Wednesday, October 08, 2003

More Nobel stuff

And just as I was saying now often happens, the Nobel Chemistry prize went to something that was clearly biology - work by Americans Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon on mechanisms for how water passes in and out of cell walls that I have to admit that I was not familiar with.

The physics prize went to something I was quite familiar with, however. Anthony Leggett of Britain won the prize for an explanation of the working of superfluidity, in which Helium does really strange and unexpected things when cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. This is really cool (literally) and amazing stuff. The awared was shared with Russians Alexei Abrikosov and Vitaly Ginzburg, for theoretical work on the equally interesting but better known (and related) field of superconductivity.

No comments:

Blog Archive