Hello, and welcome to the Physics World weekly
podcast. I'm Hamish Johnston.
In this episode, I'm joined by my colleague,
Matin Durrani, and we're going to talk about
some interesting aspects of the Nobel Prize for
Physics, and we're also going to speculate
who might win this year.
But first, I'd like to acknowledge the generous
support of American Elements.
American Elements,
the world's manufacturer of engineered and advanced materials.
American Elements,
now invent.
Next week, the winners or possibly winner
of the 2025
Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced.
In the run up to the announcement, we
like to look back on previous awards and
explore the quirky history of the world's most
famous prize in physics.
We also make a prediction or two for
this year's prize,
predictions that rarely come true.
And at the end of this podcast, we'll
have a fun
Nobel quiz.
This year, Physics World's Margaret Harris has written
about two rather
puzzling awards that were given in the early
days of the Nobel Prize.
And Matin has chosen his favorite,
Are you gonna correct me on that, Matin?
Not your favorite. Top five. His top five
prizes of the two thousands.
Hi, Matin.
Welcome to the podcast.
Hello, Hamish. How's it going? Not too bad.
Although, I have to say I'm feeling very
old
because as someone who came of age in
the nineteen eighties,
I really struggle with the fact that it's
2025.
And what's more, a whopping
68 people have bagged
a physics Nobel Prize
since February.
That's a lot of people. It's a a
lot more than I thought when I first
started counting.
And, indeed, that's more than the number of
people who won
Nobel's
in the first fifty years of the physics
prize,
which began in nineteen o one. And I
think that reflects the fact that three laureate
awards,
they're pretty well the norm these days,
whereas single winners were much more common
in the early days of the prize.
And I think, you know, since February, there's
been a mix of of two and three,
And, I think you've got those in your
in your top five. So let's let's count
down your your top five prizes
since the year February.
So starting at number five,
you've got the twenty fifteen prize,
and that had to do with the confirmation
of
neutrino oscillation,
which led to the conclusion that neutrinos have
mass.
So why is this special? I mean, one
reason it's special is, of course, Art Macdonald,
Canadian,
fellow Canadian,
shared the prize,
which, you know, for me makes it special.
But why is it special for you? Well,
before we go anywhere, Hamish, I gotta stress
that for me, I don't care what you
say. The twenty first century
includes the year February. I know you were
saying to me,
starts on the 01/01/2001,
but, luckily, the 2000 prize isn't on this
list. So this is
the 2015
prize. I just love it because the neutrino
I mean, it's one of those particles that
you learn about
on the physics degree. It was got this
great history going back to Wolfgang Pauli, who
do you remember there was that famous quote?
It was a desperate remedy. So when they
looked at,
how a nucleus undergoes beta decay,
it seemed that their energy wasn't being conserved.
And so he proposed this idea that there
was this particle carrying away
the missing energy, and, he didn't like it.
And then it wasn't until,
you know, the sixties that it was discovered,
and that led to a Nobel Prize for
a Fred Rines and Clyde Cowen.
It
in neutrinos interact so weakly with matter that
these are really difficult particles to detect.
And then it wasn't until the nineties that,
as you say, Hamish Takaki Kajita, who works
on the sub Super Kamiokande
detector in Japan,
and Art McDonald, fellow Canadian, at the Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory in the early two thousands,
what they did was they saw that neutrinos,
which come in these three types, can switch
or oscillate
from one type to another.
And that work is interesting because
it proved that neutrinos, which we thought were
massless,
actually have a very small mass after all.
And you might think, so what? But that
contradicts the standard model
of particle physics. And, you know, isn't it
great when
conventional wisdom is sort of upended?
And what's more, you know, if that wasn't
enough,
the idea of neutrino oscillation,
explained why back in the sixties, Ray Davis
and John Bacowal had only seen
a third of the number of solar neutrinos
predicted by theory from the sun in their
famous experiments.
And the reason they didn't see enough is
that their detector,
was only sensitive to electron neutrinos
and not the other types.
And so they concluded that they'd been oscillating
from one type to another as they come
from the sun. So it solved finding the
neutrino oscillation solved, you know, this
long standing mystery.
So that's number five in my list. Do
you, feel it's worthy on the list of
number five, Hamish? Oh, definitely. I mean, I
think anything that that forces physicists to revise
the standard model of particle physics is extraordinarily
important. I mean, that is the whole goal
of particle physics, isn't it? To to overthrow
the standard model and find some new physics.
