Physics Nobel Won By Laser Wizardry -- Laureates Include First Woman in 55 Years (nature.com) 151
A trio of laser scientists have won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using intense beams to capture superfast processes and to manipulate tiny objects. From a report: The laureates include Donna Strickland, who is the first woman to win the award in 55 years. Strickland, at the University of Waterloo, Canada, will share half the 9 million Swedish krona (US$1 million) prize with her former supervisor, Gerard Mourou, from the Ecole Polytechnique, in Palaiseau, France. The other half of the prize went to Arthur Ashkin, of Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey.
Strickland and Mourou pioneered a way to produce the shortest, most intense pulses of light ever created, which are now used throughout science to unravel processes that previously appeared instantaneous, such as the motion of electrons within atoms, as well as in laser-eye surgery. Ashkin won the prize for his pioneering development of 'optical tweezers', beams of laser light that can grab and control microscopic objects such as viruses and cells. Further reading: The Guardian.
Strickland and Mourou pioneered a way to produce the shortest, most intense pulses of light ever created, which are now used throughout science to unravel processes that previously appeared instantaneous, such as the motion of electrons within atoms, as well as in laser-eye surgery. Ashkin won the prize for his pioneering development of 'optical tweezers', beams of laser light that can grab and control microscopic objects such as viruses and cells. Further reading: The Guardian.
Sadly, in the current climate.... (Score:4, Insightful)
she will never know if she was really worthy of it, or just a diversity token.
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Fortunately, California hasn't figured out how to legislate the Nobel Prize yet.
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>"Fortunately, California hasn't figured out how to legislate the Nobel Prize yet."
No, but somehow the Nobel Prize committee awarded Obama a peace award for.... well.... nothing? So it does make one question the whole thing, sometimes.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sadly, in the current climate.... (Score:4, Informative)
Well. One of the Nobel Prize Committees did. The peace price is handled in Norway. The physics prize is by Vetenskapsakademin in Sweden. Quite different bodies and quite independent from each other.
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The Nobel prize for peace is such a joke that it only brings discredit upon the receivers.
Peace Prize is joke (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobel peace prize given to:
Obama - ordered the killing of thousands with drone strikes
Al Gore - made a movie
Yasser Arafat - a terrorist leader
Nobel peace prize NOT given to:
Gandhi - advocating peaceful protesting
Pretty much sums it up
Re:Peace Prize is joke (Score:5, Funny)
Allow me to continue this list.
Henry Kissinger - For ending a war he started ... well, basically for keeping its members from killing each other for over 60 years, this is indeed impressive considering their history, I give 'em that.
The EU - For
Al Gore - For producing a lot of hot air that allegedly cools the planet
Jimmy Carter - For trying. Really hard.
United Nations - For wrapping the global big players in so much red tape that they can't wage war sensibly anymore.
David Trimble and John Hume - For not shooting each other anymore. As a side note, anyone available for starting a civil war we could then end? I'm asking for a friend.
International Campaign to Ban Landmines - For making landmines magically disappear. Except the few that make people disappear instead every year.
Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat - For bringing peace to the middle east. Just in case anyone was still wondering whether this Prize is a joke.
Mikhail Gorbachev - Mostly for not being Josef Stalin
United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces - Basically for being the good natured idiot that gets into the struggle of two bullies, with the express intention that they should kick the idiot instead of each other.
Lech Wasa - For founding a union, but being considerate enough to do it in a country we do NOT like.
Mother Teresa - For making poverty and pain something to celebrate
Menachem Begin and Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat - See Peres/Rabin/Arafat.
Andrei Sakharov - For pissing off the Commies
Willy Brandt - For not wanting East Germany back.
International Labour Organization - Fuck knows why
Martin Luther King, Jr. - For being the peaceful nig.... Unlike that Malcolm guy we didn't like.
George C. Marshall - For finding a way to sell US goods and calling it aid
Carlos Saavedra Lamas - For ending a war nobody gave a fuck about. But find someone else who gave a fuck about peace in 1936
Carl von Ossietzky - For not being a Nazi
And a few more I didn't find anything to write about.
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Well, at least they got peanut butter. Sure beats the blessings and prayers the altar boys got, if that.
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The Peace Prize has certainly had its controversies and questionable moments (Obama being a notable example). I would argue that there is sometimes a legitimate paradoxical element to peace, which is this: it is frequently the case that the leader of a violent faction is the only individual capable of brokering an effective peace. This was the case with Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, etc.
The political metaphor for this situation (which extends beyond peace negotiations) is " only Nixon could go to China [wiktionary.org]". Ba
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Obama is hard to find a good quip for. There are too many, choosing one would've taken too long. It's like avoiding the low hanging fruit because everyone would just accuse you of going for the low hanging fruit. ;)
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The Nobel Peace Prize, explicitly, is not for achievement. It's designed to shine attention on what the committee thinks is important. It's supposed to be a political statement.
