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Science

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics 156

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-waiting-for-mine dept.
azatht writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" jointly to David J. Gross, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, H. David Politzer California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USThe 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Frank Wilczek Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA."
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The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics More

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics

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  • Some quicky info (Score:5, Informative)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:16AM (#10438131) Homepage Journal
    Asymptotic freedom [wikipedia.org] in the theory of the [wikipedia.org] Strong Interaction [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Some quicky info (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by mirko ( 198274 )
      I kinda liked the Wiki article which mentioned the quarks' colours...
      with the antiquarks anti-colours, I just wonder whether anti red would be cyan, anti-green, would be magenta and anti blue would be yellow, as suggested by this [tasi.ac.uk] ?

      Of course, I understood this colour case is only a paradigm and doesn't reflect any visible characteristics (also because there's no such thing as a colour, at this subatomic scale)...

      But I would not be surprised if some colour-coordination actually reflected what happens at the

      • Re:Some quicky info (Score:2, Informative)

        by yourmom16 ( 618766 )
        It has absolutely nothing to do with the normal use of color, except the name. All it is is a quantum number with 3 possible values, which Gell-Mann decided to call red, green, and blue.

        • Red, white, and blue (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Actually, Gell-Mann originally decided to call them red, white, and blue, in honor of the French flag. (Not sure why; he's American!) But it made more sense to change it to red, green, and blue, which (as light) combine to a neutral color (white), suggestive of the fact that quarks are bound into color-neutral configurations.

    • English (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tod_miller ( 792541 )
      The closer the quarks are, the more free they reign.

      The farther apart the more force is exerted on them.

      They describe it as an elastic band. It sound more like the 'proximity' provides some kind of countering effect, which is removed when they drift apart, or indeed, merely they reach the boundary of thier movement (this is me know knows nothing about all this stuff)

      But it does say that we know nothing about gravity, where it comes form, what its favourite colour is, or, perhaps topically, who it will vo

    • Not quite! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Don't attribute the theory of the strong interaction to these guys! That mostly already went to Gell-Mann in 1969. What these guys did was explain asymptotic freedom, which explains why, in the already-invented theory of the strong interaction, free quarks can't be seen. (Before them, everyone knew experimentally that they couldn't be seen, and we had a theory which supposedly could explain it, but nobody actually knew how to extract that particular prediction from the theory.)

  • Eat my Karma (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:19AM (#10438145)
    BBC Article [bbc.co.uk]

  • Well . . . (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:19AM (#10438148)
    This discovery cemented the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes the interactions of quarks and other subatomic particles inside the atomic nucleus.

    It also filled a critical remaining gap in what physicists refer to as the Standard Model, the theory that governs physics at the microscopic scale. It accounts for the behavior of three out of nature's four fundamental forces - electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force, which governs radioactive decay. Which brings us a few step forwards towards the answer of 42.

    • Re:Well . . . (Score:4, Informative)

      by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:56AM (#10438317) Homepage Journal
      It accounts for the behavior of three out of nature's four fundamental forces
      Err, no. QCD accounts for one of the fundamental forces, the strong force. Quarks (and their asymptotic freedom) don't really have anything to do with the electroweak forces, which are carried by W and Z bosons and photons.

    • Re:Well . . . (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pi_0's don't shower ( 741216 ) <ethan&isp,northwestern,edu> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:08AM (#10438866) Homepage Journal
      This discovery cemented the theory of quantum chromodynamics...
      Not to be too nit-picky, but it's worth mentioning that their work shows that quantum chromodynamics (QCD) accurately describes the strong force only at HIGH energies. The use of asymptotic freedom, or QCD at large energy scales, agrees very well with experiment. However, the theory does not give reliable predictions in the low-energy (sometimes non-perturbative) regime. To say that QCD is now completely understood ignores this problem, which is the most serious problem left (other than the Higgs) in the Standard Model today. Some possible solutions to the low-energy QCD problem (or the confinement problem) are the people working on Lattice QCD and the people working on the B-T worldsheet formalism. Sorry for the deluge of information, but I thought it was worth pointing out that there is still plenty of work to be done in understanding this theory. And as an interesting aside, even with these three brilliant men and their work, theoretical calculations only agree with experiment to about a 10% level!
      • And as an interesting aside, even with these three brilliant men and their work, theoretical calculations only agree with experiment to about a 10% level!