So yeah. Definitely.
At number,
number four, you've got the 2,001
award, and that had to do with the
creation of the Bose
Einstein condensate.
So what's a Bose Einstein condensate, and why
did
three people win,
Nobel,
or share a Nobel Prize
for creating it?
I should have stepped back a bit and
said the reasons for picking these prizes is
my my little list of reasons why I've
chosen them. And I kinda think a Nobel
Prize is significant if it's simple to understand
and it's an experimental
tour de force,
has long term implications
for science,
and it's something on people's bucket list that
people have hoped to happen for a long
time.
And also
that it was won by people that we'd
actually heard of. Not every year have we
heard of the Nobel Laurence Hamish. And I
kind of think is of interest to
people who might not be physicists if you're
explaining what's,
what would happen. If they've only got a
passing interest, you'd think these are the prizes
you'd pick. And I like Bose Einstein condensation
again because it's got that long historical link
first predicted in the mid nineteen twenties.
And it's essentially a new state of matter.
And what I also love is that the
three people who's who won the prize, Eric
Cornell,
Carl Wiemann, and Wolfgang Ketterli,
the first two on those lists, they saw
this state of matter at a really specific
time. So I've actually written it down here.
10:54AM
on Monday, 06/05/1995
at the Jiller Laboratory in Boulder,
Colorado. And they cooled down 2,000
rubidium 87 atoms
to 170
nanokelvin, and then they
saw them in
the same quantum state. This is the Bose
Einstein condensate.
And then a few months later, Ketterle,
MIT
made a Bose Einstein condensate from
500,000
sodium 23 atoms at two microkelvin.
So it's great that, you know, something happened
at a really specific time. It's very rare
in physics that you can pinpoint a discovery
to a certain time and a certain place.
And, you know, since then, as you've written
lots of stories over the years, Hamish, we've
people have created hundreds of hundreds of groups
have created Bose Einstein condensates,
and
they've been used for everything from slowing light
to making atom lasers and even
modeling
black holes.
Yeah. I well, I can't argue with that
one. And, you know, I think that the
the creation of the Bose Einstein condensate is
a it was a very
important milestone on the road to the quantum
renaissance
that we're enjoying at the moment.
You know, the the sort of the idea
that physic because of
technology and technology that was developed by the
three people who won that particular Nobel Prize,
because of that and other amazing technology, we
can now sort of control quantum systems
very exquisitely. In fact, we can create new
quantum systems as with the with the BEC.
And that's, you know, I think that's been
very important in in terms of quantum computing,
quantum sensing, quantum cryptography.
You know, it was one of those really
important milestones,
in the new quantum physics. So, yeah, no
no arguments there. I might quibble about it
being number four rather than higher up on
your list, but,
yeah, definitely no argument.
And,
no argument on the next one either, which
is the 2013
prize,
which, had to do with the
discovery
experimental discovery.
Oh, no. It's the the the theoretical
prediction
of the Higgs boson, which was then,
confirmed experimentally at CERN. So,
who who won that prize, and why why
were they worthy?
Well, the twenty thirteen prize famously went to
Francois Englert, the Belgian physicist,
the late Peter Higgs,
for discovering the mechanism
by which subatomic particles get mass. And
their work, which they'd originally done in the
sixties,
was then obviously
confirmed
by the discovery of
what Peter Higgs called the so called Higgs
boson. He never liked it to use that
name himself, and that obviously was at the
ATLAS and the CMS
detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
So it was a prize that went to
the theoretical work
that paved the way for understanding mass, and,
obviously, they didn't themselves undiscovered the Higgs boson.
And I think Peter Higgs was at pains
to distance himself
from any contribution that he might have made,
and the famously,
the citation
did, however,
acknowledge the the research that CERN discovered it.
So it went to those two,
for work they'd done back in the early
sixties. So I kinda think we have to
have the Higgs boson on this list. I
mean, it would be
weird not to include it, but it's not
top
because
there's this strange thing that is really for
their theoretical work they did many years ago.
Yeah. It is that that was a funny
one. And, you know, I think that brought
to light,
I suppose, a controversy about the Nobel Prize
in the sense that only
three people,
can be honored,
by the Nobel Prize.
