According to the New York Times, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics this morning:
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. They are Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia, and Adam G. Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
They were the leaders of two competing teams of astronomers who were trying to use the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to measure the expansion of the universe. They were hoping to measure how fast the universe, which has been expanding since its fiery birth in the Big Bang 14 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 not. Instead, they reported in 1998, it was inexplicably speeding up, a conclusion that nobody would have accepted if not for the fact that both groups wound up with the same answer.
I always thought the prizes were divided evenly between multiple recipients, but I see that they’re divided evenly between projects.
Tomorrow comes the chemistry award, on Thursday the literature prize, and the peace prize on Friday. Be sure to enter our annual guess-the-literature-winner contest (an autographed copy of WEIT is my prize), by posting your guess here.
“I always thought the prizes were divided evenly between multiple recipients, but I see that they’re divided evenly between projects.”
Sometimes prizes have been awarded evenly, sometimes the split has been different, most often (when it was not even) 2:1:1 as here. 3 is the maximum number of recipients (although organisations such as the Red Cross have been recipients). Yes, it is a 50-50 split between the two teams, with one person (Perlmutter) being singled out from one team (of which he was the clear leader) and two from the other (who didn’t have a leadership structure as clearly defined as the other group). While if I had to pick 3 I would pick these three, in the case of both teams it really was a team effort, so maybe it’s time to get rid of the “3 at most” rule. Yes, it was in Nobel’s will, but so was the stipulation that the prize be given for work done within the past year, which was chucked out more or less at the beginning.
I wish the prize in Economics would be thrown out as well.
It can’t be thrown out, since it isn’t a Nobel prize. “The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences” was instituted by the Swedish National Bank to celebrate their 300th anniversary as late as 1968.
But they could stop giving it.
Ah, OK – they just stole his name. I wonder why the Nobel trust doesn’t shut them down – they certainly could in the USA.
Here’s a Time article on how eight Nobel winners spent their prize money. Einstein (being Einstein) left the money to his first wife Mileva Maric in 1919 yet was not awarded the Prize until 1921
Actually, Einstein’s divorce settlement stipulated this. Apparently it was clear enough to all concerned that he would get the prize before long.
But what did he get it for? Most non-physicists probably guess wrongly. (Of course, he made many contributions which, compared with other things for which the prize was awarded, would have been worth additional Nobel Prizes.)
Because relativity was still considered controversial, the prize was awarded for his explanation of the photoelectric effect & his general contribution to theoretical physics. Regarding the settlement with his ex-wife ~ I was merely making a poor joke about time 🙂
Yes, he got it for the photoelectric effect. However, was it really because relativity was too controversial? The explanation photoelectric effect was a huge contribution, and Einstein himself considered it the only time he was really radical. Special relativity was “in the air” and someone would have gotten to it sooner or later. (General relativity is another matter.)
Wasn’t the choice of the photoelectric effect rather than relativity because the panel were then still taking note of the stipulation that the prize had to be for discoveries that were of some practical use to mankind?
The rumor, which IIRC was confirmed when the oldest Nobel Committee archives where released to scientists, was that the Uppsala (my alma mater, btw) school of philosophers didn’t care for it. Since they were influential on the committee the latter had to become inventive to award Einstein. The real reason was indeed, mostly, relativity.
[Again with those philosophers!]
Wikipedia would say Times needs an update:
“It was long reported that, in accord with the divorce settlement,[2] the Nobel Prize money had been deposited in a Swiss bank account for Maric to draw on the interest for herself and their two sons, while she could only use the capital by agreement with Einstein. However, personal correspondence made public in 2006[3] shows that he invested much of it in the United States, and saw much of it wiped out in the Great Depression. However, ultimately he paid Maric more money than he received with the prize.[4]”
Although I’m quite sure the observations that the universe is accelerating (still) is correct, I can’t quite get over the feeling that the “dark matter/dark energy” solution is a crock of just-so crap.
Someday, someone is going to win a Nobel by throwing those concepts into a cocked hat and coming up with a coherent solution. Right now, though, the “dark” solution ranks right up there with “it’s a mystery” as the second-weakest explanation for a scientific finding. (The most-weak, of course, is “goddidit”).
Now, I have no idea what the ultimate solution is going to be. If I did, I’d be the guy gunning for the Nobel.
But I can’t escape the feeling that dark matter/dark energy is going to turn out to be like aether. Nonexistent.
Dark matter and dark energy exist alright. We can see their effects. We just can’t describe them fully yet.
You mean like Santa Claus?
Whatever the “effects” (which again, I do not dispute), the cause is the issue.
I wonder how many Nobel winners have won with ideas/work that later turns out to be wrong?
I’m not disputing their findings, nor their importance. I’m saying that I don’t buy the explanation that has been appended to the top of those findings.
It’s aether all over again.
Enrico Fermi won in 1938 for a finding that later turned out to be not what it was claimed to be…so, it does happen that Nobel Prize-winning research turns out to be not-so-prize-worthy.
If Dark Matter turns out to be wrong, whoever demonstrates that will get a Nobel prize. 🙂 For now, Dark Matter wins the prize for “best explanation so far”.
We already know DM/DE isn’t going to turn out as the aether. As the Nobel prize suggest, we can observe those effects. In both cases these observations were responsible for the hypothesis. In the case of the aether the reverse were true, the hypothesis led up to the observations that invalidated it.
So it isn’t crock or weak but predictive. In fact both DM and DE are needed parts of the standard cosmology. SC isn’t only the first cosmology that makes sense of cosmological scales but predicts all large scale structures and a slew of parameters from the mere 5 primary ones.
Just the other week the last bastion of “modified gravity” fell to DM+GR, in that typical spiral galaxies such as ours are predicted by them, despite the detailed model needed that had hindered earlier efforts. Also the Bolshoi cosmological simulation released last week with updated parameters from WMAP 7 still results in the observed universe structures.
The thing is that most accept the possibility of spacetime expansion, that spacetime beget more spacetime. They don’t find it mysterious, “it is GR”. Well, they should. =D
In actuality DE makes up the deficit to get to a zero energy flat universe. This should make both large scale spacetime less mysterious (flat) and expansion less mysterious (literary nothing comes out of nothing)!
Finally there is a very real physical mechanism that is the closest suspect for DE. It is vacuum energy, that is predicted and verified in quantum field theories. It is also observed as residuals in the static and dynamical Casimir effect, as well as the Lamb shift, and the Unruh (accelerated observer) and Hawking (accelerated observer at black hole) radiations.
So I take your aether and raise with predictions and observations galore.
” … the “dark” solution ranks … as the second-weakest explanation for a scientific finding.”
The “dark” merely means that it doesn’t emit electromagentic photons, just as neutrinos and other things don’t. Are you perhaps taking an anthropocentric stance, just because our primary sense is visual?
It certainly won’t be nonexistent. Something is observed which doesn’t fit into the model and no one knows what it is yet, nor is it something which has ever been observed in ‘normal’ matter. People have diddled gravity (that’s a failed effort though some people can’t seem to accept it) and some people squawk about diddling Hubble’s Constant (which is trivial to do and obviously won’t work either). So while no one knows what the hell Dark Matter and Dark Energy are, there’s definitely something out there.
Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel’s post on the science behind the award is HERE Plenty of good diagrams & simple terminology throughout ~ love it
Dang, I was at Brian Schmidt’s workplace just yesterday and no one told me he’d been nominated. (I didn’t see him though.)
I saw Brian Schmidt give a public lecture a few years ago. Happy to hear he won, it’s about time astronomers got credit.