When Pioneer of Thermodynamics Was Rejected
How Max Born Won Nobel Prize After Getting Suspended
Nominated 84 Times For Nobel Prize But Never Won
Heisenberg and his views on quantum mechanics
Absurdity of nature
Uncertainty principle
Heisenberg's defence
Who Was Jagadish Chandra Bose?
Early education
Change of Plans
Work with Waves
Fun fact: In 1997, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) named Bose as one of the fathers of radio science.
Plant research
Agnosticism
Teaching
Summing up
Who Was Lise Meitner?
Collaboration with nephew
Her role in World War I
Early education & PhD
Professorship & war
Help by Bohr
Manhattan Project
Dinner with President
Chemical elements
Nobel Prize snub
Critical of friends
10 Carl Sagan Quotes On Science And Life
On climate change
Protest in Goa |
On life elsewhere
On science and politics
On afterlife
On cannabis
On experiment
On god
Recommended science documentaries |
On our place in the cosmos
On the future
On books
Why did Paul Dirac speak so little?
Dirac found comfort in his imagination and when he wanted to put across his thoughts he would do so by writing them. In his early thirties, Dirac wrote in a letter to a close friend that to defend himself against the hostilities he perceived around him he retreated into his own imagination.
Fourth Woman To Win Nobel Prize In Physics
It took 60 years, in 1963, for another woman to win the most coveted prize in physics. Maria Goeppert Mayer was awarded for discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure.
Another 55 years later, in 2018, Donna Strickland received the award for her 1985 discovery, chirped pulse amplification, a technique which is used to make cellphone screens.
Cut to 2020, we have another woman Nobel laureate in physics, her name Andrea Ghez, who has been awarded the top honor for the discovery of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way's center!
She shared the prize with colleague Reinhard Genzel. The other half of it went to Sir Roger Penrose.
When asked to comment on it, Andrea said: "I'm grateful, I'm thrilled. You know I work for the science and I'm just glad that it is recognized."
One might ask, "Why do we care about supermassive black holes, like, why is that so important to know about?
Andrea says: "They represent the breakdown of our understanding of the laws of physics. It's transformed our knowledge of these objects that we didn't really have proof existed in the universe."
By picturing the center of Milky Way galaxy at infrared wavelength, Ghez and her team were able to peer through heavy dust that blocked visible light, and produced images of the Black Hole, Sagittarius A*.
By using Kepler's third law, she showed that its mass was 4.1 million solar masses. Based on its mass and radius calculations, astronomers concluded that Sagittarius A* was a supermassive black hole.
Andrea has appeared on many black hole physics documentaries for BBC and Discovery Channel. When asked about her role as a science comunicator, she replied: "We all must step up to talk about the role of science and that is, I think, more important than ever."
She stayed up many nights at the Keck telescope photographing the center of Milky Way and then superimposed each still photograph on top of the other to make a film showing how stars around the center behaved due to Sag A*. In 2020, we celebrate her brilliance and dedication.