        What does that mean? How many significant digits of agreement do we currently have?

        Second, I'm puzzled by your characterization of QCD. My understanding is that QCD breaks down whenever gravitation/curvature effects need to be considered. Eg, at "high" energies or in the presence of sufficient mass. The "confinement problem" as far as I can tell is t

        • Re:Well . . . (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          How many significant digits of agreement do we currently have?

          QED agrees with experiment to about 12 digits. QCD agrees (at low energies) to about 1 digit (10% accuracy). However, a lot of that is due to the fact that we can only do calculations in QCD to that level; if we could do them more accurately, QCD would probably agree better with experiment.

          My understanding is that QCD breaks down whenever gravitation/curvature effects need to be considered.

          Theoretically, it ought to, at ridiculously h

          • I have no idea what that means. Quarks are no more nor less a "label", and no more nor less a "particle", than, say, electrons.

            Well, they are less a particle than an electron in that you can observe an isolated electron, but not an isolated quark. For example, if we treat a proton as composed of three particles, two up and one quark, then we get the relevant data for the proton by assiging fractional charges and such to the constituent particles.

            This does seem backed by experiments verifying "point-li

        • "High Energy" in QCD means anything higher than the QCD scale of a few hundred MeV ... so a "high energy interaction" is one in which the parties to the interaction exchange energies that are of the order of 1GeV or more. Certainly, all of the Standard Model breaks down at the gravitational scale, but that is so very much more energetic than the QCD scale that that's not what we're talking about as "high energy". We usually reserve "Planck Scale Physics" for those energies.

          Whether the quarks are "real"

          • Whether the quarks are "real" particles or not is a question of metaphysics, but to the extent that we can do deep inelastic scattering experiments and measure "pointlike constituents" in the "interior" of hadrons (stuff made of quarks), you should consider quarks to be just as "real" as other particles you think of as "real" (like electrons, protons, muons, etc)

            "Real" should mean observable. In that sense, there is something real to quarks that is being observed. But are we scattering off of "point-like

      • Well, not to be too nitpicky as well, but I think it's pretty well accepted that QCD is the theory of the strong interactions (of course, it depends on what you mean by "high" energies). What asymptotic freedom means is that you can calculate QCD perturbatively at high enough energies, but, as you mentioned, at lower energies you can't. But just because we can't always get answers out of QCD doesn't mean that it's not right - just, as you said, we don't completely understand it.

        But it's still a fascinatin
  • Is it some 100% theoretical stuff or will it have technical repercussions in the short term ?
    • It is of immense importance to the theory of elementary particles, but the forces it governs involve quark interactions, and it is doubtful any technology will explicitly need a model of quark interactions for some time! Then again, I could be shortly eating my shorts...

      • Re:Where will this take us ? (Score:4, Funny)

        by daveaitel ( 598781 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @09:03AM (#10438367) Homepage Journal
        Due to, ya know, quantum tunnelling and stuff, some of the atoms in your shorts are, kinda, in your mouth. So technically you already are.

        -dave
        • Quantum tunneling is nothing to do with Quantum Chromodynamics or the strong interaction. That comes from pure quantum mechanics, you don't need to explain the in-particle nuclear binding forces to understand tunneling.

    • Re:Where will this take us ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:55AM (#10438307)
      Is it some 100% theoretical stuff or will it have technical repercussions in the short term ?

      Generally, by the time somebody receives the Nobel Prize for a discovery, the "short term" is already over.
    • Currently all of our engineering physics is based on electricity and magnetism which depends on electrons and whole protons & their anti-particles (PET scans), plus radioactivity which depends on the weak force. However the math of the strong force was worked out first due to the weird large hadron zoo particle physicists discovered in the 1950s and 1960s. Then this mathematics was extended to unify two of the other forces- weak with E&M.

