McDonald, a Canadian citizen born in 1943, was awakened by the Nobel committee and asked to call in to the prize announcement in Stockholm.
Advertisement
In an interview with CBC Cape Breton’s Information Morning for its 2011 series, Leaders in their Fields, McDonald said studying the very small has provided huge amounts of information to science. – The owner of the oldest Nobel Prize in Physics Raymond Davis.
“A neutrino puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades had been resolved”, the Nobel body said.
Receiving such an honor, he said, is “pretty unusual, but a great tribute to the hard work of all our team over many years”. “I can’t think of a better person for a Nobel Prize“.
For Chinese scientists, this is a “historic moment”, Moeti said on the sidelines of the 2nd Ministerial Forum of China-Africa Health Development taking place in Cape Town. Their work was a key contribution to the Standard Model of particle physics, which seeks to explain how the Universe is put together. He studied at the California Institute of Technology, was a researcher at Canada’s Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, and became a professor at Princeton University in the U.S. He was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.
Kajita is from the University of Tokyo, and McDonald is from the Queen’s University in Canada’s Kingston. In a news conference at the University of Tokyo, Kajita told the audience he wanted “to thank the neutrinos, of course”. “My mind has gone completely blank”, he said after taking the stage.
“I had a discussion with Lars Bergstrom (a Swedish physicist) about hockey, and the fact that it would be nice of Mats Sundin still played for the Maple Leafs”, he said Tuesday morning.
After getting his composure back, he stressed that many people had contributed to his work, and that there was much work still to do.
Moeti describing the discovery as “an exciting achievement” and the prize won by Tu comes naturally from real distinction.
Rather than follow every minute detail, McDonald kept his eye on the big goal, recruiting collaborators from around the world, making sire that people took all the necessary steps to get the job done.
Neutrino science advanced, and the existence of the three different “flavours” of neutrino-electron, tau and muon-was worked out.
Neutrinos come in three types, or “flavors”, and what the scientists actually showed is that neutrinos spontaneously shift between types. Muon neutrinos created in collisions between cosmic rays and Earth’s atmosphere seemed to disappear on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector, a steel tank filled with pure water located in a zinc mine.
Three years later, in Canada, while working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, McDonald found that neutrinos coming from the sun also switched identities.
Advertisement
The neutrino had always been assumed to have no mass, so this one of those discoveries that’s going to change how we see the universe.
