A flaw in Nobel Prize awards?

He has a point.

"Nobel Jury Member Calls Physics Prize ‘Wrong’"

Argues that the groundbreaking CERN lab that finally discovered the ‘god particle’ deserved more than a nod

by

Agence France-Presse

October 9th, 2013

The Raw Story

The Nobel Prize in Physics should also have gone to the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, a member of the awarding committee said Wednesday.

“I think it’s wrong,” Anders Barany, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told AFP, commenting after the decision Tuesday, which was delayed for an hour due to “a lot of discussion.”

“I think those experimental researchers have done incredibly fantastic work and should be rewarded.”

Peter Higgs of Britain and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for Physics for theoretical work on a particle that explains why the Universe has substance.

The presumed particle was discovered last year by a mega-scale physics lab near Geneva operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), after a decades-long search.

Many had expected the lab to share the Nobel Prize, however it was only mentioned in a brief note accompanying the decision.

“This has never been done before. It’s a fine recognition but I don’t think it’s enough,” said Barany.

“It’s too watered down, too little to be only mentioned in the text like that. I think it’s very clumsy with that kind of text.”

Although the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organisations in the past, that has never occurred with the science prizes.

Osamu Shimomura...the chemist

Osamu Shimomura, an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for taking the ability of some jellyfish to glow green and transforming it into a ubiquitous tool of molecular biology.

"For Witness to Nagasaki, a Life Focused on Science"

by

John Markoff

May 12th, 2013

The New York Times

Sixty-eight years ago, Osamu Shimomura was a 16-year-old high school student working in a factory seven and a half miles from Nagasaki, Japan. Sitting down to work, a light flashed, briefly blinding him, and the pressure wave from an explosion came rolling through.

On his walk home from the factory, he was drenched with a black rain. His grandmother immediately had him bathe, most likely saving him from radiation-related illness.

His future wife, Akemi, was not as lucky. She was just over a mile from the blast and, though sheltered by a small hill, suffered for years from the effects of radiation poisoning.

In the aftermath of World War II and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dr. Shimomura, now a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, said he largely put the events out of his mind.

But here he was last month, in the birthplace of the atomic era, to deliver a lecture at the monthly Director’s Symposium. Nearby was a museum with Manhattan Project artifacts, and surrounding him were Los Alamos scientists who were curious about how this man, now 84 and a professor emeritus at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., felt about the bombings in 1945.

That is not, though, what he chose to address in his talk to about 100 Los Alamos scientists and lab workers.

Instead, he recounted the discovery and development of one of the most significant tools for modern biotechnology: the green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P., used widely in cell and molecular biology as a visual tracer. The discovery, which has deepened the understanding of a wide range of fundamental biological processes, brought him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008, along with Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien.

“I decided to focus on the science,” he said.

So it has been for Dr. Shimomura since shortly after Japan’s surrender. In the chaos after the war, he spent two years “idling,” he said, before enrolling in pharmacy school, a path that was not his first choice. But not long after, during a sabbatical in the 1950s, he began his life’s work, the study of bioluminescence.

He chose as his subject a crustacean sometimes known as seed shrimp that emits a striking blue light and is plentiful in the waters around Japan. His focus was on a class of compounds, luciferin, that are bioluminescent. After years of research at Princeton, they had still never been purified.

For 10 months he struggled in his laboratory, until one night, instead of heating the mixture as he usually did, he “accidentally” left the compound in a strong acid.

“Next morning, I found the dark red mixture was turned into a colorless transparent solution,” he recalled. And when he looked with a microscope, he realized that the solvent had crystallized in pure, fine red crystals.

“I was very happy by the success of crystallization,” he said. “It was probably the happiest moment of my life.”

The discovery led to an invitation in 1959 from the marine biologist Frank Johnson to work in his Princeton laboratory. There he focused his days on studying a jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, whose edge glows green. In 1961 he and his family, with Dr. Johnson, set off for the Friday Harbor Laboratories at the University of Washington.

Ultimately the small team, including Dr. Shimomura’s family members, would collect a quarter million jellyfish, all in the hunt for the elusive green fluorescent protein.

Sitting in a rowboat one day, he said, he had an insight.

“It was a very simple idea: Luminescence probably involves a protein. If so, luminescence might be reversibly inhibited at a certain pH,” he recalled.

His breakthrough came in the form of a bright blue flash, produced when he threw his extract into a sink where seawater from an aquarium had just been poured. That led to a successful strategy for extracting the luminescent substance, and ultimately to a deeper understanding of G.F.P.

Decades later, the fluorescent markers have become a standard laboratory technique used by scientists to visualize biological activity.

“It’s really changed biological and medical research,” said Marc Zimmer, a computational chemist at Connecticut College who maintains an introductory Web site on the technology. “It allows us to see things we couldn’t have imagined seeing in the 1990s.”

It was 50 years before Dr. Shimomura even addressed the topic of the atomic bombings, in an article for a Japanese newspaper.

“No one wanted to remember,” he said.

But in 2008, in his Nobel acceptance essay, he made his feelings about the bombings clear.

“Even if the use of the Hiroshima bomb was justifiable in order to precipitate an end to the war, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later was clearly a test of new arms,” he wrote. “It cannot be justified.”

In Los Alamos on April 18, he seemed content to leave it at that. But his hosts could not.

At a dinner, Bette Korber, a theoretical biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, told of how her father had been on a troop ship preparing for the invasion of Japan. For years, she said, he had credited the decision to drop the bombs with sparing his life. Years later, however, when declassified documents reopened questions about whether the Nagasaki bomb had been necessary to end the war, he was in despair, she said.

Gary Doolen, a physicist who had been a weapon designer at the lab, said there was evidence that the second bomb had been dropped as a demonstration of American power to Russians, who were then massing troops in East Asia.