      Big engineering breakthroughs are anticipated if gravitatio

    • Re:Where will this take us ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Theory of Everything ( 696787 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @11:29AM (#10439881)
      Is it some 100% theoretical stuff or will it have technical repercussions in the short term ?

      I just attended Frank Wilczek's press conference. He was asked this very question. His answer, in short, was "No." In medium, "The are no real-world applications I can think of." In long, "Maybe, someday, it could benefit nuclear power production because we better understand the nucleus. And there are side-benefits: the WWW was developed at CERN, and young people are inspired to science-related careers."
      • I hope you get upmodded as it was the very kind of answer I was expecting :)
      • Sounds about right for Frank. I had him as a TA my first semester of school - he taught us Einstein summation convention, as well as an introduction to quantum chromodynamics. Unfortunately, it was a recitation for an advanced E&M class. Rather frustrating for kids who were struggling to understand their coursework.
  • It just seems to me,with what little I know of research and physics, that these things are now such large scale enterprises that the awards should actually go to the institions and not the people.
    • I disagree entirely. There are too many things in fundamental research which are known exclusivly through the names of their makers.

      http://web.mit.edu/8.712/www/lecture3/tsld008.ht m

      above is but one of many

    • Re:How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by trtmrt ( 638828 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:40AM (#10438238)
      These guys were theorists. For what they came up with they didn't need an army of graduate students and engineers turning bolts on an accelerator. Fortunately there is still some room for people that just know a lot and are smart enough to do discover things by themselves (of course in the context of other people's work).

    • Re:How can you select a couple people anymore..... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QuantumMajo ( 744804 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:55AM (#10438311)
      Good point, but these guys really did pioneer a huge field ... quantum chromodynamics. Which is not interior design for quantum physicists by the way, but how quarks join together to create the particle zoo we have. As good as CERN or SLAC is, for example, without these three guys, the accelerators at those labs would have nothing to do. Many of my friends in high energy physics work at experiments specifically designed to probe the QCD effects that David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek theorized. So ... should we give the award to the numerous validators or to the first pioneers. I go for the first pioneers. But hey, I am a theorist.
    • It just seems to me,with what little I know of research and physics, that these things are now such large scale enterprises that the awards should actually go to the institions and not the people.

      Why does this comment aggrevate me so? Maybe it's because political correctness has run amok, Maybe it's because the importance of individual acheivement is being marginalized because we don't want others to feel "left out".

      These prizes damned well should be awarded to individuals in recognition of their acheivement. Then, by proxy, their institutions will will receive their due recognition. Just my $.02

    • http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-m ain.html

      One of the main points of this uber-famous book is that large organizations are intrinsically incapable of creative thought. They can equip and support brilliant, creative individuals, but the those individuals are not interchangeable parts; while the individuals could carry out their work with any random source of funding, the organization behind them could not reproduce their results with any random individuals.

    • I was fortunate enough to meet Jack Steinberger [nobelprize.org] (physics 1998), and he said pretty much the same thing. They had pretty much administered a huge project, and the only leader of the project who had actually done a lot of science was long dead. The real work was done by armies of graduate students, but Jack took every opportunity to give them credit.

      I have also met Doug Osheroff [nobelprize.org] and he actually got the nobel prize in 1996 for something he did as a graduate student. So, they exist too.

    • what little I know of research

      At a research university you will have many departments (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). And within those departments you will have many Professors each probably working on few topics, but mostly different from what other Professors are working on (or from a different perspective). So what one lab - The Professor, his post-docs, staff, and grad-students - works on is completely separate than what any one else in the institute works on, ignoring occassional collaborations.

      F

  • I need to catch up on my physics (Score:5, Informative)

    by FLOOBYDUST ( 737287 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:24AM (#10438173)
    It always amazes me how little I know when I look at what these folks do. http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty /frank_wilczek.html/ [mit.edu] Interesting reading.

