published in 2006. Mr. Seroy said the book would be released by year’s end.
Much of Mr. Transtromer’s work, including “The Half-Finished Heaven,” was translated by his close friend and fellow poet Robert Bly. Mr. Bly has been named as one of the central people who introduced Mr. Transtromer to a small but devoted group of American readers.
The selection of a European writer for the literature Nobel — the eighth in a decade — renewed criticisms that the prize is too Eurocentric. The last American writer to win a Nobel was Toni Morrison in 1993. Philip Roth has been a perennial favorite but has not been selected.
The committee noted after the announcement on Thursday that it had been many years since a Swede had won. It last happened in 1974 when Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shared the prize.
Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the academy, said this week that the literature jury had increased the number of “scouts” it employed to scour for books in non-European languages.
And once again, the jury proved its inscrutability. In previous years, the choice of relatively unknown writers like Herta Müller of Germany has surprised Nobel watchers; in other years, winners like Harold Pinter or Orhan Pamuk have raised questions about whether the Nobel committee is overly influenced by politics.
While Mr. Transtromer has been a longtime favorite to win the Nobel, he has also won other prizes, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Petrarch Prize in Germany and the Bellman Prize.
The Nobel Prize comes with an honorarium of nearly $1.5 million.
Christina Anderson contributed reporting from Stockholm.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/arts/swedish-poet-wins-nobel-prize-for-literature.html?ref=world
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