Dr. Shimomura, tall and stooped, mostly listened.

After the lecture, he toured a Los Alamos museum, where full-size models of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are on display. His wife, Akemi Shimomura, also a chemist by training and his longtime research collaborator, said that the Japanese government had been stupid to not surrender immediately after the Hiroshima bomb.

“Starting the war was stupid,” Dr. Shimomura replied.

The next day, they returned. Something was on his mind. The day before the Nagasaki bombing, Dr. Shimomura had seen a B-29 bomber drop three parachutes. The drop had puzzled him. He would later learn that they carried instruments for data transmission and measurement.

He asked John E. Pearson, the Los Alamos physicist who had invited him to lecture, about the instruments. After some hunting they found models of the original parachute payloads.

“Some guy came up and started explaining what we were looking at,” said Dr. Pearson. “Osamu said, ‘Yes. I watched them falling.’ I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone quite as stunned as that guy.”

Nobel Lecture by Osamu Shimomura...

Osamu Shimomura delivered his Nobel Lecture on 8 December 2008, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University, where he was introduced by Professor Gunnar von Heijne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. 
 
Go to

Interview with Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien...

The Laureates discuss how they entered science, the green fluorescent protein's journey of discovery from jellyfish to worms, the motivations behind creating a paintbox of fluorescent proteins, and how to attract students to study other glowing molecules that exist in Nature.

Go to

Osamu Shimomura [Wikipedia]

Nobelprize

Nobel Foundation rebukes ethics violation allegation

"Nobel official defends disputed China trips"

by

Malin Rising and Louise Nordstrom

December 23rd, 2008

The Associated Press

STOCKHOLM, Sweden

The head of the Nobel Foundation on Tuesday rejected criticism against all-expenses-paid trips that prize jurors made to China and said it was "normal" for them to accept such invitations.

Michael Sohlman, executive director of the foundation that manages the prestigious awards, told The Associated Press he welcomed a bribery investigation into the trips, adding he didn't see anything wrong with the visits.

"When you invite a lecturer it is normal to pay for travel and board," Sohlman said in a phone interview. "The Nobel Foundation cannot finance such trips."

An anti-corruption prosecutor opened a bribery probe last week following a Swedish Radio report that said three jurors from the medicine, chemistry and physics committees were invited to China in 2006 and 2008 to explain the selection process and what it takes to win a Nobel Prize. Chinese authorities paid for their plane tickets, hotels and meals, the report said.

"It happens very often that someone who is linked to the Nobels goes abroad and then they are often asked to talk about the system of awarding the Nobel Prize," Sohlman said.

The 10 million kronor ($1.2 million) Nobel awards are handed out annually in six disciplines: medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, economics and peace. Each award has its own prize committee.

The committees are famously tightlipped about their work — deliberations are kept secret for 50 years — and purport to resist outside pressure or public campaigns for or against a certain candidate.

With that in mind, critics say the China visits were inappropriate even if they don't lead to any criminal charges.

"It is insane to let oneself be invited on trips of this kind," said Anders Barany, a former nonvoting secretary of the physics prize committee, and a current voting member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

He was a vocal critic of a similar trip in 2002 in which he and other Nobel officials traveled to Japan to attend the opening of a traveling exhibit from Stockholm's Nobel Museum. Letting the hosts pay for the visit was problematic, he said, because Japan had a stated goal of winning more Nobel Prizes.

"I don't think there's direct link in the sense that someone feels that we have to thank Japan and give them a laureate," he said. However, he added that if committees must choose between several equal candidates, "small psychological effects" can influence the decision.

"I've repeated this constantly, but the Nobel system doesn't want to listen to me yet, and I think it's a scandal," Barany said.

Sohlman said it would be an "absurdity" to suggest that the Japan visit would have an effect on the prizes.

Two Japanese scientists won Nobel Prizes in 2002. No Chinese scientist has won a Nobel Prize since 1957.

Prosecutor Nils-Erik Schultz told AP his probe would focus on the China trips and not the Japan visit because there is a five-year statute of limitations for bribery investigations in Sweden. He said he expects to contact Chinese authorities to find out more about the purpose of the visits.

Chinese media reports at the time said the three Nobel jurors gave lectures on the process of nominating and selecting Nobel winners.

One of them — Sven Lidin of the physics committee — said in a speech that "China and the Nobel Prizes are not far apart" and that it would not take very long for a Chinese scientist to win a Nobel, according to a report by the state-run China News Service, posted on the Zhejiang university's Web site.

Lidin declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation. But he said he welcomed the probe "so that this is cleared up."

Schultz said his investigation would also examine whether drug maker Astra Zeneca had any inappropriate links to the prizes. Swedish Radio reported that the company sponsors Web site producer Nobel Web and Nobel Media, which manages the television rights for the awards, and that one of the medicine prize committee members also is a board member at Astra Zeneca.

The key is to find out whether there had been any attempts to influence the decision-making process because "one expects that this is handled objectively to 100 percent," Schultz said.

If charged and convicted, the jurors would face fines or up to two years in prison.

Gunnar Oquist, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prizes in physics, chemistry and economics, expressed regret about the China trips, noting that they were not organized by the academy.

Oquist said he only knew about the 2006 trip and that he had thought it was to focus on scientific prizes in general, not just the Nobels.

"The only thing I wanted to make sure was that it wouldn't become a Nobel trip, so to speak. Now, that's what it turned into anyway because the Chinese made a very big deal about it," Oquist said. "There was more of a Nobel focus than one had expected."

The academy has a verbal policy on not getting into situations representing a conflict of interest, but Oquist suggested it was time to lay down more specific guidelines "after what has happened."