  • The Elegant Universe (Score:5, Informative)

    by MonkeyDev ( 810880 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @08:45AM (#10438266) Journal
    If you want a good description of what Superstrings is all about, read Brian Greene's book "The Elegant Universe". It's about superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory. His book was also made into a PBS special a few months ago. Brian Greene is a master at making these complex issues understandable. And he's fun to watch too. I'm not sure how much pure research he does anymore, but he's probably one of the best things that's ever happened to science because he helps people like me understand what people like him do - and tells us why we should care!

    • Or watch the show (Score:2, Informative)

      by Baron Eekman ( 713784 )
      Although this is slightly offtopic, I recommend spending three hours behind your computer to watch Greene's NOVA program The Elegant Universe [pbs.org]
    • Another option is Greene's newest book (2004) "The Fabic of the Cosmos". I'm only about a hundred pages into right now, so I'll let you know how it turns out. Having said that, I read "The Elegant Universe" and found it fantastic. The sequel, so far, is just as good or better.

      Later taters,
    • No, he's actually a master at giving you the impression of understanding. No offense - with the scarce funding that's going into String Theory right now, it's a necessary skill.

      Just because he paints a picture it doesn't imply one understands its meaning.
    • "The Elegant Universe" is a very good book, and I recommend it. It's worth noting, however, that the Nobel Prize award just given has nothing to do with string theory at all.

    • This is probably a good example of why commercial theoretical advances should be weighted down in considerations for Nobel prizes. Commercial success is already a goal - smart people can make money this way. I think that the encouragement of smart people to make money from Nobel prizes is a good thing - spurring advances in fields which may not see commercial return in the discoverer's lifetime.

      Brian Greene is obviously making money on books and TV shows - perhaps not the million or so that a Nobel prize

  • After T'Hooft prize (Score:2, Informative)

    by colores ( 766507 )
    It is long waited prize in the the High Energy Physics comunity. It wasn't awarded before because some dispute about the original idea claimed by Gerard T'Hooft but never published [cerncourier.com]. Only after T'Hooft got the nobel prize in 1999 the path to the "QCD nobel prize" was really open.
    • The full history is here: Gerardus 't Hooft - Autobiography [nobelprize.org]:

      "At CERN, I became interested in the quark confinement problem. I could not understand why none of the expert theoreticians would embrace quantum field theories for quarks. When I asked them, why not just a pure Yang-Mills theory?, they said that field theories were inconsistent with what J.D. Bjorken had found out about scaling in the strong interactions. This puzzled me, because when I computed the scaling properties of Yang-Mills fields, they
  • ... I'm glad to see freedom is alive SOMEWHERE.
    • Asymptotic Freedom... Where you think you have freedom, til a fair time later, where you realize you have a lot less freedom than you had before? Though the conditions hadn't changed?
  • As much as I'd love to have a "Theory of Everything" I think the scientific community needs to do something about the names given to the different "flavors" of quarks before we move any further with this theory. For those of you who don't know, there are six flavors of quarks that we know of, their names are (and I swear I am not making this up) Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom. Charm and Strange? Do you ever think this was a joke among physicists that just got out of hand

    • It's a Bob Calvert reference.

    • Top and Bottom were originally known as Truth and Beauty. Okay maybe not originally, but I've sure seen them presented that way. Hell I even saw Feynman refuse to name them in his QED Lecture Series [vega.org.uk], and I'm betting it's because he couldn't bring himself to call them Truth and Beauty.

    • Re:These guys need to get out more (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnHolier than ever ( 803328 ) <unholy_NO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:12AM (#10438901)
      In fact, the original name (and one that is still used by many physicists) for the top and bottom quarks were Truth and Beauty. Now, of course, joykillers like you say that's not technical enough and that it can't be serious. As if Top and Bottom meant something more....If you want to do any anything technical, they should be called 1,2,3,4,5, and 6. Otherwise, give any name you want, they're just names.
      • Joykiller?

        If anyone deserves to be a little whimsical from time to time, it's the guys who sit around and figure out why the Universe is the way it is. I wasn't saying that the names aren't technical or serious enough, there's enough complexity in the name Quantum Chromodynamics to make most undergrads head's spin, they don't need the names of the elementry particles to be alpha, beta, gamma, etc.

