SUMMARY: A trio of scientists won this year's Nobel prize, including Canada's Donna Strickland--the third female recipient in history and the first in 55 years. Amna Nawaz speaks with Strickland about her research in laser amplification, what she would tell young people interested in a physics career and how she plans to celebrate her landmark achievement.
SUMMARY: A trio of scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating some of the world's tiniest machines. Their nanorobots use extremely controlled movements to perform tasks that the creators hope will one day be useful in the world of medicine. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss these mini machines and the other science and medicine Nobels awarded this week.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The latest winners are in the field of chemistry, and the Nobel went to a trio of scientists who helped pioneer tiny molecular machines in the world of Nanotechnology. These are specially designed molecules that can produce controlled movements. And there's talk they could some day be useful in the world of medicine.
Our science correspondent, Miles O'Brien, is here to walk us through the significance of this and the other Nobels awarded this week. He joins us tonight from San Diego.
Miles; Drs. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard Feringa, for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. How small are we talking?
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): Well, think of a nanometer.
A nanometer is — well, there are 80,000 of them in a human hair. That will give you an idea. We're talking very small. Imagine machines at the molecular level that can do work, and some of the applications that we're thinking about are potentially drug delivery inside our system, and many others where tiny machines can pack a punch.
Another application they're looking at potentially, Hari, is creating computer storage capability at the atomic level. Well, if you're storing things at the atomic level, you basically need a processor that is at the molecular model.
And so nanomachines are potentially revolutionary. We're still very early on, though, in that game.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How do you build something that small?
MILES O'BRIEN: It's basically a chemical process that you engage with, and that is part of their insight.
And, you know, basically, the researchers are saying that we're kind of like the Wright Brothers at this point. We built a flying machine, but how could you possibly have conceived of the 747 at the time that occurred?
These mechanisms, these tiny nanomachines, have the capability of revolutionizing medicine, revolutionizing computer storage, and really who knows what, because we can't imagine that 747.
HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, let's shift to physics.
The Nobel was given to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and Michael Kosterlitz for something called topological phase transitions and phases of matter. I need an advanced degree just to understand what the prize was for.
MILES O'BRIEN: Yes, yes, it's — this is a tough one. It's a lot of mathematics and physics. And it's difficult, frankly. It's tough sledding.
But it is a very human moment involved. There is a very human moment involved. Dr. Kosterlitz got the word in his car. Listen to his response.
QUESTION: We run the official Web site for the Nobel Prize. Have you already heard the news of the announcements to the physics…
DR. MICHAEL KOSTERLITZ, Nobel Prize Winner: No, haven't heard anything. I'm talking from an underground car park in Helsinki, Finland, right now. So, I can barely hear you.
SUMMARY: Gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime -- aren’t just an Einstein theory any more. A team of international scientists announced Thursday that they confirmed the waves’ existence after recording feedback from a black hole collision a billion light-years from Earth. Hari Sreenivasan learns more from Dave Reitze of the California Institute of Technology.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Now some truly cosmic news.
The sound of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, it was recorded by a team of scientists at the LIGO Observatory, proof of gravitational waves, or ripples in time and space, first theorized by Albert Einstein.
We explore this monumental moment in physics with Dave Reitze of Caltech, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory.
Now, that was a rudimentary attempt at explaining what a gravitational wave is. But what are they, and why is it such a big deal to find one?
DAVID REITZE, California Institute of Technology: Actually, you did a pretty good job.
So, gravitational waves are fluctuations in space-time. And any time you have a mass, something that has matter in it, accelerating, all right, it produces a gravitational wave. All right? And that’s a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
Now, these particular gravitational waves, in order to be able to detect them, you need really, truly massive objects. So, in this case, these were black holes that had about 30 times the mass of the sun in them.
So, why gravitational waves are so interesting is that they tell us something about the universe that you can’t get from any other kind of astronomy. So, if you think about optical astronomy, that looks at certain classes of light. If you look at radio astronomy — so gravitational waves are completely different.
They come from a different sector of the universe, and that’s why they’re so exciting.
HARI SREENIVASAN: OK. So Einstein is sitting at his patent clerk’s office thinking about this big thought, and what is the connection to space-time?
DAVE REITZE: Yes.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Does time and space bend? And if you heard or saw, so to speak, this moment, does that mean that time and space bent just a little bit at those points?
DAVE REITZE: Oh, in fact, this particular event was, as my colleague Kip Thorne calls it, a storm in space-time.
All right? As these two black holes came together and collided, they really disrupted space-time and produced this burst of gravitational radiation. It’s interesting that you mention Einstein. Gravitational waves were first predicted actually 100 years ago. And Einstein himself, all right, thought it was an interesting consequence of the theory of relativity, but didn’t think that it had any practical value, because he said that the effect is so tiny that we will never be able to measure them.
And it took 100 years from the time that he predicted them to the time we have been able to measure them.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The Nobel Prize in Physics is often awarded to work that can be tough to explain to anyone who isn’t actually a physicist. But this year’s winners, announced earlier today, won for research that actually affects our everyday lives.
Jeffrey Brown has the story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): A trio of scientists won for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes, often referred to as LEDs.