And, really,
there were thousands of people involved in the
discovery
of the Higgs boson at CERN. It was
made by two
different collaborations,
Atlas and CMS.
And, it just seemed a bit weird really
that
the the prize could only go to two
people
rather than
all those
other people who worked very hard.
But I suppose it would just be a
nightmare to to decide who out of those
thousands of people
would win the award.
So,
I mean, I know at the time there
was talk about, oh, you know, should they
change the rules at the Nobel Prize and
and give it to collaborations? But I think
it was
I I hope I get this name right.
Lars Brink. I think Lars Brink I spoke
to, who is a member of the, Nobel
committee,
told me that,
the the the Physics Nobel Committee in Sweden
basically told me that they, you know, they
didn't want thousands of people going round
calling themselves
Nobel Laureates. They wanted to keep it exclusive.
So I suppose that's why it's,
why why it's still three people. I mean,
even among the theorists themselves,
there were several other people involved. There was
Tom Kibble,
Philip Anderson,
who potentially could have been included in that
list of theorists. And so
there was quite
a debate at the time about who else
might have won it. So it was those
two,
that got it. So, yeah, that's number three
on my list. Yeah. Well, it's a it's
a good choice, and I suppose it illustrates
the power of the standard model, doesn't it?
That, you know, somebody made a prediction. It
was at '64 back way back, anyway, a
long time ago.
And, you know, that prediction held for years
and years and years, and then sudden and
then all of a sudden,
in the in the twenty first century, the
the the Higgs was discovered,
finally. So, yeah, it just goes to show
the power of the standard model, in terms
of prediction
and, I suppose the ability of experimentalists
to interpret that prediction
and finally,
make the discovery.
So moving on to number two,
this is the 2011,
Nobel Prize for Physics. And this was a
real shocker, you know, the discovery behind this
prize. This is the discovery of what I
mean, I suppose what we call dark energy.
It's not really the discovery of dark energy
because we don't know what dark energy is,
but it's a Nobel Prize associated with dark
energy. So what's, what happened there?
Yes, Amy. So that's the twenty eleven prize.
So that went to, again, three people,
Brian Schmidt, who had led
something called the Hi
z or Zed? Hi z z supernovae
search team and his colleague Adam Rees,
and Saul Perlmutter, who led
another
rival team called the Supernovae
Cosmology Project. And what those teams were doing
were studying these exploding stars,
supernovae.
And, yeah,
they always blow up in the same way
when they reach
the same mass, so they're standard candles.
And so you can measure distances in the
universe.
And they're very rare, and they've been carrying
out these painstaking surveys of these,
supernovae.
And they thought they would find out that
the universe is decelerating,
getting expanding more slowly.
But as the data piled up, they realized,
the data only made sense if they if
the universe has a force that's pushing
matter apart.
So those three won it for the accelerating
expansion of the universe,
AKA, it's this mysterious dark energy that, we
still don't really know what it is.
So like you say, Hamish, it was quite
a shocking finding.
It's quite simple to understand.
It's,
has implications for where the cosmos is gonna
go. I mean, who doesn't love those kind
of big questions?
So that, to me, is number two on
the list.
It's quite closely related to,
the work done by John Mather and George
Smoot. They do remember they studied the cosmic
microwave background. George Smoot actually died. That's right.
Certainly. He died recently, didn't he? So he'd
studied small variations in the CND,
which is the kind of echo of the
Big Bang, the remnants of the,
large scale structures that we have in today's
universe. And the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
said that discovery was as significant as that
prize. But to me, this
implication of the future of the universe makes
it more important, I would say. So that,
CMB work was the 2,006 prize, but I
think this edges it. Yeah.
I know. I I I agree. You know,
they they first of all, they they discovered
that,
in a sense, the opposite of what we
expected
is happening.
And then the added bonus is that we
we have no explanation
for for for why this is happening. You
know, we call it dark energy, but who
knows what dark energy has. So in a
sense, it's it's sort of opened up a
a huge
field of of of speculation
and work
in, in cosmology and astronomy astrophysics.
So, yeah,
no no arguments there.
So drum roll, please. We're on to,
number one,
and that is the 2017
prize, which went to physicists who are involved
with the first observation
of gravitational waves.
So we're still in the on the cosmological
scale here. So what what's going on with
these gravitational waves? How are they discovered, and
why is it important?
