That's a wrap
Thanks for joining us for the live coverage of the 2018 Nobel prize for physics. Don’t forget to come back tomorrow to find out who has scooped the prize for chemistry.
The last thoughts on today’s award are from Dr Amelle Zaïr from King’s College London, who is a lecturer in advanced photonics and Dr Seirian Sumner, a behavioural ecologist and co-founder of Soapbox Science, an outreach platform to promote women in science.
“I am extremely delighted that the Nobel prize in physics 2018 recognised the invention of optical tweezers and the invention of chirp pulse amplification technique to produce ultra-short and intense laser pulses,” says Zaïr.
“Nowadays CPA femtosecond lasers are reaching impressive amount of applications. This invention has paved [the way for] state of art laser technology and motivated fundamental discovery for the near future. It has enabled eye surgery, micromatching, ultrafast optics and sensors and transforming our way of seeing nature towards revealing fundamental concepts when matter is subject to such strong and ultrashort electromagnetic fields. I am particular proud to be part of this community of scientists and that [the] UK has invest into this research.”
Sumner says the fact that Strickland’s Wikipedia page has only appeared today is telling.
“It took a Nobel prize for Donna Strickland to be noticed enough to have a (short) Wikipedia page written about her. Another example of how womens’ contributions to science go unnoticed and uncelebrated,” she says. “It takes the science equivalent of an Oscar for a woman in Stem [science, technology engineering and mathematics] to get noticed!”
And that’s a wrap!
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According to an interview from a few years ago, Ashkin felt a bit miffed that he had previously missed out on the Nobel prize when it was awarded in 1997 to a trio of scientists including Steven Chu, one of Ashkin’s colleagues, “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”
Perhaps today’s news is some consolation…
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Here’s a video from a few years ago with Gérard Mourou talking about his work. Apparently he came up with a key idea when he was skiing. “You know when you are skiing you are spending a lot of time on the chair lift, you have no phone, nothing, just you and mother nature…”
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Al-Khalili says the subject matter of this year’s prize, is “tremendously exciting”.
“Lasers are being increasingly used as instruments in scientific research, particularly in probing the quantum world,” he says. “Lasers can be used like tweezers to manipulate and move atoms around, they can pump atoms and molecules with tiny rapid pulses of energy to probe their behaviour, and they can even help us understand some of the secrets of the quantum world that play a role side living cells, in the new field of quantum biology, something I am very interested in.”
Comment in from physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili. “The most thrilling thing for me is to see Donna Strickland share this year’s prize. It is quite shocking to know that she is only the third woman to win a Physics Nobel, ever! She is also the first female winner in 55 years, particularly when we consider great physicists who missed out, such as Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell Burnell,” he says. “It is also quite delicious that this comes just a few days after certain controversial and misogynistic comments made at a conference at Cern about women in physics.”
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The Wikipedia entry for Donna Strickland has gone from being non-existent this morning, to having multiple sections.
More on how female scientists are missing from Wikipedia in this piece.
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More reaction on Twitter...
I wonder if the University of Waterloo will promote Donna Strickland to full professor now that she has won a Nobel Prize
— Duncan Bell (@DrDuncanBell) October 2, 2018
There is another new record here: at 96 years old, Arthur Ashkin is the oldest person to win a Nobel prize.
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Lots of reaction on Twitter to the news that Donna Strickland shares the Nobel prize for physics – the third woman to win in the history of the prize.
“We need to celebrate women physicists because we’re out there, and hopefully in time it’ll start to move forward at a faster rate. I’m honoured to be one of those women,” Strickland said on a phone call to the press conference.
Others have said that Prof Strickland should be allowed to enjoy the prize, rather than being cast as a spokesperson for women in science:
It’s not Strickland’s job to comment for all women in science right now, she should be able to celebrate her win like every other chap who won in the last 101 years... https://t.co/roYxwR8Ue9
— Kate (@Knhannah) October 2, 2018
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Advice for PhD students hoping to wend their way towards a prize from one of the committee members: “Choose the topic first, then look for people who are doing this, then select the best [group].”
Get the low down on the 2018 Nobel prize in physics
My colleagues Hannah Devlin and Ian Sample have put together a first take on this year’s award – check it out here.
Optical tweezers sound a bit sci-fi, but they allow scientists to use radiation pressure to hold and move very tiny objects. This means scientists can hold even living cells in place, allowing them to probe their inner workings.
That’s a wrap on the press conference! Here’s a useful graphic on Strickland and Mourou’s work from the Nobel prize team:
Ultra-sharp laser beams make it possible to cut or drill holes in various materials extremely precisely – even in living matter. Millions of eye operations are performed every year with the sharpest of laser beams.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/MiYb4i8AHw
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2018
Apparently Ashkin is so busy with his latest scientific paper, he might not be able to give interviews about winning the Nobel prize...