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Except, you know, he's not. I mean, look at 1994 or 1996.
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I started the conversation with how "peace prizes are aspirational". You brought up Obama as a (implicitly unique) disproving case. I rebutted with other examples. Now you're trying to shift it to "how do you feel about Obama, I still hate him!!" I'm not going to defend Obama because it's being distracted to your goalpost shifting.
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I see, you want to debate Barrak Obama. We were talking about the Peace Prize, and the standards of it. But, all you do is talk about how horrendous Obama is.
It's been almost two years. You might want to get over it.
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Yes, and in previous years she wouldn't have known if she wasn't worthy or if it was systemic bias preventing her from recognition.
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You passed Victimization Training 101 with flying colors huh?
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she will never know if she was really worthy of it, or just a diversity token.
We do know you are a sexist jerk if you really believe that.
Funny, "progressives" say that Clarence Thomas would never have been on the Supreme Court if he weren't black.
Thus actually demonstrating the corrosive nature of "affirmative action" - and why it's a horrible idea.
Re:Sadly, in the current climate.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having been educated in Swedish academia (my alma mater holds the Nobel lectures), I would like to believe that we have progressed farther than that.
Nobel Prizes are not limited to awarding achievements in the last calendar year. Sometimes the achievements have been made several decades ago. Most laureates are quite old, many having retired from active work.
Therefore there is an amount of inertia in the system in the diversity of laureates compared to increased diversity among contemporary scientists.
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Oh please, Sweden is the Tumblr of Europe. One only needs to point at Obama's peace prize to show how worthless and political those awards are.
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Oh, I call BS. She knows she's worth it.
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Oh, I'm pretty sure she knows she was the person most deeply motivated to solve the problem, likely after a series of interactions with guys involving superfast processes and manipulating tiny objects. Congratulations! I'm sure women everywhere are applauding her work.
Gender doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
"Gender doesn't matter! Everyone is exactly the same as everyone else!"
Yet we're constantly having "I'm a woman therefore my accomplishments are special!"
If gender doesn't matter, why is it constantly thrown in our faces?
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It's a mixture of virtue signalling, propaganda, and genuine wish to encourage women to participate in really hard work of being a scientist.
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If you hand out participation tokens for a group, you're not exactly encouraging the group to work really hard. You encourage them to participate, but they'll expect to get a prize for that already.
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hear that everyone, the nobel prize is a "partitipation trophy"
meanwhile "Opportunist" has shitposted like 1000 times on slashdot about how hard it is to be a straight white male and has anyone given him a prize? no!
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There should be a moderation flair called "Dumbass" for shitposters like you.
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Yes. The goals contradict each other
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Because we live in a society where men, knowing there's no legitimate reason women cannot contribute equally, feel threatened when they do and are recognized for it
Where the fuck do you live? I've lived and worked in the UK, Germany and the US and in all of those countries men aren't threatened by female competence. They welcome it.
they are special because they overcame the shitstorm of male fragility
That's nothing. You should see the barriers the men had to overcome. Men are special too. Lets all be special.
You're fucking special.
Gender shouldn't matter in physics... but it does (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet we're constantly having "I'm a woman therefore my accomplishments are special!"
You seem to be mistaking an argument for equality for an argument for preference. Perhaps you would understand if your accomplishments were dismissed as unimportant because of your skin color or age or gender or some other irrelevant bit of your physiology rather than the quality of your ideas. Women aren't arguing for special treatment. They are arguing for EQUAL treatment. It only sounds like a call for "special" treatment to people who are missing the point.
If gender doesn't matter, why is it constantly thrown in our faces?
Gender SHOULDN'T matter for topics like this yet It DOES matter because too many people (like yourself) make it matter in the wrong places. Gender is supposed to matter in some circumstances but physics isn't one of them. It is really hard to explain why there hasn't been a single woman worthy of a Nobel prize in Physics in over a half century without invoking some amount of sexism in the explanation. Maybe unintentional sexism but sexism all the same. They don't deserve the award because of their gender but they also shouldn't be excluded from it because of their gender either. Sexism is real and if you think fighting against it is "throwing it in your face" then you are part of the problem.
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Gender SHOULDN'T matter for topics like this yet It DOES matter because too many people (like yourself) make it matter in the wrong places.
How do you expect something to matter LESS when you put MORE emphasis on it? That's the part I don't get.
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Where? Who by? How?
Sorry but 'it must be sexism' is a fucking weak argument.
Women get more scholarships than men, the education system was changed to give them better educational outcomes, more women get top grades at school, more women go to university, more women graduate, more women get post graduate qualifications, hiring in academic positions favours women.