So this was the 2017
prize, which again went to three people, Rainer
Weiss, who again died very recently,
Barry Barish and Kip Thorne
for discovering gravitational waves. And, again, there's that
link to Einstein. He predicted these,
what you might call, ripples in space time.
That's a sort of shorthand for it.
And for years, these been these have been
on people's bucket lists,
as a sort of thing that people wanted
to
detect. And they built the LIGO detectors, which,
there were two of them,
these huge interferometers,
one in
Louisiana
and the other in Washington state. And these
are amazing feats of engineering that
when a gravitational
wave strikes the detector, they can effectively detect
changes. And I I love this stat.
Changes in distance
tinier than the radius of the proton.
So really
incredible feats of engineering
involving thousands of people and some really sensitive,
measurements.
And again, it was that I love it
because it was on a certain date. It
was Monday, 09/14/2015,
so ten years ago.
And the staff who'd been calibrating the LIGO
detector in Livingston had gone to bed as
it happened. And when and they'd left their
instruments,
they it was about to start taking data
and the gravitational waves were recorded, and that
signal was known as g w
one five zero nine fourteen after the date.
And it was the collision of two black
holes
1,300,000,000
light years away
had hit that detector.
And,
you know, what an incredible thing, you know,
a real thirst. It's something that we'd long
sought after. And, again,
this was something that, if you remember, Hamish
was everywhere on the news. It was a
big, big deal at the time.
And since then, we've detected about well, not
we. Physicists have detected about 200
gravitational wave events.
And what's more, there's this whole field of
gravitational wave astronomy.
So the idea that you
detect a an a cosmic event with gravitational
waves, and then you can look at them
with
follow-up studies using cosmic rays,
neutrinos,
photons,
and those different things come give you different
information about cosmic events. So
I think it's number one on the list,
an amazing discovery, something we'd long
sought after,
quite simple to understand,
and opened up this big new field.
Yeah. It is, it is amazing. And, you
know, then there's the historical,
side of it where I think it, Am
I right in thinking that Albert Einstein predicted
gravitational waves in 1915?
Is that right? When he came up with
his general theory of,
relativity.
And it was pretty well a hundred years
later, wasn't it, that they were actually
observed? That that's amazing. And the other
incredible thing about,
the LIGO detectors
that made this observation
is, you know, that they're they're huge, but
they're quantum
instruments.
Right? You know, they rely on
lots and lots of sort of quantum
metrology
technologies. And, you know, it it they're sort
of, well, they're just part of the quantum
renaissance
that I mentioned earlier.
This exquisite control of light, for example, to
to make those incredible measurements. So, yeah, I
I I have to agree with you on
that one. I I think that's definitely number
one,
for for many reasons.
Definitely. I'm glad you agree.
I'm glad you agree.
Obviously, you know, it's totally, totally arbitrary, this
list, and, you know, everyone else might have
had their own separate list. It's just a
bit of fun. There's no, I'm not saying
there's any sort of authority to my choice,
but that's that's
my pick. Okay. Well, so we're gonna go,
from
the last, twenty five years further further back
into history.
And we're gonna look at two prizes that
were awarded,
I think were they awarded roughly in the
first decade or thereabouts, anyway, very early,
Nobel Prizes.
And, our colleague Margaret Harris has written two
fascinating articles
about,
well, these two prizes that are puzzling
to say the least, very odd prizes.
And I'm afraid Margaret can't join us today.
But, so Matina and I are gonna have
a look at these prizes.
Now one of them was awarded in nineteen
o eight to the French physicist
and inventor,
Gabriel Littmann,
for his method of reproducing
colors
photographically
based on the phenomenon
of interference.
So, are you familiar with this prize, Matin?
It it it's a really interesting one. So,
yeah, this was the nineteen o eight prize.
So at the time,
two years before that,
Thompson
won the prize for discovering the electron.
Nineteen o seven, we have the Michelson Morley
experiment that sort of showed there isn't an
ether and that the speed of lights and
so on.
So this one kind of came out the
blue a bit. So this was,
it's for a weird
photography method
that, well, first of all, it's never really
took off.
Apparently, for it to take pictures, you need
to
take a whole minute in sunlight for it
to work.
You can only see the pictures if you
view them head on.
And there's the other problem that this
the mirrored back of the photographic plate
needed toxic mercury.
