Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Nobel Prize as a family affair

Joseph James (‘JJ’) Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Physics Prize for his discovery of the electron, a negatively-charged sub-atomic particle of mass 1/1840 of the mass of a hydrogen atom. His son, George Paget Thomson also won the Nobel Prize (in 1937, shared with Clinton Davisson) for showing that a beam of electrons could be diffracted. Diffraction is the spreading out of a beam as is passes through a small gap and is a property of a wave, not a particle.

William Henry Bragg (father) and William Lawrence Bragg (son) shared the 1915 Physics Prize for their discovery of X-ray diffraction.

Niels Bohr took the 1922 Physics Prize for his model of the structure of the atom and his son Aage the 1975 prize for work on the structure of the nucleus.

Marie Curie won two NobelPrizes (1903 Physics and 1911 Chemistry) and her daughter Irène Joliot –Curie won the 1935 Physics Prize. (The Curies were a remarkable family for scientific honours – Marie shared her first prize with husband Pierre, and Irène shared hers with her husband Frédéric. All the Curies’ prizes were for work on radioactivity).

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to the American Roger Kornberg, a professor at Stanford University in California.

Two great Universities (Stanford and Berkeley) are competing for Nobel prize winners. The latest one (Roger Kornberg, Chemistry), is of special interest since his father was also a Nobel prize winner being Professor at Stanford! ...continues here!

Radomir Antić, Panathenaikos

There is talk in Athens for Radomir Antić taking over as coach of Panathenaikos, after Backe was sacked (see my earlier comment about Backe in this blog).
Antić has been unemployed for 2.5 years after beind dismissed by Celta de Vigo on march 29, 2004. Even worse, is the following (from wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radomir_Anti%C4%87): "He later admitted joining Celta in such circumstances was a mistake and vowed never to accept coaching jobs in mid-season again". Is he wiser now?

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

George F. Smoot awarded 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics

Cosmologist George F. Smoot, who led a team that obtained the first images of the infant universe — findings that confirmed the predictions of the Big Bang theory — won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics today (Tuesday, Oct. 3). Smoot, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), shares the prize with John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This is UC Berkeley's 20th Nobel Prize since Ernest O. Lawrence won in 1939, and its eighth physics Nobel. ...continues here!