Nobel Prize Winners 2017

Physics – The physics prize was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. The received the prize for the discovery of gravitational waves released in the world by violent events in the universe such as the mergers of black holes. Weiss, professor emeritus of Physics at MIT, along with Thorne and Barish, California Institute of Technology Physicists, pioneered LIGO, or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, the scientific project that made gravitational wave detection possible.

Chemistry – The chemistry prize was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Richard Henderson and Jaochim Frank for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution. Cyro-electron microscopy is a technique that takes accurate and detailed pictures of living things at atomic scales. This is assisting scientists make high resolution, 3D images that can help in cancer drug research and better understanding of the Zika virus. Jacques Dubochet is a retired biophysicist of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joachim Frank, a professor at Columbia University in New York and Richard Henderson is a scientist at the British Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

Physiology – The 2017 prize was awarded jointly to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm. The award celebrates the study of the tiny biological clocks in every living thing. The three American Scientists were able to peek inside our biological clock and elucidate its inner workings. Their discoveries explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolution.

Literature – The Literature prize was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world. The author of seven novels, a short story collection and screenplays, Ishiguro was born in bomb-hit Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England at the age of 5.

Nobel Peace Prize – The Peace prize 2017 was awarded to International campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic, humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground breaking efforts to achieve a treaty based prohibition of such weapons. The group formed by Geneva based coalition of disarmament activists is behind the first treaty to prohibit nuclear arms. 

Economics – The US Economist Richard Thaler was awarded the $1.1 Million Nobel Economics Prize for his contributions in the field of behavioral Economics. The award giving body said that Thaler contributions have built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision making.

Movie Review: Particle Fever

Particle Fever is a 2013 documentary film tracking the first round of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The film follows the experimental physicists at CERN who run the experiments, as well as theoretical physicists who attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the LHC results. The film begins in 2008 with the first firing of the LHC and concludes in 2012 with the successful identification of the Higgs Boson.

The subject of the film is the Large Hadron Collider, a massive miles long particle accelerator designed to detect the Higgs boson by replicating, miniature, the Big Bang. It works by smashing together two high-energy proton beams aimed directly at each other. Comprised of liquid helium cooled magnets and complex microelectronics, the LHC is the world largest crash test Laboratory.

One doesn’t have to be a physicist or good at math, to enjoy the energy and thrill of discovery that radiates from the documentary “Particle Fever”. Mark Levinson, director of the film has taken a potentially daunting topic, the search for the elusive and highly significant Higgs Boson particle, also known as “God Particle” and turned it into a movie that not just accessible but fun, with a surprisingly emotional playoff at the end.

Real stars of the film are the half dozen physicists who tell the story of the search for the Higgs Boson, lending the tech talk real drama. They are led by David Kaplan, a theoretical physicist at John Hopkins University who acts as a kind of tour guide to the story and helps simplify a complex subject for a general audience, many of whom would never otherwise care about any of this. The pursuit of knowledge sake is science as purest. As Kaplan says, everyone looking for the Higgs particle always understood that the search could yield nothing, other than understanding everything.

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Content Source:- http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/particle-fever-movie-review-a-true-scientific-search/2014/03/19/fc9bf708-aaeb-11e3-98f6-8e3c562f9996_story.html