So this is hardly a kind of breakthrough.
And, funnily enough, the reason for the prize
being awarded was,
there was a big ding dong behind the
scenes.
And it was meant to be
Max Planck for his work on quantum, but
people were a bit
sniffy about quantum physics back then. They weren't
quite sure what it was all about,
and it hadn't really been experimentally confirmed. So,
and then there was this side
issue of,
Max Planck had been nominated by
the Swedish physicist and chemist, Svante
Arrhenius, who famously
predicted that c o two can,
affect the climate.
And he had a bit of a tiff
with another rich mathematician called
Gustave
Mittag Leffler,
and, they didn't get on particularly.
So Irenaeus had nominated Max Planck,
and, he wasn't the chair of the Nobel
Committee, but he had a sort of influential
voice.
But behind the scenes, this other guy, Mittag
Leffler,
he persuaded the committee members not to vote,
to vote Dan Planck because he didn't like
him.
And
in the end,
he got so Lippmann got 23 nominations,
from 12 people, all of whom are French.
Lippmann is French.
And once he got
awarded the prize, this Mittag Leffler guy was
boasting about his victory.
So basically, he was a bit nefarious. He
got his mates on the panel
to vote against Max Planck and for Lippmann.
And it was this sort of behind the
scenes skullduggery that led to Lippmann
winning the nineteen o eight Nobel Prize.
It's a really incredible story that,
not sure how many people are aware of,
but, that is the
person that you know, he really stands out
in those early years. You wonder why did
he win this prize. So that's that's the
story that Margaret's dug into.
Yeah. It's it's it's a really great piece
that she's that she's written. And, you know,
I have to say after reading it and,
you know, sort of doing a bit of
research
online, reading about Littmann,
you know, I I really like it. I
mean, sure. Okay. Maybe it's not physics. Littmann
was a physicist.
But,
it all sort of hinges on this concept
of structural color,
which is something that, you know, it's a
really hot topic these days. You know, structural
color is the thing that makes,
you know, certain berries look extraordinarily
blue or, you know, the colors that appear
on some butterflies
or,
on some birds' feathers.
And, you know, it's all sort of tied
in with metamaterials
these days. You know, to me, it feels
really modern.
But, you know, of course, on the other
hand, it was very clunky and, you know,
the exposure had to had to be very
long, as you say, toxic chemicals.
Apparently, people do this today, hobbyists and artists.
And so it's it's it's sort of a
still a thing that people do. They don't
use the toxic chemicals anymore.
So yeah. I mean, it it on the
face of it, it looks weird. But, you
know, there is, you know, I think I
think there is actually some interesting physics in
there, and it somehow, it feels sort of
modern.
Actually, I one thing about,
Margaret's article, if you take a look at
it, there are
images, aren't there,
that have been,
taken that actually he took,
that Lippmann took,
images of I suppose they're sort of they're
photographs, so all the light angles were set
up properly and then a photo was taken.
But, they do look very nice. I think
there's one of the Matterhorn.
Is it the Matterhorn? Or maybe Mont Blanc
or anyways, taken in the Alps as sort
of an alpine scene. I mean, the other
thing we always forget is that when Alfred
Nobel,
created his will, it was for the the
prize was meant to go for the person
who'd made the most important discovery
or invention
during the preceding year. And I kind of
think that preceding year and invention,
that's perhaps been lost a bit over the
years. And, definitely, this was
an invention and that had just happened.
So I feel in the early years there
was a feeling that we had to acknowledge
work that had just been done. Whereas
in recent years, I think pretty much
not always I mean, the Higgs boson was
an exception. That was definitely the previous year,
and gravitational waves was the also the year,
but not always
is it work that has just happened. Yeah.
I mean, the invention bit. Yeah. That that
is something that's forgotten. I mean, last year,
there was the the prize,
to two computer scientists
for their development of AI, artificial intelligence. And
that, I suppose, is an invention prize, isn't
it? And you can't argue that,
artificial intelligence is a really important
technology and
that, you know, they were honored for inventing
it. And and speaking
of inventions,
the next the next prize is,
I suppose, even even weirder
than the photography prize. So fast forward to
1912,
and that year's Nobel Prize for Physics
went to the Swedish inventor,
Nils Gustaf Dalen,
apologies to any Swedes out there for my
pronunciation,
for his invention of automatic regulators
for use in conjunction
with gas
accumulators
for illuminating
lighthouses
and buoys.