In Oslo, Nobel Institute Director Geir Lundestad said members of the peace prize committee have also accepted trips to attend conferences and give lectures.

"I do not think it is right to have an absolute ban on letting the organizers pay such trips," he said. "That would be impractical and expensive."

Lundestad said the Nobel Foundation decided at a board meeting last Friday how the Nobel Prize committees should handle financing for their trips in the future.

Sohlman confirmed there was a regular board meeting on Friday in Stockholm, but declined to say what was discussed because the foundation is private.

He called the extensive media coverage of the trips "ridiculous" and said that he himself has accepted several invitations to give lectures about the awards in France, the United States, South Korea and Japan.


Nobel Prize jurors and ethics

Nobel Prize jurors and ethics

This doesn't really come as a surprise. When money and prestige are involved in human activities these two features rise to the top.

"Nobel Prize hit by bribery scandal"

December 19th, 2008

NDTV

The prestigious Nobel Prize has been hit by a bribery scandal. Several Nobel Prize jurors are now under the scanner for making all expenses paid trips to China in 2006 and 2008.

The jurors being investigated were members of Nobel committees for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry.

The probe is looking to whether the Nobel jurors' trips to China were meant to influence decisions of Nobel committees. The inquiry is also looking into why the Chinese invited the jurors.

The last time China claimed a science price was in 1957, when two Chinese researchers won the physics award.

The preliminary inquiry is being conducted by a special anti-corruption prosecutor at Stockholm in Sweden.

"Nobel Prize Women in Science..."--worthy book

Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries

by

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

ISBN-10: 0806520256
ISBN-13: 978-0806520254

Publishers Weekly:

Only nine of the more than 300 Nobel prizes awarded in science since 1901 have been won by women, notes science writer Bertsch as she sets the context for the biographical essays that follow. Examining the careers and lives of 14 women scientists "who either won a Nobel Prize or played a crucial role in a Nobel winning project," she movingly depicts their battles against gender discrimination for recognition and respect and she describes the self-conflict about their roles. Subjects range from Marie Curie (1867-1934) to such contemporaries as Rosalyn Yalow, awarded a Nobel Prize in 1977 for her work as a medical physicist, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astrophysicist credited, at the age of 24, with the 1968 discovery of pulsars, who made large personal sacrifices for her science. Bertsch introduces the small pantheon of women leaders in science whose careers and words offer advice and inspiration, if small comfort, to women in science today.

Library Journal:

As the subtitle suggests, this book describes the lives and struggles of 14 women who were either awarded the Nobel Prize or played a critical part in the work of the men who received it. And the "struggles" were horrendous. From the nonadmission policies of most graduate schools, even as late as 1960, to the restrictive admission policies even at the undergraduate level, simply obtaining an adequate education in the sciences was a battle for women. And, with few exceptions, most of them had to take unpaid or lowly paid jobs if they wanted to do science. Tenured positions might be offered after the Nobel Prize was won! Bertsch is a former newspaper reporter, and her background is reflected in her terse, dramatic treatment of each woman. There is an excellent set of references, as well as a thoughtful introduction and conclusion. At the outset, Bertsch asks "Why so few?"--at the conclusion, given the trials and tribulations, one wonders how so many endured. Highly recommended for all science collections.-- Hilary D. Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

I found used copies as low as $3.13 at amazon. com .

British physics...how is it measured?

The Fox and the Grapes

by

Tara Hogan

Is this a case of sour grapes? Ultimately, how does one measure the realm of physics achievements...by prestigious awards, national clout, garnered prize money...isn't there something more?

"Where have our Nobel physics prizes gone?"

Britain's proud contribution to the history of physics has been tarnished by lack of success in recent decades

by

Matthew Chalmers

October 14th, 2008

Times Online

The work that brought one US and two Japanese scientists this year's Nobel prize for physics won't mean much to most people. It concerns brilliant insights into the “broken” mathematical symmetries that govern the sub-atomic world, shedding light on why the universe contains any matter at all - which includes you and the air you breathe. It is precisely this kind of mind-blowing stuff that the £3.6 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, currently down for repairs, was built to unearth by smashing particles together 600 million times per second inside a 27km subterranean fridge.

But you don't need a PhD in theoretical physics to appreciate one thing about this year's physics Nobel: it didn't go to the UK. In the last three decades only one UK citizen has been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics: Tony Leggett in 2003. It's a conspicuous mismatch next to the 20 prizes accrued by UK physicists during the previous seven decades, and compares against six Nobels in chemistry and 11 in medicine picked up during the same period.

Meanwhile, Germany (population one third greater) has won ten, France (same population) four and the US (five times greater) a whopping 45 physics Nobels since 1978. Should we be concerned?

Nobel-calibre physics is world-changing. Last year's more widely reported prize went for the discovery of a magnetic effect that two decades later allows you to pack more DVDs on your hard drive. The 1964 prize recognised the invention of the laser that burns data on to those DVDs, and the microelectronics age itself was born with the transistor (1956 prize), around which electrons discovered by Cambridge physicist J. J.Thomson (1906 prize) are shunted.

Physics also underpinned the deciphering of DNA, bringing the UK physicist Francis Crick a share of the 1962 medicine Nobel. And the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance (1952 physics Nobel), without which we would not have MRI scanners, has spawned further Nobels in chemistry and in medicine - the latter shared by UK physicist Sir Peter Mansfield, of Nottingham University, in 2003.

Science is no Olympic-like contest, but Nobel prizes bring national and institutional prestige, as well as a slice of ten million Swedish kroner. The Japanese Government is already capitalising on last week's announcement by hinting that it will use the “tailwind” of the Nobel to strengthen its case for hosting the LHC's multibillion-pound successor: a 40km long “international linear collider”, which could be operational in the 2020s. Given our politicians' worship of the knowledge economy, to which physics contributes some £70 billion annually, any signs that the UK's Nobel physics heritage is in decline should set government alarm bells ringing.

