Interview with Professor Sir Peter Knight, President of the Institute of Physics on the 2012 Nobel prize in physics winners Serge Haroche and David Wineland (mp3) Some highlights from Prof Knight's interview are below.
Fundamental Physics winners.
While the chemistry award has sometimes been overshadowed by the towering reputations of physics winners such as Albert Einstein, laureates include ground-breaking scientists such as radioactivity pioneers Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, though she also won the physics prize.
It's left to the frustrated reader to shout "Marie Curie!" at this supposed hotbed of Parisian sophistication, where no one seems to know that a female 1903 physics winner is toiling in a nearby suburb, on her way to winning her second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry.
The physics winner was Hans Rinderknecht; his performance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MITT) in Cambridge explained how he uses light to trigger nuclear fusion.
Shūji Nakamura, 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, inventor of the blue LED, hails from the former town of Seto.
A 1977 study, cited by The Atlantic, found that physics Nobel winners were an average of 36 years old when they did their prize-winning research, while chemistry prize winners were an average of 39 years old.
For the 13th edition (1926) of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Marie Curie, cowinner of the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics and winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, wrote the entry on radium with her daughter Irène Curie, later Irène Joliot-Curie and cowinner of the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Alexei Abrikosov, who now works at the Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, and Vitaly Ginzburg of the Lebedev Physical Institute, in Moscow, were responsible for discovering how type-II superconductors work (it is all down to the behaviour of their electrons).The third physics-prize winner is Anthony Leggett, a colleague of Dr Lauterbur's at the University of Illinois.
I spent hours reciting things to myself: names of Saul Bellow characters, physics Nobel prize winners, John Coltrane albums, anything to keep the numbness away.
As flashbulbs went off during the news conference and the physics and chemistry winners wrapped themselves in the mantle of quantum mechanics, the once-revolutionary science that underlies all their discoveries, a small, almost elfin woman named Ruth Braunziger stood smiling on the edge of the melee of cameras and reporters.