So
so this guy, it seems, was a sort
of gas engineer.
Maybe not, you know, the same engineer that
comes to fix your boiler in your house,
but, I I don't think he had any
connection to physics. He was
he was interested in using gas,
to
to light up,
lighthouses.
I mean, it's not surprising because, you know,
much of Sweden's coastline is rugged and irregular,
so lighthouses were a crucial
infrastructure.
And apparently, at the time, gas was the
best thing.
I suppose electricity
was not,
maybe you just couldn't get the wattage through
to to really pump out a bright light
at a lighthouse. So they so they relied
on gas.
So his work was important, but,
again, I think Max Planck might have missed
out on this one, didn't he?
Well, no. It was so
nineteen o nine, the prize went to Marconi
for wireless communication,
big name in physics. 1910,
van der Waals for his molecular work. 1911,
Wilhelm Wien,
again for black body.
1912,
the prize people thought it ought to go
to,
the Dutch physicist, Camilleen Hones, for superconductivity.
But,
a nasty accident,
ended up with, kind of Darwin
winning this prize. So just to go back
a bit. So, yeah, Darwin, from what we
know, was, kind of a lazy
student. When he was younger, apparently, he'd made
a machine to make himself coffee in the
morning.
Sounded like an early sort of tease made
that, he was too lazy to get up
and make coffee.
But like you say, lighthouses
were a sort of thing that were important
at the time for shipping, and they traditionally
were,
lit by
acetylene,
which is very bright, but it can be
explosive
and you can't ship it around. So what
he did, he created this
canister
and he filled it with a strange mixture
of asbestos and something called
di diatomaceous
earth. And it was a material that you
could pour the
acetylene in
like a sponge and then transport it around.
So the first thing he did was he
created a way of shipping the acetylene around.
He then made it safe by creating a
device to turn the acetylene supply on and
off for the lighthouse
so it could flash.
And then the third thing he did was
he made a valve,
to turn the acetylene burners on at night
and off in the morning automatically without needing
any human intervention. So
he creates a way of shipping acetylene,
making it safe, and having it turn on
and off.
But that year, very sadly, he's he was
injured in a factory accident and blinded.
And so kind of it was a sympathy
vote for him because he'd suffered this terrible
injury, and it was his brother actually who
went to the ceremony in Stockholm,
on his behalf.
So it was a kind of sympathy vote
for that injury.
I should say that he carried on as
a scientist and I this is crazy. He
was
ten years later, he invented the AGA cooker,
so beloved of
people with big houses and, lots of money.
Who knew that that the man who won
the 1912
Nobel Prize invented the AGA cooker and won
a Nobel Prize? So this is the Margaret
calls it by some margin.
It's the unluckiest
Nobel laureate in history, but also perhaps lucky
in some sense.
Yeah. That yeah. That is an amazing story
that he invented the AGA,
cooker,
which is, yeah, as you say, much beloved
in the, in in the British countries. Have
you got one, Hamish?
No.
I don't know if I've ever have I
ever seen I I just don't, I don't
know. Mixing those circles. No. No. No. No.
I've you know, I've I I am an
avid listener to the archers, and sometimes there
is a a mention of the AGA not
working or fire up the AGA or that
sort of thing. But,
yeah, that
that is a a really good story,
but both of them actually, Littmann and Dolan,
from the early days of the Nobel Prize.
And, you know, it I suppose it is
an illustration of how, you know, things have
changed in terms of timeliness
and also utility.
You know, you don't really get prizes these
days,
for the invention
of something in physics.
So are we coming up to your predictions
for the Nobel Prize this year, Hamish?
Yeah. We are.
Every year we make predictions,
and, we're rarely right.
Sometimes we do get it. Sometimes we're close.
But I think it's a bit of a
stopped clock
effect because,
well, to be honest, you know, we often
put forth the same people
every year, you know, people at the top
of their game in physics. And eventually,
one or two of them do win a
prize.
But,
this year,
It is quantum year, isn't it? Do you
think quantum will? I mean, I personally think
it will. I mean, the Nobel Committee aren't
at fools. They do like to sort of
acknowledge what's going on
in the wider world. I've got a funny
feeling they'll be sucked in by quantum. I
do. And you you know,
part of my belief is inspired by last
year's
prize,
you know, which was won by two computer
scientists.
