That's a wrap
And there we leave the physics prize for another year. Huge congratulations go to James Peebles, who set the foundations for modern cosmology with his work on the big bang, dark matter and dark energy, and to Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor who spotted the first world beyond the solar system.
Here is my colleague Hannah Devlin’s news story on the prize:
We’ll be back again tomorrow for the Nobel prize in chemistry. Is it time for gene editing to win the gong? Join us from 10.15am!
There are two methods that astronomers use to spot planets around other stars. One is the so-called transit method where scientists watch for planets as they wander across the face of their parent star. Even though the star is but a pinprick in the heavens, sensitive telescopes can often detect the minuscule dimming of the starlight as the planet goes by and casts its shadow on the detector. It’s been extremely successful - Nasa’s Kepler’s mission is one space telescope that has exploited transits to find hoards of new planets.
Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz used a different technique. They looked at how stars are pulled around by planets that swing around them. This radial velocity method exploits the Doppler effect. In this case, as a planet’s gravity pulls its star towards Earth - with its telescope-wielding astronomers - light from the star is shifted towards the blue wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. The rays are basically squeezed up, making them bluer. As the planet goes around the star and pulls it backwards, the starlight is stretched out and so turns more towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Measure these wavelength variations and you can work out first if there’s an unseen planet in orbit around a star, and secondly how long a year lasts on the world.
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How much of the galaxy have we searched for planets beyond the solar system? Not an awful lot...so we can only imagine what lies out there.
The discovery by 2019 #NobelPrize laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz started a revolution in astronomy and over 4,000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way. Strange new worlds are still being discovered, with an incredible wealth of sizes, forms and orbits. pic.twitter.com/nqhJcJGJTv
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2019
Here’s Didier Queloz talking about the discovery of that first known exoplanet.
“At that time I didn’t think at all it was a planet. I just thought something was wrong.”
Here are the official citations for this year’s winners:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos”
With one half to James Peebles at Princeton University “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor at the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and the University of Cambridge, UK.
But what about Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz?
In October 1995 the duo announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system. Using custom-made instruments, they spotted the Jupiter-like planet 51 Pegasi b from the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France.
The work led to a surge of similar such discoveries. Today, more than 4,000 exoplanets have been spotted in the Milky Way, and the discoveries keep on coming. These are wild and wonderful worlds. The easiest to spot are vast, blisteringly-hot gas giants that swing around their parent stars on extremely close-in orbits. Others appear to be rocky and lurk in the habitable zone, where liquid water would run freely. Still others are thought to be exotic water worlds: their entire surface an ocean.
As more planets are found, and more observatories are launched in to orbit, or switched on here on Earth, astronomers are getting closer to answering what is perhaps one of the most profound questions humans ask: are we alone?
Here’s James Peebles in 2017 talking about the history of modern cosmology at the Perimeter Institute in Canada.
James Peebles’ work shone a light on the universe’s structure and history and laid the foundations for cosmology for the past 50 years. The big bang model describes how the universe evolved over nearly 14bn years from a hot, dense ball to the vast, cold and expanding universe of today.
Barely 400,000 years after the big bang, the murky universe cleared and became transparent allowing light rays to travel through space. Today that relic radiation remains as the cosmic microwave back ground. In it are written many of the early universe’s secrets.
With theoretical tools and calculations, James Peebles interpreted these traces from the infancy of the universe and discovered new physical processes. He found that only 5% of the observable universe is known to us in the form of stars, planets and people. The remaining 95% is mysterious and made up of what physicists call dark energy and dark matter. So-called dark energy is said to drive the expansion of the universe, while dark matter is the invisible substance that appears to hang around galaxies, revealing itself only by its gravitational draw.
Peebles has been asked if he has advice for young people considering a career in science. He does indeed:
You should enter it for the love of the science. The awards and prizes, they are charming and very much appreciated, but that’s not part of your plans. You should enter science because you’re fascinated by it.
“We still must admit that the dark matter and dark energy are mysterious,” says John Peebles in an interview with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “There are still many open questions … what in the world is this dark matter?”
Is there life on other planets, he’s asked?
He’s pretty sure there will be something we’ll call life on other planets. But adds:
“Whether it will be like life on Earth is very difficult for me to know, maybe chemists will sort that out … we can be very sure we will never ever see these other lives, these other planets.”
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A theoretical framework, developed by James Peebles over two decades, has become the foundation of our modern understanding of the universe’s history, from the big bang to the present day.
Meanwhile, in 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a sun-type star, 51 Pegasi.
Well the prize was certainly coming and it’s well deserved. Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets since this trio effectively launched the field. The discover of worlds beyond our solar system has truly transformed our understanding not only of the Milky Way, but of our place within it.
