Nobel Prizes
If you are interested in science you can learn
a lot about how science develops by studying the lives of Nobel Prize
winners. Students
looking for term papers can try to explore who these winners interacted
with, their colleagues and competitors. Why were they doing the work
that
brought them a prize? And, who were some of people that should have
received a Nobel Prize and did not? This web site touches on a number
of Nobel Prizes. When a page relates to a Noble Prize there is a link
on the right of the navigation bar at the top of the page. Have a good
term paper!
Scientists are judged by their
concrete achievements. Names
like Newton, Galileo, Maxwell,
Darwin,
and Einstein
will probably be remembered for millennia because of their
life-changing discoveries. These discoveries will not disappear
although they may be extended as Einstein's relativity extended
Newton's mechanics. Few scientists will be Einstein's peer but many of
them will also make important contributions to science and technology.
Newton himself commented "If I have been able to see further than
others, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants." (Hooke -
1675 - some aspects of the attribution are clouded). For the last
century Nobel Prizes
have been
the gold standard in recognition of scientific achievement. Only
Einstein of the five scientists above received a Nobel Prize. The
others had all passed away by the time the prizes were established. The
prizes have achieved great visibility because they are financially
large, relatively fair, and they are also rare. Nearly all
of science topics covered by prizes are interesting. Most of the
prize-winners are also uncommon men and women. Gifted, driven,
sometimes all too human, most of them have been graced with Newton's
ability "to see further."
Once
more, there is plenty of really important scientific work done by a
host of other giants that did not receive Nobel Prizes!
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Enrico Fermi
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory or Fermilab is named
after Enrico
Fermi. Fermi was one of the fathers of elementary particle
physics, the subject studied at Fermilab.
Fermi was both a great theorist
(the theory
of beta decay) and a good experimenter (neutrons and the
nuclear
reactor). The scope of his scientific interests was
enormous. Cronin
in a 2003 colloquium
at Fermilab displayed a page (slide 15) out of Fermi's notes from 1948
listing more that twenty possible topics he might speak on for a
seminar at Berkeley. Some of these topics even now
would make very
interesting colloquia!
Fermi passed away at the age of fifty-three in
1954 from cancer. A
number of the early pioneers in nuclear physics and x-rays suffered
from cancer due to exposure to radioactivity before the risks were
fully appreciated. I never heard Fermi speak. I worked as an
operating room orderly at the University of Chicago about the time
when
Fermi was treated there. With modern medicine and modern radiation
safety one wonders if Fermi
could have survived twenty to thirty years more. He would have been a
tremendous influence at Fermilab and would have enjoyed the great
campaigns in neutrino physics and the start of the collider programs
at Fermilab
and CERN that led to
the discovery and understanding of the
famous intermediate vector boson that is at the root of beta decay
theory.
Fermilab was dedicated with the help of
Fermi's wife, Laura Fermi on
a very windy spring day in 1974. Mrs. Fermi's interesting book "Atoms
in the Family" is a useful history of Fermi's life. It was my
pleasure and honor to help Mrs. Fermi with some of the information
needed for the dedication speech. During the talk chairs were blowing
off the podium in front of the Fermilab high-rise (now Wilson
Hall). Some of us feared
Mrs. Fermi would also blow away. Norman
Ramsey, the founding president of URA, stepped up to save her from
the fall. Meanwhile he was taking care of a very small dog that
was also in danger of being swept away. The dog belonged to Dixy
Lee Ray, another speaker and then chairman of the US Atomic Energy
Commission.
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