And I sort of thought, well, you know,
quantum
quantum computers. What about the computer science
side of it rather than the, you know,
the physics side of it. And so
I'm going to predict a prize
for pioneers of quantum
algorithms.
But the problem is that I've got four
people in mind,
and only three of them can win.
So,
my contenders are Peter Shor and Gilles Brassard.
They're both computer scientists,
and then Charles Bennett
and David Deutsch. Now I know Deutsch is
definitely a physicist. I think Bennett is also
a physicist as well.
And I'm going to say that three of
those people,
are going to win for their contributions to
the developments of
algorithms for quantum computing and quantum
cryptography.
And,
you know, my bias will come out again.
I think I'm hoping that Gilles Brassard will
be in there because, of course, he's Canadian.
And we do love a Canadian Nobel Prize
winner. We've had lots of them recently. How
many Canadians have won a Nobel Prize for
Physics? That's not part of my quiz, but
it ought to be. Oh oh, gosh. I
don't I don't know. There's lots. More than
you would expect.
More than you would expect.
Yeah. So so that's one prediction,
sort of based on the fact that quantum
is hot and
thinking, oh, yes. Computer scientists can win. Why
not these computer scientists? But
we also we we sort of have a
running
infographic,
that we started to produce,
a few years ago. And, essentially, what we
do is we divide all the Nobel prizes
up into
into fields, categories like condensed matter physics, particle
physics,
applied physics,
and we sort of chart
year on year
where the award is given. And the idea
being, you know, we're looking for patterns.
Is is an award given in particle physics
every five years,
every six years, that sort of thing. So,
you know, if you stare at this thing
for long enough, you can see patterns in
it. And
what's really apparent is that there hasn't been
an award for condensed matter physics
in a while, and there hasn't been an
award in particle physics
for a while.
Now the particle physics has been a bit
quiet on the particle physics front over the
past,
you know, decade or so. So that's a
difficult one.
I mean, if you
if you
if you consider,
the concept of cosmic inflation
to be particle physics,
you know, maybe you could have an award
for
Alan Guth,
Paul Steinhardt.
I'm sure I'm sure there's some other people
that I've left out that could be included
in such an award.
And for a condensed matter, I suppose there's
two options.
One would be metamaterials,
where
our old friend John Pendry at, Imperial College
London And David Smith. That's right.
Those two have been on a lot of
lists for a lot of years. Yeah. And
I would add Federico Capasso
to that. Yeah. The the
amazing,
applied physicist,
who does a lot of work in, you
know, sort of using metamaterials
for practical
applications.
I mean, I think he really, really
deserves a Nobel Prize, so it would be
great if he won one.
And,
and then the other the other option is
twisted
twistronics,
twisted graphene,
which has some pretty amazing properties. But I
think it might I don't know. It might
be a bit too early for that. And,
you know, we've already had a a graphene
Nobel Prize, which you which wasn't in your
top five. It wasn't. No. So, basically, you
made four predictions. Like, one of one of
them might be right. You are you allowed
so but if you had one to choose
from, you'd go for the, the quantum stuff.
Yeah. Well, I would because I think it's
it's very relevant
at the moment, you know. We again, it's
this quantum renaissance.
It's something that,
you know, it's it's gone out of academic
physics. It's industry, you know. There's lots of
quantum computing startups. Quantum cryptography
is being used.
So, you know, there's a very practical
side of things as well. So I'll go
for the quantum
algorithms and, yeah, hopefully,
my fellow Canadian,
Gilles Brassard, will be in there,
along with a few other people. Okay. So
it's now time for the, the quiz, Hamish.
Now I had totally forgotten that in 2020,
in the depths of lockdown, I did a
Nobel quiz. I'm glad to find that some
things I've forgotten I ever did, but, you
know, there's some questions on there. I'm sure
you've definitely forgotten. So I'm not gonna go
through them all. I love asking you questions,
Hamish, because you're normally pretty good at these.
So,
so question one,
like, not many people have won a Nobel
Prize in two subjects. So Marie Curie is
the famous
person who won the chemistry prize
and the physics prize. Now
can you remember in which order she won
them?
Was it physics first and then chemistry or
the other way around?