Yet the Nobel, awarded for a single discovery often decades after it was made, paints a rather different picture of UK physics than most other measures. The UK consistently punches above its weight in the number of citations its physics research papers receive, and excels in closely related disciplines such as earth science, mathematics and astronomy, which lie outside the Nobel remit. UK physicists also do well in other prizes such as the Wolf, often seen as a precursor to the Nobel.

Indeed, earlier this month the most extensive review of UK physics undertaken, chaired by Professor Bill Wakeham of Southampton University, concluded that the subject is in good health, although admitted that it faced big educational challenges (A-level entrants have plummeted by a third since 1993, the Institute of Physics estimates that we are up to 8,000 physics teachers short, and 20 university physics departments have closed since 1997).

Our recent dearth of physics Nobels could simply be a run of bad luck, and UK institutions may lack the resources to lure top names and be less inclined to lobby - factors which, on top of greater funding, may have helped to drive the huge rise in US physics Nobels over the past 50 years. What is unlikely to help matters, though, is the complete reliance of UK physics on central funding, compared with the booming biomedical sciences, for example, which benefit from support from the Wellcome Trust, charities and the pharmaceutical industry. Inevitably this limits the volume of basic physics research and generates a need for short-term societal and economic returns, none of which sits comfortably with the blue-skies, investigator-led research typical of Nobel recognition.

The Wakeham review is testament to this vulnerability. It was commissioned in response to an £80 million black hole which appeared in the quango that funds UK particle physics and astronomy late last year - something deemed by a Commons select committee to have damaged the UK's international standing in physics.

International reputations are vital in particle physics, which is far too expensive and complicated to be carried out by single countries. Whichever nation ends up hosting the international linear collider, it would reap scientific and economic rewards. Indeed, with an impeccable 54-year track record of European and international collaboration, CERN (which straddles the Swiss-French border just outside Geneva and to which the UK contributes £78 million annually) has its own plans for such a project.

The long-awaited LHC, which caught the world's attention when it switched on last month, should bring Nobel rewards. And if, as widely expected, it discovers a particle called the Higgs boson, a retired Englishman called Peter Higgs, of Edinburgh University, will almost certainly be on his way to Stockholm to boost our physics Nobel tally. That would give newspaper editors no excuse not to tell their readers about the broken mathematical symmetries of nature rewarded in the 2008 prize, since the Higgs boson is predicted to be the product of just that - explaining, no less, the origin of mass.

This year's Nobel prize for physics is one of tens that mark the enormous advances in our understanding of nature's fundamental constituents. It's a trail that leads right back to the quantum mechanics revolution at the beginning of the last century and to the UK, which helped to lay the foundations of modern physics and thus the modern world. The UK has an enormous scientific Nobel heritage. The club of living UK physics laureates has only three members. It's high time that number was increased.

[Dr. Matthew Chalmers is a writer and former particle physicist at CERN.]

Lord Rutherford and no second Nobel Prize

Abstract:

"I have dealt with many different transformations with various periods of time, but the quickest that I have met was my own transformation in one moment from a physicist to a chemist." Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Banquet, 1908)

This article is about how Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) got the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and why he did not get a second Prize for his subsequent outstanding discoveries in physics, specially the discovery of the atomic nucleus and the proton. Who were those who nominated him and who did he nominate for the Nobel Prizes. In order to put the Prize issue into its proper context, I will briefly describe Rutherford’s whereabouts. Rutherford, an exceptionally gifted scientist who revolutionized chemistry and physics, was moulded in the finest classical tradition. What were his opinions on some scientific issues such as Einstein’s photon, uncertainty relations and the future prospects for atomic energy? What would he have said about the "Theory of Everything"?

Lord Rutherford of Nelson, His 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Why He Didn’t Get a Second Prize

Eyes on the "prize"...Nobel that is

Some advice from a former Nobel laureate...Douglas Osheroff. It would be a mistake and poor science if the Nobel Prize were the sole goal in scientific research. Osheroff does offer some advice and certainly understands that scientific achievement may be focused on one or two individuals but that there is an army of supporting individuals.

"Inspired thinking"

by

Matthew Chalmers

August 1st, 2008

physicsworld.com

Douglas Osheroff was one of 19 Nobel-prize-winning physicists who attended a meeting in Germany last month that played host to over 550 of the world’s most promising young researchers. He gives Matthew Chalmers his tips for would-be Nobel laureates of the future.

Before 1996 Douglas Osheroff did not know much about the picturesque island of Lindau on Lake Constance in southern Germany. But that year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics with David Lee and Robert Richardson for the discovery that helium-3 undergoes a dramatic change to a strange frictionless "superfluid" when cooled to below about 2 mK.

The following year, Osheroff was invited to attend the 47th meeting of Nobel laureates in Lindau — an annual event at which 20 or 30 laureates hold discussions with several hundred young researchers from around the world to help inspire the next generation of scientists. Osheroff has now attended this elite gathering five times, most recently last month. This year’s event was devoted to physics and was attended by 19 Nobel-prize winners, including particle physicist Carlo Rubbia, cosmologist George Smoot, and solid-state physicist Peter Gruünberg, who shared last year’s prize, along with five laureates from other disciplines.

Osheroff, who is based at Stanford University in the US, takes his role as a mentor very seriously. "Even before I won the prize, I spent a lot of time giving talks to students," he told Physics World shortly after emerging from one of the meeting's press conferences. But after receiving his Nobel prize, he soon found himself more in demand than ever. Osheroff estimates that he started flying about 120,000 miles annually after winning his prize; now, he says, he is clocking up more like 150,000 miles a year.