I see plenty of sexism but it sure as fuck doesn't explain the Nobel award for physics.
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It's simply because there are less women working at the highest levels in these fields, which has as an underlying cause that women, in general, are less inclined to put in what it takes to lead such research teams (ie. putting work before family, foregoing socializing, personal hygiene, etc).
Less women willing to make such sacrifices (or only part-time) means they're competing with more men willing to do so, which naturally leads to men being over represented and thus having increased chances of winning pr
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It's simply because there are less women working at the highest levels in these fields, which has as an underlying cause that women, in general, are less inclined to put in what it takes to lead such research teams (ie. putting work before family, foregoing socializing, personal hygiene, etc).
Whoa their Sparky! Could you drag out a few more memes there? I've worked with a lot of physicists and scientists, and the ladies had perfectly acceptable hygiene. And you might be surprised at how many even played sports. Hell - I'm into Ice Hockey, and shower twice a day, and many buds are into sports like handball and running. I mixed genders in that group.
Now, discarding the memes, There is a particular mindset and way of thinking required of a physicist. There is almost certainly a thought process
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> If a woman wants to be a physicist, nothing will stop her. If she doesn't, no one can make her.
That's just incredibly naive.
Your statement is bullshit. You apparently believe thatr men are pushed along, with nary a cloudy day, their road to physics paved with gold.
When the fact is - it's not easy. This is not a fraternity. Today, there are sexists on both sides. There are large scale disagreements.
But here's the truth coward. This is not a field for the easily dissuaded. If you have a theory, there are going to be those who oppose it. Either because of belief, or even devil's advocate. I've sat in rooms where my ideas are
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Here it's because it is such a rarity (1 woman in 55 year period of awarding), so it's noteworthy.
While it's unreasonable for someone to look at Nobel winners like them before entering the field, in reality people find anecdotes more compelling and it helps data showing it is a viable field for women.
It's a tough line to walk, to highlight female winner against a backdrop of mostly male winners versus diminishing the achievement by adding a qualifier 'female nobel winner'. It invites a lot of folks to spec
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In her defence, she seems to be getting put on a pedestal and isn't stepping up there herself. She happily acknowledges that it was a team effort.
She (and the Nobel prize committee) can't help that there are sexists focussing on only one of the recipients.
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that's not even applied science, that's technology (Score:2)
People do not get that fundamental physics is over (you would not call seriously "string theory" "scientific" would you?).
I know I am repeating what Lord Kelvin said to his embarrassment just before great discoveries in relativistic physics, quantum physics, etc.
Nevertheless, that's truth: everything ends, everything has limits, humanity has limits and science has limits.
The clear indication that we are close to the limit is absence of ANY fundamental discoveries since a long time ago.
We are gradually shift
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Laughable. It's not over until we know everything, and we clearly don't.
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You can't know everything. Science is about _repeatable_ phenomena. There is vast areas in existing world where they are not repeatable.
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While we may never know everything, we may be running into the reality that we simply can't conduct experiments/observe enough to solve what we don't know. There is an exponential factor in difficulty of getting new data and we are increasingly stuck being unable to get further.
Already it seems like it is mostly coming up with new models to describe existing observations, so we are to a large extent stuck with just re-examining the same data over and over again.
We do occasionally get new observations and i
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People do not get that fundamental physics is over (you would not call seriously "string theory" "scientific" would you?).
[useless crap deleted]
LOLWUT!?!?!
You MIGHT be able to get away with that after gravity is unified with all the other forces.
When you look at the technology that in a mere century and a half grew out of the unification of just electricity and magnetism, and knowing that there's still a crapload of fundamentals about gravity alone that we still do not know, saying crap such as "fundamental physics is over" is just painting yourself as a pompous, arrogant know-it-all spouting off in ignorance in an attempt to look smarter than eve
Science requires tools (Score:5, Insightful)
People do not get that fundamental physics is over
Yeah yeah, people were making this bullshit argument centuries ago [scientificamerican.com].
(you would not call seriously "string theory" "scientific" would you?).
As long as it make predictions that can be empirically tested then of course I would.
I know I am repeating what Lord Kelvin said to his embarrassment just before great discoveries in relativistic physics, quantum physics, etc.
And he was just as wrong as you are.
The clear indication that we are close to the limit is absence of ANY fundamental discoveries since a long time ago.
What are you babbling about? You are in a scientific golden age for discoveries. Furthermore we have well known holes in our knowledge of fundamental physics. We have no way to reconcile gravity to quantum mechanics. We can't explain large amounts of seemingly missing matter in the universe. Just because we're not rolling out a new theory of special relativity every other week doesn't mean we've explained everything. It was literally centuries between Newton and Einstein but the only reason Einstein's work was such a breakthrough was because of a LOT of important work done in time between the two men.
