Yesterday, the academy announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, William C. Campbell, Satoshi Omura and Youyou Tu for their “discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites”, which are responsible for the illnesses elephantiasis, river blindness and malaria.
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A Japanese and a Canadian scientist won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for discovering that elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass, opening a new window onto the fundamental nature of the universe.
Several years ago, Takaaki Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.
In 2001, McDonald and his team announced that they had discovered that electron-neutrinos from the sun changed flavors into muon- or tau-neutrinos on their way to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada.
The experiments conducted by Kajita and McDonald proved that neutrinos have mass – even if it is nearly negligible. But when measurements were done on earth, it appeared that two thirds of the neutrinos were missing. Therefore, the experiments by Kajita and McDonald also uncovered neutrinos’ slight mass.
Neutrinos are the lightest elementary particles we know – they are so light that they have been considered massless ever since their original hypothesis (Pauli, 1930) and then since their first experimental detection (by Reines and Cowan, in 1956).
The winners will split the 8 million Swedish kronor (about Dollars 960,000) prize money.
The findings “really inspired a whole global community of scientists to drop what they were doing and try to understand the neutrino”, said Joseph Lykken, deputy director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Maybe there was something wrong with the theoretical calculations of how the neutrinos are produced in the Sun?
Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald’s breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation that has upended scientific thinking and promises to change understanding about the history and future fate of the cosmos. Most that reach Earth from elsewhere were created by nuclear reactions inside the Sunday. In fact, billions of neutrinos are passing through your body as you read this.
During his time at Queen’s, McDonald has served as the inaugural Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics, and has been a professor emeritus since 2013.
MacDonald said scientists would still like to find the actual weight of neutrinos.
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The Nobel Prize is a set of annual worldwide awards bestowed in a number of categories by Swedish and Norwegian committees in recognition of academic, cultural and/or scientific advances.