Like many Nobel laureates, Osheroff has found that winning the prize offers a platform from which to tackle issues that lie beyond the research lab. "As a laureate, I have an ability to say something that will have more impact than it probably deserves," he says. Osheroff has taken a particular interest in global warming, having spoken out on the topic during the 2004 US presidential election, although he admits it is ironic that his extensive travelling has given him a pretty large carbon footprint.

Career advice

Osheroff spoke about climate change when he was last in Lindau in 2005 and this year he took part in a panel discussion about the subject. But he attended the event first and foremost to meet the 567 young researchers who had been selected from about 21,000 applicants from 66 nations (15,000 of whom were from India and China alone). "It's mostly a matter of talking to students, getting them stimulated and giving them as much good advice as you can about careers in physics," he says when asked what he hopes to achieve by attending.

In previous years, Osheroff has talked about his role in the panel set up to investigate the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster and his discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Superfluids are quantum-mechanical states of matter that have zero viscosity and can therefore do strange things like flow up hill. This year, however, he discussed strategies that he thinks are key to making Nobel-prize-calibre discoveries in physics. "By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated, so I take a historical approach and review what made certain discoveries possible."

He starts with the example of the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who won the 1913 Nobel prize for his investigations into the properties of matter at low temperatures. Having been beaten by the Scottish physicist James Dewar in the race to liquefy hydrogen gas, Onnes managed to liquefy helium by chilling it to below about 4.2 K. This achievement, which took place 100 years ago last month, was a feat in itself, but Onnes then tried to cool the helium further to see if it would solidify.

After two whole years he eventually reached the unprecedented temperature of 1.04 K, but the helium refused to budge from its liquid state. "This is no wonder," says Osheroff. "I personally have cooled helium to 0.0001 K and it stays happily as a liquid." Instead of quitting, Osheroff explains how Onnes looked around for other interesting questions that could be tackled using the cryostat he had built.

With physicists at the time debating how the electric conductivity of metals would change when cooled to near absolute zero, Onnes secured a pure sample of mercury and told one of his students to find out what would happen in this regime. They discovered by accident that the conductivity almost vanished at about 4 K, making this the first observation of superconductivity — the flow of electric current without resistance. The moral, says Osheroff, is that a failure in experimental science may be an invitation to try something new that ends up reaping big rewards.

But there is more to the story. Although Onnes had probably cooled his cryostat below 2.17 K hundreds of times during his lifetime, it was not until 1938 that the Soviet physicist Peter Kapitza in Moscow, along with the Canadian researchers Jack Allen and Donald Misener at Cambridge in the UK, discovered that below this temperature the helium becomes a superfluid. Kapitza shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel prize for the finding, although it is still not clear why Allen and Misener were not recognized....

As Osheroff points out, Onnes had even remarked that at about 2 K the liquid helium in his apparatus ceased to boil, but he never went back to try to understand what the origin of this behaviour was. So the lesson this time, according to Osheroff, is to always be aware of unexplained behaviour. "Nature usually doesn’t knock with a loud bang," he says. "She whispers very softly."

Community effort

Based on his forays into the history of physics, Osheroff does not think there is much point in trying to direct fundamental research for specific applications — as governments often like to try and do. He cites the example of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which underpins the now widespread medical technique of magnetic resonance imagining (MRI). Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell developed NMR independently in 1946 in order to study the charge distribution of atomic nuclei, for which they shared the Nobel Prize for Physics six years later.

NMR has since won a further three Nobel prizes, not only in physics but also in chemistry and in physiology or medicine, and Osheroff thinks it will quite possibly win a fifth for functional MRI, which allows the activity in the brain to be monitored in real time. "If you say ‘Oh my god, we need some way of monitoring brain function non-invasively' and set out to do so without knowing anything about NMR, it just would never have happened," he says.

Osheroff’s third message for young researchers echoes a famous quote attributed to Newton: if I can see further than anyone else, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. He cautions that it is wrong to think of advances as being made by brilliant individuals in isolation and that, in reality, progress almost invariably results from the scientific community asking questions, developing new technologies and sharing the results. "I show a picture of my apparatus and put the names of scientists whose contributions were essential in making the discovery I made, such as Purcell. There are 14 names up there, but I could easily have put up twice that number."

Osheroff also uses the discovery of the cosmic background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who shared the other half of the 1978 Nobel prize, to highlight the importance of fully understanding your experimental equipment. The pair only realized the origin of the very weak signal being picked up by their giant horn-shaped receiver when they had ruled out every other explanation — including the possibility that the noise was from pigeon droppings.

Osheroff offers one final piece of advice for students wishing to make a breakthrough in experimental physics: avoid too many commitments, particularly those that require you to be out of the lab at fixed times. "You've got to sometimes back off from what you're doing to make you a better researcher, but language lessons or dance classes are not advisable," he says. "Research does not adhere to a schedule."



NOVA's "Absolute Zero"

Lawrence Bragg...people's scientist

William Lawrence Bragg

Painted by Homi Bhabha and Hugh Carmichael in 1939 and resides at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England

William Henry Bragg

William Lawrence Bragg

Sir William Lawrence Bragg (then Head of the Cavendish Laboratory) and Lady Bragg in their garden in Cambridge, England, October 1951.

A blast from the past by a relatively unknown in the realm of physics who finally found his niche in teaching science to youngsters. The person is William Lawrence Bragg who was the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize [with his father Sir William Bragg] in 1915 involving the invention of X-ray crystallography.