Call them for what they are: Nobel Prizes in Technology
You seem to have a huge misapprehension. Physics only advances when we can built devices to test our theories independent of human senses. Theories are fine but they are meaningless without the tools to verify them. Furthermore we cannot refine our theories without the data from these tools which inform us how the world actually behaves. A theory of gravity waves is meaningless unless you have some tool to test for their existence. Physics isn't just blackboards and chalk.
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You are an imbecile
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We are gradually shifting towards applied science and mere technology. All of three fields, basic science, applied science and technology are essential for humanity, but the fact is that the first one is almost over or probably over already.
When you see a shift away from basic science and into applied science / technology, it generally just means our instrumentation is not sufficient for basic science to march forward at an equal pace. Once technology improves enough to enable new methods in basic science, the pendulum swings back.
We have so much left to learn that we are nowhere near hitting the limits of what science can discover.
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>We have so much left to learn that we are nowhere near hitting the limits of what science can discover.
Empty declarations.
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You don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Modern Science has a laundry list of fundamental problems:
* Problems with the Standard Model [wikipedia.org]
* Problems with Big Bang [wikipedia.org]
* Unsolved Problems in Physics [wikipedia.org]
E.g. The SI system is a clusterfuck of 7 "fundamental units" but more then half of them are *dependent* on others.
*facepalm*
E.g. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that Energy can not be created nor destroyed, only transformed. Ergo, the universe has always existed (in some form.)
* Where did this energy come fr
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None of the problems you mentioned have a clear experimental path to verifiability
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* Consciousness can be transferred,
There's a pretty clear experimental path to verifying that.
"Hey Bob, the code word is spaghetti" *CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER NOISES* "So, completely different body, sack of meat, or computer that wasn't Bob before, what's the code word?"
You could say that's just memory, but it'd be one hell of a big step and it'd likely earn you a nobel prize. Or at least a copy of you would earn it. This is where things get messy. But with enough personality tests they could see what the side-effects were. If something
Re: that's not even applied science, that's techno (Score:2)
Advanced precision instruments are opening up unexplored areas of research and a multitude of industrial and medical applications. . . Strickland and Mourouâ(TM)s newly invented technique, called chirped pulse amplification, CPA, soon became standard for subsequent high-intensity lasers . . . The innumerable areas of application have not yet been completely explored.
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Why are there 4 fundamental forces [wikipedia.org] (wait, 5?) instead of 2 or 3? Why the three dimensions (plus time)? Why is space expanding? Will it expand forever? Why does the fabric of space wobble [wikipedia.org]? Are gravitons a thing? And I still don't get how black-holes can be singularities, but retain rotational momentum, and be a donut... but also still a singularity. Aren't we still confused about how quantum mechanics jive with... gravity and electromagnetism? We've still only got interpretations of just whateverthefuck
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You do not know what science is. Science is not to answer ANY questions.
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Science answers all sorts of questions. Even some philosophical questions like "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?". The answer is that the egg arose way earlier in evolution than chickens and chickens immediate predecessor also laid eggs. So some Velociraptor-like thing laid an egg which hatched a more chicken-like thing. But the egg came first. It also answered "If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?" Which I always thought sounded like bullshit, of cours
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Unless you just want everything to be tossed on the floor, I fail to see the benefit.
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Prior art.
The Washington Post and New York Times have been manipulating liberals minds for years.
I think the real question we need to ask (Score:2)
Laser Wizardry (Score:2)
Did MST3K do that one?
Why only one "diversity token" in 55 years, if so? (Score:2)
"55 years" is practically identical with the time that "women's liberation" first became a common term. If it takes 55 years of pressure to get ONE Nobel awarded, it's not a very big effect.
She might be a "token" of course, in the Jackie Robinson sense: if there's a pervasive tendency to dismiss a group, that dismissal is highlighted when a particularly un-dismissable talent comes along, and you kind of have to recognize them, however late.
If there was a Nobel in Physics awarded to a woman every five year
I'm reminded of Candace Pert (Score:2)
Worth reading Candace Pert's book Molecules of Emotion as wikipedia's entry [wikipedia.org] on her states:
"...an eye-opener into the intellectual warfare of modern scientific discovery – the gamesmanship, the sly purloining of others’ results – but also into the round-the-clock work, the exhilaration of a shared breakthrough, and the slow, painful rise of women in the scientific professions. "
The most memorable thing about her book was that her boss Solomon H. Snyder, who headed the lab, was the one who g
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There's a long list. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin [wikipedia.org] who completed her studies at Cambridge University but they did "not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."
Left England for the USA and Harvard to write her PhD. "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". Astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zeberg called it "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy".
And yet now
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