        I just find it funny that in trying to discover a theory of everything, we use a phrase from Finnegan's Wak

      • the original name for the top and bottom quarks were Truth and Beauty.
        Ah, yes. But the famous physicist John Keats demonstrated (in his ground breaking URN experiments in Greece), that these two were the same thing.
      • This used to be my /. .sig for a couple years:

        Truth decays into beauty, while beauty soon becomes merely charm. Charm ends up as strangeness, and even that doesn't last, but up and down are forever.

        I think I just copied it from someone's .sig in nntp://sci.physics

  • Prize money?? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wetlettuce ( 765604 )
    I hadn't realised that the Nobel Prize actually had a cash prize. Considering these guys were just doing there job, the payout is not bad. 10M swedish krona (763K GBP or 1.36M USD).

    • Re:Prize money?? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I hadn't realised that the Nobel Prize actually had a cash prize. Considering these guys were just doing there job, the payout is not bad. 10M swedish krona (763K GBP or 1.36M USD).

      Excuse me? "Considering these guys were just doing there job"? What does that have to do with anything?

      1. Your grammar needs improvement: you should have written "their" and "jobs".

      2. Anyone that wins the Nobel prize in physics is an awful lot smarter and has done an awful lot more work than "just doing his job".

      3. You imply

      • 1. Your grammar needs improvement: you should have written "their" and "jobs".

        Hmm... this is /. not a customer report, I think a bit of slack can be given

        2. Anyone that wins the Nobel prize in physics is an awful lot smarter and has done an awful lot more work than "just doing his job".

        I never said anything about them not being smart and not putting in extra hours but fundamentally they were getting paid to do that work, hence they were doing their job. Some people actually work because they enjoy it,

  • "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" It's her way of saying you can approach freedom, but you will never quite get there. - not as long as I'm around.

  • A plug for Caltech and good teaching. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrRobin ( 33359 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @09:23AM (#10438499)
    Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago, and I actually _remember_ his explanation of asymptotic freedom to us (even though I am a only a biology guy)! I also remember Feynman's guest lecture on numerical methods for "solving" otherwise impossible problems in Quantum Mechanics (which he demonstrated with a hand calculator!). We (the undergrads) were for the most part cocky know-it-alls with no clue what a privilege it was to have these folks (and many others of their caliber) teaching us up close and personal. Now, I look back with amazement at being able to discuss/joke/plead with these folks like it was no big deal. Seriously, if there are any gung-ho Slashlings out there looking for an intense science education, Caltech is hard to beat. Of course, if hazy memory serves in this matter, more than half the class flunked that first Phys1 midterm, so this is not for the faint of heart...

    • Re:A plug for Caltech and good teaching. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:24AM (#10439035) Homepage Journal

      Hey! One of these guys (Politzer) was my Phys 1 prof when I was a frosh at Caltech *cough* 27 years ago

      I remember taking "Track B" with Politzer and Gomez back about that time, with class notes distributed on pink paper, brutal take-home quizzes on relativity, etc.

      Politzer is a pretty good and patient prof, answering questions, explaining basic physics points, etc. although one time he did get annoyed at a cocky youngster (I don't think it was you - this was 26 years ago) slouched up in the front row.

      Cocky youngster: "I don't see why you just don't use Stoke's Theorem."

      Politzer: "I could just do this, too! (writes down what I later learned was manifestly covariant form for Maxwell's equations), but I'm teaching the class (erases equations) and this is how I want to do it."

      The silenced cocky youngster sitting up front was spared the further embarrassment of seeing his classmates behind smiling at his long overdue comeuppance.

      I agree - Caltech can't be beat for pure science education. It helps, too, that the freshman year is graded Pass/Fail and that they have an honor system, unlike most any other school, actually trusts you to take a closed-book, limited-time,take-homeexamination.


      • "Politzer is a pretty good and patient prof, answering questions, explaining basic physics points, etc. although one time he did get annoyed at a cocky youngster (I don't think it was you - this was 26 years ago) slouched up in the front row."