Book review by, Brian Pippard:

Light is a Messenger: The Life and Science of William Lawrence Bragg

by, Graeme K Hunter

ISBN: 019852921X

Sir Lawrence Bragg was my professor in my student and early teaching days. To his family he was Willie, and only became Sir Lawrence because his father was already Sir William. If I refer to him as Willie it is simply to avoid ambiguity; of course, I never thought of him or addressed him so. The two Braggs had shared the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics for inventing X-ray crystallography; Willie, at 25, was the youngest winner ever. His pride, however, became tinged with regret since it was assumed too easily by others that his father was the originator who was generously recognizing help from his son.

In fact it was Willie - a research student at the time - who had the big idea about reflection from crystal planes, and who was later to show such skill in interpreting the diffraction patterns. Sir William's principal contribution lay in instrument development. Theirs was a real collaboration, but not without tensions. We youngsters who knew him as Cavendish Professor in post-war Cambridge knew nothing of the bouts of depression, the sense of inadequacy and the rare but explosive angers of the suave and kindly Edwardian gentleman who had charge of our destinies.

Having become famous at the very outset of his career, Willie - who was then not yet 30 - succeeded Rutherford first at Manchester and then, 20 years later, at Cambridge. But unlike Rutherford, he had little knowledge of nuclear physics or a desire to learn more. Bragg had been a student long before the discovery of quantum mechanics, and was too busy to catch up following its appearance. So when Linus Pauling came on the scene as a very real rival in the 1950s, Bragg faced a skilled quantum theorist and unquestionably a greater chemist. We cannot be surprised to learn of a German scientist in the 1930s wondering "How does Bragg discover things? He doesn't know anything". The only possible answer is that he loved what he was doing, believed research was his most important task, and was prepared to spend all the time needed for his powerful and distinctive imagination to get to grips with a problem. As the Cambridge geophysicist Teddy Bullard once remarked, "Bragg can't stand having anyone cleverer around, and it's lucky for the Cavendish he's so clever himself".

With his limitations and hatred of administration, how well did he cope at the Cavendish Laboratory? In the vernacular of the time, jolly well. He had to reconstruct everything in 1945, with no hope of recovering the lab's pre-eminence in nuclear physics but with a queue of talented wartime graduates longing to get their teeth into research. With Norman Feather's aid, he took his pick and encouraged individual research groups to make their own way, breaking from the monolithic Rutherford tradition (which was not, in fact, quite so monolithic as legend has it).

From this initiative sprang conquests in radio astronomy, low-temperature physics, metal physics and, in due course, molecular biology - the finest Cavendish achievement of all. He also got the university's agreement to appoint a laboratory secretary and an accountant so that in the end, and against the odds, he himself could find time for research - encouraging and inspiring Max Perutz and John Kendrew in their all-but-impossible ambition to resolve completely the structure of a protein.

"When I was stuck," Perutz told me, "I'd talk to Bragg and he always had a suggestion for overcoming the difficulty." From the few conversations that I had with Bragg at the time, I know this was true - the old buffer was not past it by a long chalk.

Bragg left the Cavendish in 1953 to become director of the Royal Institution (RI), just as his father had done in his time. His immediate predecessor, the spasmodically likeable Edward Andrade, had very nearly wrecked it. The story of his dismissal and of Bragg's appointment is told in the book in some detail and is wryly amusing if one can forget the accompanying private agonies.

It was at the RI that Bragg fully developed Michael Faraday's tradition of lectures "to a juvenile auditory". He had never been wholly successful in lecturing to students but he threw himself into the task of making science exciting to schoolchildren and revealed an enviable gift for analogy and metaphor. He was, perhaps for the first time in his life, really happy while at the RI - having a duty that was a pleasure, a talented team of researchers, and a wife, Alice, who had always given him the love and support he needed. She had talents of her own, and a commanding but friendly presence that had earlier graced her stint as mayor of Cambridge. As a Justice of the Peace, she had expected students to set a good example; to one, charged with a cycling offence, the policeman on duty whispered, "You're for it, my lad, Lady B's on the bench".

I have said little about the science, which is central to the book. The pioneering analysis of mineral structures by X-ray crystallography was a cerebral sport demanding severe concentration, trial and error, and the special genius that was Bragg's. In this first-ever biography of Bragg, Graeme Hunter - a biochemist at the University of Western Ontario - has done his best to explain the science without a mathematical deluge. However, I fear that many readers - including those who are scientifically literate - will find the details heavy going, even if they will thoroughly enjoy the human story. Bragg himself might have done the trick, but it takes a certain familiarity with crystallography to follow the account with confidence.

All the same, the reticent academic gent was a very important creator, whose life story makes excellent reading.

Brian Pippard was Cavendish Professor of Physics from 1971 to 1982.


From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921

Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam

1967

Biography:

William Lawrence Bragg, son of William Henry Bragg, was born in Adelaide, South Australia, on March 31, 1890. He received his early education at St. Peter's College in his birthplace, proceeding to Adelaide University to take his degree in mathematics with first-class honours in 1908. He came to England with his father in 1909 and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as an Allen Scholar, taking first-class honours in the Natural Science Tripos in 1912. In the autumn of this year he commenced his examination of the von Laue phenomenon and published his first paper on the subject in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in November.

In 1914 he was appointed as Fellow and Lecturer in Natural Sciences at Trinity College and the same year he was awarded the Barnard Medal. From 1912 to 1914 he had been working with his father, and the results of their work were published in an abridged form in X-rays and Crystal Structure (1915). It was this work which earned them jointly the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915, and from this year to 1919, W. L. Bragg served as Technical Advisor on Sound Ranging to the Map Section, G.H.Q., France, receiving the O.B.E. and the M.C. in 1918. He was appointed Langworthy Professor of Physics at Manchester University in 1919, and held this post till 1937.

