Japan’s Takaaki Kajita, 56, and Canada’s Arthur B. McDonald, 72, jointly won this year’s $960,000 prize “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”, The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced in a statement on Tuesday. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.
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With their discovery, Kajita and McDonald helped prove that neutrinos must have mass, thereby changing “our understanding of the innermost workings of matter”, the Nobel committee said.
So what does this mean?
Prof Jon Butterworth, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, welcomed the decision, and said “It solved the longstanding solar neutrino problem, which was one of the things we were taught as students as being a weird anomaly which wasn’t understood – not enough neutrinos coming from the Sunday”.
This week another set of brilliant minds joins the ranks of Nobel Prize winners in five categories – medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.
The universe is swamped in neutrinos that are left over from the Big Bang, and many more are created in nuclear reactions on earth and in the thermonuclear reactions that power the Sunday.
In experiments created to count the number of neutrinos that arrive from the sun, particularly electron-neutrinos, scientists found that up to two-thirds of the calculated amount was missing. Tens of thousands of them are passing right through your body right now, with no effect. However, this has been extremely hard to observe because, despite being one of the most abundant particles in the universe, neutrinos hardly interact with matter.
The new finding forced scientists to reconsider their basic understanding of what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called the “fundamental constituents of the universe”. Katie was able to demonstrate this in 1998, when an experiment conducted by him and his colleagues showed neutrinos flipping between two identities while en route to the Super-Kamiokande detector (3,300 feet underground).
Before, physicists had thought that neutrinos were massless particles. Brown said it’s also a success for the theory known as quantum mechanics, which deals with fundamental particles and their interactions, because that’s the only way to explain how neutrinos can change from one type to another.
Hopefully, a few of them will come from Nova Scotia, inspired by Arthur McDonald’s example of excellence in the pursuit of basic science and our understanding of the universe.
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The laureates will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of prize creator Alfred Nobel, a Swedish philanthropist and scientist. 2015 Nobel Prize winnersEach year since 1901, the professors of the Nobel Assembly have awarded the prize to people whose work has benefited mankind.