The blue LEDs, first created in the early 90s, paved the way for brighter and more energy-efficient white lights, the kind now seen on the screens of phones, TVs and computers, even signs on the subway.
Two of the scientists were from Japan, one from the U.S.
Our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, joins me now from Boston to tell us about it.
So, Miles, the invention of blue light-emitting diodes, what exactly does that mean?
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): Well, we had red and we had green, and we needed blue the take it over the top.
Let’s step back for a little bit. Back in the ’60s, when they created the first light-emitting diodes, red was the first one because it was the easiest to make. The semiconducting material that makes that particular color was much easier to make in an efficient way. Then came green. And you can think about the first calculator you got, which was always with a red light emitting diode. And eventually we got into green.
But blue was difficult because the material that creates that particular color, that wavelength, was hard to work with. Gallium nitride was the tricky thing that was difficult for scientists and engineers to efficiently turn into the crystals to mass produce.
But once you have red, green and blue, put them together, you have white light, and that’s created a revolution.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, that’s the word that the Nobel committee used, revolutionizing lighting. So it has seeped into all facets of life.
MILES O’BRIEN: Well, think about the incandescent lightbulb, which is just a hot, glowing filament in a vacuum tube. Then we went to fluorescent lights, much more efficient.
And now we’re in the world of LEDs, which if you go back to the incandescent bulb, comparing it, 20 times more efficient, and lasts much longer. You know, a quarter of the energy on our planet is spent in creating light. And in order to reduce all of our need for energy and our carbon footprint, LEDs make a huge, significant impact.
On July 4, 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced that they had discovered the Higgs boson, the elusive particle that scientists hoped would explain why all matter has mass. News cameras rolled as the physicists popped open champagne.
What the public didn’t see were the years of stress, joys and frustrations that accompanied the efforts of the Large Hadron Collider. But theoretical physicist David Kaplan and physicist-turned director Mark Levinson followed the drama that unfolded since the collider went live in 2008, capturing 500 hours of film in seven years. Using professional film crews and physicists armed with cameras, “Particle Fever” captures the sheer excitement the moments before the collider first turned on and the distress in the control room when a helium leak brought research to a temporary stop. Theoretical physicists feared they would never see proof that this particle, the lynchpin of the standard model of particle physics, existed.
Physics says you’re an impurity in an otherwise beautiful universe.
You’re almost unfathomably lucky to exist, in almost every conceivable way. Don’t take it the wrong way. You, me, and even the most calming manatee are nothing but impurities in an otherwise beautifully simple universe.
We're lucky life began on Earth at all, of course, and that something as complex as humans evolved. It was improbable that your parents met each other and conceived you at just the right instant, and their parents and their parents and so on back to time immemorial. This is science’s way of reminding you to be grateful for what you have.
But even so, I have news for you: It's worse than you think. Much worse.
Your existence wasn’t just predicated on amorousness and luck of your ancestors, but on an almost absurdly finely tuned universe. Had the universe opted to turn up the strength of the electromagnetic force by even a small factor, poof! Suddenly stars wouldn’t be able to produce any heavy elements, much less the giant wet rock we’re standing on. Worse, if the universe were only minutely denser than the one we inhabit, it would have collapsed before it began.
Worse still, the laws of physics themselves seem to be working against us. Ours isn’t just a randomly hostile universe, it's an actively hostile universe.
My physicist colleagues and I like to pretend that the laws of physics are orderly and elegant. Indeed, I just published an entire book, The Universe in the Rearview Mirror, about the beautiful symmetries of the universe. Programs like Nova or Slate’s own Bad Astronomy tend to focus on the knowable structure of how everything fits together.
The history of physics, in fact, is a marvel of using simple symmetry principles to construct complicated laws of the universe. Einstein quite famously was able to construct his entire theory of special relativity—the idea that ultimately gave us E=mc2 and explained the heat of the sun—from nothing more than the simple idea that there was no measurable distinction to be made between observers at rest and observers in uniform motion.
The long-overlooked 20th-century mathematician Emmy Noether proved the centrality of symmetry as a physical principle. And what is symmetry—at least as scientists understand it? The mathematician Hermann Weyl gave perhaps the most succinct definition:
“A thing is symmetrical if there is something you can do to it so that after you have finished doing it, it looks the same as before.”
Which sounds innocuous enough until you realize that if the entire universe were made symmetric, then all of the good features (e.g., you) are decidedly asymmetric lumps that ruin the otherwise perfect beauty of the cosmos.
The seemingly simple idea that the laws of the universe are the same everywhere in space and time turns out to yield justification for long-observed properties of the universe, like Newton’s first law of motion (“An object in motion stays in motion,” etc.) and first law of thermodynamics (the conservation of energy).
As the Nobel laureate Phil Anderson put it:
“It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry.”
Everything is kinda the same? Every Friday night is like every other one? Sounds almost comforting. But it would be a mistake to be comforted by the symmetries of the universe. In truth, they are your worst enemies. Everything we know about those rational, predictable arrangements dictates that you shouldn't be here at all.
How hostile is the universe to your fundamental existence?
Very. Even the simplest assumptions about our place in the universe seem to lead inexorably to devastating results.
