| US Physicists share
Nobel physics prize
By AKEEB ALARAPE, Ibadan
Thursday, October 7, 2004
Three American scientists won the 2004 Nobel physics prize
on Tuesday for showing how tiny quark particles interact,
helping to explain everything from how a coin spins to how
the universe was built.
David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek showed how the
attraction between quarks, nature's basic building blocks
is strong when they are far apart and weak when they are close
together, like the tension in an elastic band when it is pulled.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work helped
give "a unified description of all the forces of Nature
... from the tiniest distances within the atomic nucleus to
the vast distances of the universe."
It explained how "an everyday phenomenon like a coin
spinning on a table" is determined by fundamental forces.
The three scientists showed how quarks, the building blocks
of protons and neutrons, were held together by a so-called
"strong force." Without this force there would be
nothing holding the tiny particles together, nor indeed any
basic building blocks to assemble into an object like a coin.
"They really helped us to understand how it is that quarks
are bound together to make protons and neutrons," said
David Wark, a particle physicist at the Rutherford Appleton
Laboratories in Britain.
Their theory, known as quantum chromodynamics, also showed
that when quarks are close together at extremely high energies
they act like free particles, a state they called "asymptotic
freedom." In this state, they resembled those of the
other forces in subatomic physics electromagnetism and the
"weak force" dealing with nuclear decay, meaning
the U.S. trio had made a first step to "the theory of
everything," Gross told Reuters by phone from Santa Barbara,
California.
A grand unified theory of the universe has eluded scientists,
who cannot yet reconcile the way subatomic particles behave
with theories on the force of gravity. "Once you understand
all these forces it turns out that there are certain features
that cry out for unification," Gross added. "Remarkably
at the same energy almost, gravity also becomes equally strong."
The next stage of unification involves "not just these
forces that govern atoms and nuclear behaviour "but also
all the universe," Gross said. "That's one of the
main goals and efforts of the last 20 years to search for
the unified theory."
Wilczek, speaking in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the trio's
theories first appeared "outlandish" when they emerged
in the 1970s and Nobel recognition came as a "great relief."
Finnish theoretical physicist Stig-Erik Starck said the trio's
research had "built a model of how the universe was born,
how it works and how it will ultimately die."
Gross from the University of California, Politzer from the
California Institute of Technology and Wilczek at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology will share the 10 million crown ($1.36
million) prize. "I have no idea what to do with the money,
my wife has some ideas," said Gross. "We don't have
champage on ice but its probably a good idea."
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