W. Lawrence Bragg, who had been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1921, was Director of the National Physical Laboratory in 1937-1938 and Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics, Cambridge, from 1938 to 1953. He was Chairman of the Frequency Advisory Committee from 1958 to 1960.

Knighted in 1941, Sir Lawrence holds the degree of M.A. (Cambridge), Honorary D.Sc. (Dublin, Leeds, Manchester, Lisbon, Paris, Brussels, Liege, and Durham), honorary Ph.D. (Cologne), and honorary LL.D. (St.Andrews). He has many honorary fellowships and is an honorary or foreign member of American, French, Swedish, Chinese, Dutch, and Belgian Scientific Academies.

He was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1931; the Royal Medal of the same Society in 1946, and the Roebling Medal of the Mineral Society of America in 1948.

Together with his father, he has published various scientific papers on crystal structure after their joint publication of 1915: The Crystalline State (1934), Electricity (1936), and Atomic Structure of Minerals (1937).

Sir Lawrence's chief interests at the present time are the application of X-ray analysis to the structure of protein molecules, which are being investigated in the Davy Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution, in continuation of similar work at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. This collaboration has succeeded in determining for the first time the structure of the highly complex molecules of living matter.

Having been awarded the Nobel Prize at the very early age of 25, W. Lawrence Bragg was the youngest-ever laureate. The very rare opportunity of celebrating a golden jubilee as a Nobel Laureate was given special attention during the December ceremonies at Stockholm in 1965, when Sir Lawrence, at the invitation of the Nobel Foundation, delivered a lecture - the first Nobel Guest Lecture - in retrospect, on developments in his field of interest during the last fifty years.

In 1921 he married Alice Grace Jenny (Hopkinson) of Cambridge, and they have two sons (the elder of whom became chief scientist with Rolls Royce, while the younger entered a Cambridge instrument-making firm), and two daughters (the elder of whom married an official of the Foreign Office, while the second married the son of the Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge).

Lawrence Bragg died on July 1, 1971.

Popularization of science

Science accolades...more Nobel-like awards?

Fred Kavli's proposal for an "alternative" to the Nobel Prize is fundamentally good, but to rank it along with the Nobel Prizes may be misplaced. Why not consider it just another homage to the disciplines of science such as the "Templeton Award" or many, many others?

From The New York Times:

"A Philanthropist of Science Seeks to Be Its Next Nobel"

by

Dennis Overbye

April 19th, 2005

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.

The boys were halfway across a snowfield when the German airplane appeared. Their rifles, clumsily camouflaged, were sticking out of their backpacks.

They stood frozen as the plane buzzed in tighter and tighter circles around them, wondering if they should run for the only possible shelter, a large boulder in the middle of the field.

It might finally have been curtains for the Kavli boys, Fred and Aslak.

"If we'd run, we would have been done for," Fred Kavli, 77, recalled recently, his head thrown back as he communed with memories of an adventurous youth in wartime Norway. "That was very dangerous, yah," he said, recalling expeditions to steal fuel oil from the Germans.

Mr. Kavli survived his boyhood, much to the retroactive relief of scientists worldwide.

A year ago, Mr. Kavli stood up in front of a group of the nation's scientific elite at a dinner at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and announced that he was in the process of spending $75 million to endow 10 scientific research institutes, all bearing his name, at colleges around the country and the world.

In a ringing Norwegian accent, Mr. Kavli, a recently retired engineer and businessman, invoked his boyhood adventures skiing across the mountains.

"At times," he said, "the whole sky was aflame with the northern lights shifting and dancing across the sky down to the white-clad mountaintops. In the stillness and loneliness of the white mountains, I pondered the universe, the planet, nature and the wonders of man.

"I'm still pondering."

The world found out what a sophisticated shopper Mr. Kavli was when scientists affiliated with his institutes won three of the eight Nobel Prizes given for science in 2004: Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara; Dr. Frank Wilczek of the new Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Dr. Richard Axel of the equally new Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia.

Now Mr. Kavli is planning his own version of the Nobel Prizes.

Starting in 2008, and every other year afterward, the Kavli Foundation will be sponsoring three prizes worth $1 million each in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience.

By comparison, last year's Nobels were worth about $1.3 million each.

"The point is to create visibility for science," Mr. Kavli said. "The Nobels do a good job. It might take us 100 years to catch up." Mr. Kavli says he is in it for the long term.

Some universities, he pointed out, have lasted 500 years. Mr. Kavli is not alone in the good fight.

Another newcomer is Michael Lazaridis, whose company Research in Motion invented the BlackBerry, and who founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, his hometown. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Meanwhile, longtime philanthropies like the Rockefeller, Sloan, Carnegie and Keck have supported basic research and built telescopes.

Scientists say they need all the help they can get as federal support for fundamental scientific research gets squeezed by the deficit. "I think this guy has done a service to the country at a time when there is a constriction in research support," said Dr. Eric Kandel, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia and director of the Kavli institute there.

Mr. Kavli grew up on a farm at the end of a fjord in Eresfjord in southwestern Norway, hiking, skiing and riding motorcycles with his older brother, Aslak.

His career as a capitalist began early. During the war, when oil and gas were scarce to nonexistent in Norway, he and his brother had a business supplying lumber for furniture manufacturers and making and selling wooden briquettes for burning in automobiles. When Aslak went off to Oslo to college, Fred ran the business by himself. "That was how I financed my education," Mr. Kavli recalled. "That gave me confidence in business."

After getting a degree in applied physics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Mr. Kavli took a boat to America, following the example of his father, who spent 13 years in San Francisco before returning to Norway and marrying.

In Los Angeles he got a job with a small company with a contract to make sensors for the control systems on Atlas missiles, something Mr. Kavli says he knew nothing about, at least at first. "In America, you don't have to know anything; you just have to ask the right question," he said.