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And the winners are
BREAKING NEWS:
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2019
The 2019 #NobelPrize in Physics has been awarded with one half to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.” pic.twitter.com/BwwMTwtRFv
OK, here we go.
I wonder if the bookies take many bets on the Nobel science prizes? I’ve never bothered, with a wisdom that the coming announcement will confirm.
And now we do have confirmation: the announcement will be at 10.50am UK.
Oh they do love to keep us waiting. We’ve had no official word of delay, but it’s not unusual for them to run over the stated start time. The tension, the tension....
Here’s Göran K Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the chap who gets to make the calls. You have to admit he’s well turned out for the occasion.
If your phone rings, pick up! It might be Secretary General, Göran K. Hansson, trying to reach you with some important news. #Physics #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/M72GCZqZVX
— Vetenskapsakademien (@vetenskapsakad) October 8, 2019
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What’s the point of the Nobel prizes you might ask. It raises a whole bunch of issues that scientists and others have picked over for decades. The short answer, perhaps, is that it does wonders for Alfred Nobel’s name. But does it promote the myth of the lone genius, and ignore the reality of the collaborations that drive modern science? Certainly. Here’s a piece that Hannah Devlin and I wrote on the whole malarkey.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has handed out 112 Nobel prizes in physics since 1901. They have gone to 209 individuals with John Bardeen being the only person to land two, in 1956 and 1972, for work on semiconductors and superconductors respectively.
Sir Andre Geim at Manchester University can boast of winning both the Nobel prize and the rather more irreverent Ig Nobel prize. He shared the 2010 Nobel prize in physics with Sir Konstantin Novoselov for discovering the hoped-to-be wonder material, graphene. The prize came ten years after Geim shared the Ig Nobel prize for levitating a frog with a fellow amphibian-bothering knight, Sir Michael Berry. A year later, Geim published a paper on Earth’s rotation with his hamster, Tisha.
So far only three women have won the physics prize, roughly once every 60 years. The clause bears repeating: that’s once every 60 years. They are Marie Curie (radiation) in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer (nuclear shell structure) in 1963 and Donna Strickland (chirped pulse amplification) last year. No woman has yet been named the sole winner of the prize. All have shared it with two men.
Runners and riders
The physics prize has been easy to predict a couple of times in recent years. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 teed up Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for the prize the following year. And then, in 2017, scientists on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) won for announcing the first detection of gravitational waves the year before.
This year’s winner is harder to call, but there’s no shortage of physicists who may have turned in last night in the quiet hope of having their day, or most probably their sleep, interrupted by an enthusiastic Swede.
There’s the trio of Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser for their work on quantum entanglement. There’s John Pendry for his cool invisibility cloaks, which are neither invisible nor cloaks, but why spoil the fun? Another contender is Lene Hau who worked out how to slow down and even stop light. And what about all those exoplanets astronomers keep finding? One day there will surely be a prize for worlds that are out-of-this-world and I can see Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz sharing that. Who else? If the Wolf prize is any guide, and history suggests it is, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard who work on quantum information science are in with a chance. And if the committee is feeling practical, perhaps John Goodenough will win, at last, for lithium-ion batteries. Having said all that I can hear the complaints already: “What about Perovskite solar cells?” And it’s a fair point. The bottom line? We have no idea.
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Last year’s physics prize was shared among three scientists who turned light into tools. The US researcher Arthur Ashkin, who at 96 became the oldest recipient ever, was awarded half of the prize for inventing “optical tweezers”, which harness the pressure of laser light to manipulate tiny objects, such as bacteria and viruses.
Gérard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada split the remaining half of the prize money for what is called chirped pulse amplification which generates bright, ultrashort laser pulses. The method paved the way for millions of people to receive laser eye surgery. Strickland became only the third woman to win the physics Nobel.
Welcome to the live blog for the 2019 Nobel prize for physics
And so to day two of the 2019 Nobel prizes!
The season kicked off yesterday when Sir Peter Ratcliffe at Oxford University, Gregg Semenza at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and William Kaelin at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston shared the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering how cells sense and respond to an oxygen shortage.
The trio, who will split the 9m Swedish kronor (£740,000) winnings, spent more than two decades piecing together the complex genetic machinery that allows animals to thrive at some of the highest altitudes on Earth. The work has paved the way for new anaemia drugs, while other medicines are in the pipeline for treating cancers, heart disease and stroke.
But today is all about the physics prize. Whose life is about to transformed by what still ranks as the most prestigious prize in the world?
Join us for the live announcement, comment and analysis. We’ll find out the winner – or more likely the winners – no earlier than 10.45am.