Some reaction coming in from Andrea Taroni, editor of Nature Physics: “Optical tweezers are a huge deal in many domains beyond physics for the manipulation of nonoscale and biological objects, whereas high-intensity, ultrashort laser pulses are used extensively across physics and chemistry,” he said. “And there’s the small fact that Donna Strickland is the first woman to win the prize in 55 years – woop!”
Strickland again: which field does she expect the technology to be useful in? “It is used in laser machining,” she says, adding that very large lasers are being built around the world for chemistry, physics, medicine and engineering.
Her thoughts on receiving “the call” this morning: “First of all you have to think it is crazy,” she says.
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Donna Strickland is on the phone to the press briefing… there is a question about how she feels about being the third woman to receive the prize. She seems surprised : “I thought there might have been more,” she says.
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The technique this duo pioneered is called chirped pulse amplification or CPA. It has led to corrective eye surgeries for millions of people.
French physicist Gérard Mourou and Canadian physicist Donna Strickland share the other half of the prize for their work on developing very, very short and very intense laser pulses.
There’s a very jolly video going on in the live broadcast right now with a hairdryer and a ping-pong ball to demonstrate the principle.
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It’s all about the light: Arthur Ashkin, an American physicist has been awarded half the prize for his invention of optical tweezers, which allow light to manipulate tiny particles.
There we have it: three winners, and a third female Nobel laureate in physics!
And the winners are!
BREAKING NEWS⁰The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the #NobelPrize in Physics 2018 “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics” with one half to Arthur Ashkin and the other half jointly to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland. pic.twitter.com/PK08SnUslK
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2018
A hush has fallen. Even the portraits seem to have their eyes on the committee that has just arrived… Here we go!
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There is more suspense going on here than an episode of The Bridge.
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The grey mist has descended again to inform us there has been a delay...
You might even have time to make a quick cup of tea.
We’re running at least a minute late. If you have been holding your breath, you might want to inhale now.
The gong for the youngest Nobel laureate for physics is still held by Lawrence Bragg, who won the award in 1905 aged just 25. It was a father-son double act: his dad, Sir William Henry Bragg, scooped the other half of the prize which was given for the pair’s work on using X-rays to probe crystal structures.
The Nobel prize celebrates the extraordinary in science: but the tech to do so seems pretty low key. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences have just tweeted a picture of “the phone” used to tell winners that they have bagged the laurels.
From this ordinary phone, someone will receive an extraordinary phone call #NobelPrize #Physics pic.twitter.com/EpDoSdobIy
— Vetenskapsakademien (@vetenskapsakad) October 2, 2018
The grey mist has lifted… which means we’re just moments away from the big reveal.
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At the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Solna, Sweden, where the announcement will be made, there is a lot of shuffling and muttering going on. Presumably to add to the air of mystery the live video is kept in a hazy grey until the announcement kicks off.
It’s been 55 years since a woman was awarded the Nobel prize in physics, when in 1963 Maria Goeppert Mayer was awarded a share of the prize for her discoveries around how protons and neutrons are arranged in the nucleus of atoms. The only other woman to have won the physics prize is Marie Curie, who was one of three winners in 1903.
Several women are in the running this year, including Lene Hau, a Danish physicist who has managed to not only slow light down, but halt it in its tracks.
My colleague Hannah Devlin has previously written about why there are so few female Nobel laureates and the problems with the prize – it’s well worth a read as we await the announcement of this year’s winners.
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Runners and riders
If last year’s winners came as little surprise, this year it’s all up for grabs. Among the breakthroughs that have been touted as contenders is the development of solar cells based on a class of mineral called perovskites, devices whose performance is now on a par with that of silicon solar cells, and which are less costly and energy-intensive to produce. Here’s an interesting read by my colleague Adam Vaughan on that technology.
Other mooted winners include scientists who have worked on quantum entanglement – a phenomenon Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance”, and which, in a nutshell, means that even when two particles are separated by vast expanses, they are still “in touch” with each other so by measuring the properties of one, the properties of the other are also known. Here’s a fun read by Dave Hall on whether this could lead to teleportation.
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On a tangent to the prize, the physics community is still reeling from yesterday’s revelations that a senior scientist with Cern (which has been an academic home to a fair few Nobel prize winners), gave a presentation in which he argued male scientists were being discriminated against, and that physics was “invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation.” Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University has now been suspended.
Prof Anne-Christine Davis of Cambridge University, said: “His comments were absolutely outrageous. They are the sort of comments that people may have made decades ago but, coming in this day and age, I just don’t know what planet he lives on.”
Welcome to the Nobel prize for physics live blog
It’s that time again – the Nobel prize for physics is set to be announced at 10.45am. The nine million kronor (£770,000) prize is decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Last year’s prize was awarded to the trio of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for their work which led to the detection of gravitational waves: ripples in the fabric of spacetime, produced during violent events, such as the merger of black holes.
You can read more about last year’s prize, and the science it celebrates, here.
