October 07, 2008
1 American, 2 Japanese Share Nobel Physics Prize
Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:
An American and two Japanese physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work exploring the hidden symmetries between elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature.
Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the 10 million kroner prize (about $1.3 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize.
Ever since Galileo, physicists have been guided in their quest for the ultimate laws of nature by the search for symmetries, or properties of nature that appear the same under different circumstances.
However, in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu, who was born in Tokyo in 1921, suggested that some symmetries in the laws of nature might be hidden or “broken” in actual practice.
A pencil standing on its end, for example, is symmetrical but unstable and will wind up on the table pointing in only one direction or the other. The principle is now embedded in all of modern particle physics.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:04 AM | Permalink
Comments
As you read the glowing propaganda statements about the physics Nobel prize this year in the media keep these facts in mind: 1. No particle with fractional electric charge has ever been observed, except perhaps as an artifact in the databook of Robert Millikan. 2. No quark has ever been observed in isolation. 3. No convincing calculation, from first principles, has been made, of a proton or neutron from any number of three quarks, as one has calculated hydrogen from electron, proton, Coulomb's Law and quantum mechancs. The quark theory is a model only, of many possible models. See the work of the late professor Barut at U. of Colorado or David Bohm among many others.
Unfortunately, physicists of 2008 have degenerated to little more than followers rather than leaders like their great predecessors. Most will place their selfish interests above larger interests. As an example to prove this statement, consider that thousands of physics teachers over the past half century or so, have, without question, blindly taught a watered down physics sequence of introductory courses, differing little from high school physics, to pre med majors at the bidding of the low level biological sciences and medical industry. The physicists have done this, for the most part, without question, placing their selfish interests of a job above the over riding interest of higher standards for the low level medical profession they have produced with this outrageous and irresponsible behavior.
If simplicity is a lofty goal, as Dr. Weinberg is quoted in the article in USA Today on this subject, why is not this principle the same "lofty goal" in cancer where the medical orthodoxy, and most physicists as well, have abandoned the experiments and facts of Otto Warburg proving that cancer is one disease of oxygen deficiency, for a much more complicated and unproved and unsuccessful and prejudiced cesspool theory of speculated gene mutations. Science in the 21st century is in a sad state of affairs. Talk is cheap especially when articles in orthodox physics publications are accepted in secret and reviewed by secret reviewers, answerable to no one. Funny, isn't it, how science editors have adopted the principle of secrecy in evaluating scientific works, but secrecy is the enemy of the truth.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Oct 8, 2008 9:23:22 AM
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