Two years later, he put an ad in The Los Angeles Times looking for financial backing for his own company.

"I was ambitious, face it," Mr. Kavli said.

A few weeks later, he made a sales pitch to General Electric, which was looking for sensors for the engine on an atomic-powered airplane, a crazy-sounding idea, Mr. Kavli admits. They were sitting in the lobby because Mr. Kavli's security clearance had not yet caught up to him, and he did not think much of his chances.

But when he returned to Los Angeles, the order - his first - was sitting on his desk. That was in 1958.

By 2000, when Mr. Kavli sold the company, Kavlico had grown to 1,500 employees and was doing $67 million a year worth of business making sensors for airliners and military aircraft, including the legendary SR-71 Blackbird and the space shuttle, and, more recently, for automobile engines. Mr. Kavli, who is divorced with two grown children, also accumulated real estate throughout Southern California.

Among his other loves, like travel, tennis and skiing, is his house, expanded and renovated, in nearby Goleta, a 12,000-square-foot labor of love, perched sensibly back from a cliff overlooking the Pacific.

Some of Mr. Kavli's reserved demeanor begins to melt at the front door. Inside the visitor is greeted by a row of statues. "I call these my ballerinas," he said.

Mr. Kavli, who counts architecture as one of his passions, said he had designed much of the house himself, including the mahogany ceiling panels in the three-story living room, and traveled the world scouring materials like the pink Italian marble for his bar, antiques and artwork.

One long hallway leading to the bedroom and a guest wing was lined with photographs of friends, family, adventures and presidents, including one of him with President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall. There is the old farm, perched between a fjord and a lake. Here is Mr. Kavli on a balloon trip in South Africa, and touring Mongolia. Here he is on a motorcycle trip with his brother, lounging with a pair of young women.

Asked about the women, Mr. Kavli smiled shyly, the points of his cheeks flushing red. "Those are some girls," he said.

The sale of his company for $340 million in 2000 gave Mr. Kavli both the time and the money to return to his boyhood roots. "My interests are now back full circle to where I started," he said at the Carlyle dinner.

"Starting a company and making a lot of money are O.K.," he said in a recent interview. "But they are not a satisfactory accomplishment when it comes to benefiting humanity."

A resident of Santa Barbara since 1974, Mr. Kavli had already been involved with the University of California, Santa Barbara and had endowed a couple of chairs there. His first thought was to do more of the same, but, Dr. Gross, director of what was then the Institute for Theoretical Physics, had another idea.

"I think in fact that some of our friends put us together," Mr. Kavli said.

Dr. Gross convinced Mr. Kavli that helping expand the physics institute, supported by the National Science Foundation, would be a more effective use of his money.

In 2001, Mr. Kavli agreed to give the institute $7.5 million, which was more than enough to pay for a stylish addition to their Michael Graves building. In 2003, the institute was renamed in honor of Mr. Kavli.

The $7.5 million became the template for further giving.

Scientists agree he has invested it shrewdly in order to get the maximum impact from his donations.

"I'm looking for highly leveraged situations," Mr. Kavli agrees, his face lighting up, "where institutions are putting in a large share."

The deal is basically the same for each of the new institutes. The foundation agrees to pay $7.5 million, typically over four years, to the university, which adds the money to its endowment.

The interest from that money, about $400,000 per year once all the money is in place, goes to the institute.

That might seem like small change compared with the millions a university department or research institute spends in a year or the billions the government disburses, barely enough to keep a tenured professor in cappuccino and chalk. But because it is discretionary, with no strings or government agencies involved, the Kavli money is especially useful in an era of declining research budgets.

David Auston, president of the Kavli Foundation, said, "There is a real concern that the federal government is growing more conservative and more bureaucratic - less willing to take risks."

"What the money buys is flexibility," said Dr. Kandel, of Columbia. He said Mr. Kavli was providing seed money that could be amplified by the recipient.

Both the M.I.T. and Chicago institutes, for example, have used Kavli money to investigate novel ways to detect and study dark matter, the mysterious and elusive particles that seem to make up most of the matter in the universe. The Chicago group also took $1 million off the top of the grant to pay for an instrument for a telescope being built at the South Pole to study dark energy. The telescope itself and its main instrument are being paid for by the National Science Foundation.

Last year's Nobels were a nice surprise. "We were very fortunate," Mr. Kavli said. "We're not promising to do that every year."

It had finally stopped raining in Southern California. Out over the ocean, a sheet of gold was peeking out from under banks of dark clouds. In the foreground, as he settled into an easy chair, silhouetted by the light from the west, Fred Kavli was far away thinking about the future.

He and Mr. Auston plan to take a break from creating institutes soon, when the number has reached 12 or 13 so they can concentrate on setting up the Kavli Prizes.

The plan, whose details will be formally announced at a news conference in Oslo next month, is to have them awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the academies of other countries. The ceremonies would take place in Oslo in September, starting in 2008.

That's a nice time of year in Norway, Mr. Kavli admitted. It would also be strategically timed, just a month before the You Know Who Prizes are announced in early October.

Mr. Kavli professed to be unconcerned about the possible competition between him and other prizes. Besides his own and the Nobels, there are, among others, the Crafoord Prizes, awarded, like the Nobels by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, worth $500,000; the Gruber Prizes, worth $200,000, and the Templeton Prize, worth $1.5 million, given for research in spiritual matters, which is often given to a scientist. They all have their own agendas, he said.

Besides promoting science, Mr. Kavli said, "The main thing is to create networks of support for the institutes," he added. "We intend to be international, worldwide."

"Anyway," he said, stretching out his arms against the sunset, "money is not everything."

What do you think...more prizes?