Image: John Hendrix
In Brief
- An annual gathering in Lindau, Germany, brings together promising early-career scientists and veteran Nobel Prize winners in their field. This year's meeting focuses on physics.
- In honor of the Lindau meeting, Scientific American has collected 12 articles from the magazine's archive, excerpted here, written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Some of the excerpts recount prize-winning discoveries, some speculate on the future of physics and some address eternal questions: What is the universe made of? And are we alone in it?
- Even though some of the articles excerpted here were first published many decades ago, a surprising number remain relevant to the ongoing investigations of modern physicists.
More In This Article
Every summer nobel laureates converge on Lindau, Germany, to share their wisdom with, and to learn from, up-and-coming scientists hailing from many corners of the globe. This year the 62nd meeting focuses on physics. In honor of that event, the two of us have selected excerpts from some of the most fascinating articles that Nobel winners have published in the magazine over the years, on topics ranging from cosmology to particle physics to technology.
As we gathered these selections, which begin on the opposite page, we were struck anew by the way the problems that puzzled physicists decades ago continue to drive research today. Yes, the field has changed since the days of Albert Einstein, P.A.M. Dirac and Enrico Fermi. Physicists have made vast leaps (such as constructing and honing the Standard Model of particle physics) and encountered strange turns (such as dark energy). Yet many of the questions being tackled now are the same, at root, as those that have spurred research throughout the past century—among them: Why is matter so much more abundant than antimatter? Does the Higgs boson, widely believed to account for the mass of subatomic particles, truly exist? And what does “spooky action at a distance” betray about the workings of the world?
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
3 Comments
Add CommentNice article. Good insight of a very select club.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWouldn't it be awesome to change the world for the better with just two sheets of rolled up paper!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLETS DO IT! -- Take one sheet and role it up making a tube (just tiny pieces of tape to hold).
At the center of the tube start marking small arrows away from you at an angle spiraling to the end (mark that end south.
Go back to center and in the same direction start marking arrows to the other end (mark that end north.
Do the same with the other sheet but make it a bit bigger so one will fit inside the other. You have just made two pretend bar magnets!
Taking the two magnets insert the north pole into the other north pole. Note the arrows are clashing (repelling).
Now insert the north pole into the south pole and the arrows are melding (attracting). This is where it gets real interesting! Looking at the north pole end, the arrows show the direction of magnetic force to be counter clock wise. Turning it around the south pole shows the arrows or force to be clock wise. Now "what is this" one direction has turned into two directions at the same time! yes but, yes but you say Its just how you look at it Two directions at the same time indeed.
OK lets bend one around (horse shoe) and look at both ends at the same time. Don't miss any thing here because this is how the world works.
Note that the forces meld into a figure eight and that is how every thing in this universe is held together.
The cell has a nucleus with chips (nuclei) of itself in orbit.
Horizontally to the nuclei orbit, chips are flung out to produce a pole on each side of the orbit.
The cell Earth with one orbit, rock with two some minerals and all life with three and a new species (brain) with four.
By chewing pollen the bee produces a glob of wax. Immediately after the placement, the saliva or water of the glob interacts in repelling the wax away from the glob's nucleus.
The wax takes on the shape produced from the three nuclei orbits of the water nucleus. What is called evaporation leaves an empty six pole or six sided wax structure.
What on earth would have ten poles? Ghost, spirit, bigfoot, ufo? hmmmmmmmm
cbc.ca bruce voigt
PS -- The Earth has its nucleus nuclei orbiting "equatorially" from West to East. Through centrifugal force nuclei spiral horizontally away from the orbit producing our North (counter clockwise) and South (clock wise) poles.
The text book diagram showing the Earths Magnetic Field is perhaps "wrong"!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=living-in-a-quantum-world
Bruce you are an original thinker . Look forward to more from you. Can you also explain the scope of energy that is associated with mass that lie beyond that of the extractable Electromagnetic Energy that's there in mass ,given by the famous equation , e = mc^2 . I mean , if you draw the straight-line graph e= mc^2 , ( c being constant ) it's gradient would not be 90 degrees . Hence the graph would have a large area representing the region e > mc^2 . What does that energy mean ? Doesn't it mean that ordinary mass contains energies that transcends the electromagnetic energy ' e' ? Such energies do not manifest in our three dimensions of space directly as it travels at superluminal speeds , but theoretically we cannot say that it is not there , although it's in the imaginary region for us, till we find an interpretation for the phenomena.We might not find any physical equivalent to it , like root of minus one. But , once we understand that region we must be able to tackle other unknowns too.to my mind, it indicates subatomic quantum energies in which the macro world of electromagnetic energies are embedded in. Any further enlightenment or discussions on this are welcome . You may rite to dadster at gmail.com .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this