I well,
I've got a fifty fifty chance of getting
this time. Easier, obviously. So I'm gonna say
chemistry.
She won the physics prize in nineteen o
three
and the chemistry prize in 1911.
So physics first nineteen o three and chemistry
1911.
Right.
So you got that wrong. Oh, no. Not
at one. Okay. Next
next question, Hamish.
Right. In 2010,
Roy Glauber,
his Nobel Prize, what happened to it? Was
it, a,
sold for money,
b,
stolen by burglars,
c, thrown in the bin,
d,
lost in the woods.
What happened to his medal?
I think it was stolen.
Correct.
Stolen by burglars.
Do do were they targeting him for his
Nobel Prize, or it just happened to be
on the, on the mantelpiece when they came
in? I can't remember. Who knows? They stole
it anyway. But they're they're made from gold,
aren't they? I think they're worth quite a
bit. And, I think it was recovered later.
Yeah. I do I do remember, yeah, reading
that it had been recovered, which is good.
One out of two. Okay. Third question, three,
Hamish.
It's very rare that this happens, but which
physicist
almost decided to turn down the offer of
a Nobel Prize?
Was it, a, Paul Dirac,
b, Einstein,
c, Heisenberg,
or d, Schrodinger?
Well, I mean, I I think Dirac was
famous
for being,
I don't know, sort of strange character, wasn't
he? So, I think it's got to be
Dirac.
Correct. So, yeah. It was Paul Dirac. And
I think I think Rutherford told him, look,
you'll you'll get more publicity if you turn
it down. There'll be more noise about it
than if you just go and accept it.
So he he he picks it up. So
you got two out of three. Okay. Two
questions to go, Hamish. Question four.
What informal event do Nobel Laureates
get invited to in Stockholm
after they pick up their medals?
Okay. You got four choices. Is it, a,
the dog
ball,
b, the frog ball,
c, the hog ball,
or d, the warthog
ball.
Ball as in like a a dew. Yeah.
So it's something the students will do, I
think, in Stockholm. Which one of those was
it? Dog, frog, hog, or warthog?
Oh, gosh. I don't know.
I mean Apparently, Frank Wilczek loved going to
it when he went. He enjoyed
taking part in this thing. Okay.
I mean, I suppose Warthog sounds more sort
of exciting.
You're you're shaking your head with tuna. We've
only got that one. It is the frog
ball.
They do the frog ball. So there you
go. That is
wrong Hamish. You got two out of four.
So No. Not doing very well. Final question.
This is this is this is quite easy.
Well, isn't this easy? Okay. So how old
was William Lawrence
Bragg? Do you remember he won the prize
with his dad
for X-ray crystallography? And he is the youngest
person
to win a Nobel Prize for physics. So
how old was William
Lawrence Bragg? Was he, a,
22,
b, 25,
c, 28,
or d,
31?
Well, before before you gave me those options,
I thought, oh, it's got to be about
25.
Is it 25?
No. He was,
oh, no. He was. Yes. Correct. He was
25. Sorry. Yeah. Be you. Getting my dates
mixed up. So he was 25. So, yeah,
Paul, William
Lawrence Bragg, who won it with his dad,
was
25
years old. So I think you've got three
out of five Is that respectable
mid That's decent. Mid table result?
There are a further five questions on the
physics world website. I won't torture you with
all of them because I think you ought
to know the rest of them.
Why is that? Because I those are the
ones that I came up with. Well, no
Probably forget the answers even if I came
up with the quiz. But one of them
is what day of the week is the,
Nobel Prize normally awarded on? Well, that's yeah.
Well, for physics, it's Tuesday. Tuesday. Yeah. It's
always a Tuesday. So Yeah.
I'll give you an extra point. Four you
got four out of six then. Well well
done.
Okeydoke.
Well, thanks for joining me, Matin.
And I should say that, all of the
articles that we've talked about in this episode,
I'll put links to them in the notes
for this week's podcast.
I'm afraid that's all the time we have,
and I would like to thank American Elements
for their generous support
of this episode.
Thanks for joining me, Matin, and a special
thanks to our producer,
Fred Ailes.
We'll be back again next week with an
episode
devoted
to this year's
Nobel Prize for Physics, which, of course, will
be announced next Tuesday.
See you then.
American Elements,
the world's manufacturer of engineered and advanced materials.
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