        Couldn't have been me. I've always been a back row guy, and only made comments to the person sitting next to me. Also, except for a brief period needed to pass AMA95, I have never known the Stokes equation to save my life. ;^)

        I'd forgotten about Gomez but your p

    • I had Wilczek as a recitation instructor first semester freshman year at MIT. It was his first term at MIT too so it started off a bit odd - he tried teaching Einstein summation notation the first day, but after that he was great. He had over the summer solved every problem in the text book himself - so if you ever wanted to do some practice problems he would let you check the answers. It also meant that he never stumbled through the problems (but I am sure he would have been fine without the solutions).
    • Politzer was a terrific lecturer ('85). And one of the most approchable physicists at Tech. I remember my Ph12 TA (Randy Kamien) saying this work was likely to get him the Nobel!
      Shout out to Kip and Charlie, and RIP to Gomez.
    • After you left, Politzer became famous at Caltech for other reasons: Sloth.

      As of the early 90s, he had done literally nothing of interest besides his teaching. There was a lot of grumbling on the part his fellow faculty members -- to the point that Politzer circulated a (locally) famous memo about 1990, where he announced he'd be returning to research. But just barely -- I think he's done a half-dozen papers in the past 10 years.

      Moral of the story: If your graduate work is brilliant enough, you
  • A Politzer prize!

  • ah yes, highbrow for a day (Score:3, Funny)

    by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdot@@@hackish...org> on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @10:47AM (#10439350)
    This is where we pretend we care about the nobel prize in physics for a day.

    Now back to Linux.
  • Two of the winners are in their mid 50's. But the work they won the prize for was done over 30 years ago. That means they were in their early to mid 20's at the time!
  • I've attempted to explain the physics behind the Prize on my blog, Illuminating Science [illuminatingscience.org]. Plenty of links for extended reading available, and it should (I hope!) be suitable for a non-physicist interested in science.

    All comments and, especially, corrections, greatly welcomed.

  • Because if I hadn't read this, my question to the Jeopardy answer:
    The 2004 Nobel prize for this science was given for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.
    would have been:
    What is fuck-if-I-know?

  • The article at this time has an extra phrase, "The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics" stuck in between Politzer and Wilczek. It's missing some commas, too. At this point it appears that the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics went to, among others, the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. It will be interesting to hear the Prize give its own acceptance speech. Perhaps the medal itself will be carried to the podium and placed by the microphone so we can learn about its insights into quantum theory. At least it's better than havi

  • Dr. P. is a Rap Singer Too (Score:3, Funny)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @02:19PM (#10442411) Homepage Journal
    David Politzer's name sure sounded familiar to me. Then I remembered:

    Back when I was at CalTech in the early 80's (studying physics myself), a friend named Scott Lewicki, and his friend Doug Priest got David Politzer to record a rap song called The Simple Harmonic Oscillator Rap.

    Google doesn't find me an MP3 of it, but the lyrics are in this PDF document [dickinson.edu]. Search in the text of the document for "Politzer" and you'll find the lyrics.

    You can purchase it on a CD called Physics Pholk Songs [harmonpublishing.com] for $15.00.

    Here's the first verse:

    I want to talk today about things that shake,

    And I hope my words aren't too opaque.
    One degree of freedom moving to and fro,
    Just how it moves, we'd like to know.
    We can represent all kinds of things
    By a single mass between ideal springs.
    Each spring's connected to a wall.
    So the outer ends don't move at all.

    Enjoy!

  • What we see... (Score:3, Funny)

    by writermike ( 57327 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2004 @02:25PM (#10442519)
    The physics person sees...

    azatht writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction" jointly to David J. Gross, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, H. David Politzer California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, USThe 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Frank Wilczek Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA."

    The others see...

    azatht writes "The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics ...(uuuhhh words, words, words, uh... blah).

  • They get accolades for reverse engineering, but others get....well okay I guess the building blocks aren't protected under the DMCA, yet.

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