4 Father-Son Nobel Prize Winners In Physics

Fathers are often the role model for their children. Richard Feynman's father taught him how to think, not what to think. Aage Bohr grew up working with his father Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. Did you know that seven father-child pairs have been awarded a Nobel Prize? Of these, four pairs won the Nobel Prize in physics.

JJ Thomson and George Thomson

Sir Joseph John Thomson won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1906 for the discovery of electron, the first subatomic particle to be found. Thomson was also a great teacher, and nine of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes, including his son George.

Working with Cathode rays

Contradicting his father, George Paget Thomson won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1937 for the discovery of wave properties of electron. He showed by scattering electrons through thin Gold films that electron diffracted as if it were a wave. With his discovery, George confirmed Louis de Broglie's theory.

Niels Bohr and Aage Bohr

Aage Bohr grew up surrounded by physicists including Heisenberg, Pauli and Kramers. After graduation, he served as a personal assistant to his Nobel Prize winning father who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, best known for explaining the structure of Hydrogen atom.

At that time, the known properties of atomic nuclei could not be explained by the existing nuclear models. Aage studied this problem in the late 1940s and solved in 1952. He gave a new theory to describe asymmetrical shapes of certain nuclei, what the shell model and liquid drop model could not account for.

Aage Bohr shared the Nobel Prize with physicists Ben Mottelson and James Rainwater in 1975 for their explanation of the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei and its experimental verification.

William Bragg and Lawrence Bragg

Lawrence Bragg was born in Australia and graduated from the University of Adelaide at age 18. He soon was offered a scholarship in mathematics by the University of Cambridge while his father William Henry Bragg secured a prestigious Cavendish chair of physics at the University of Leeds.

The family moved to Britain and the father and son duo studied the structure of minerals by means of X-rays. They shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1915 for their services in the X-ray crystallography research. A sulfide mineral is named "Braggite" in their honor.

Manne Siegbahn and Kai Siegbahn

While Niels Bohr was among the first to gain theoretical understanding of atom's internal structure, Manne Siebahn was an experimental physicist who understood electron shell system experimentally by means of x-ray spectroscopy.

Manne won the Nobel Prize in 1924 for his precision measurements that drove many developments in quantum theory and atomic physics. His son Kai also won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1981 for the development of electron spectroscopy.

Other Father Child Nobel winners

1. Pierre Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 with his wife Marie Curie for their extraordinary contribution to the understanding of radioactivity. Their daughter Irene won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 for pioneering work in artificial radioactivity.

2. Arthur Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1959 for his studies on the synthesis of DNA. His son Roger Kornberg won in chemistry in 2006 for explaining how information is copied from DNA to RNA.

3. Hans von Euler won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1929 for research in organic chemistry. His son Ulf von Euler won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1970 for his work on neurotransmitters. They are distantly related to mathematician Leonhard Euler.

Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Anyone who wants to gain valuable insights on learning, teaching and investigating should pick up Feynman's last major work What do you care what other people think? that was prepared as Richard Feynman struggled with a rare form of cancer from which he died in 1988.

The title of the book is taken from a question which Arline Greenbaum, the love of Feynman's life, often put to him when he was preoccupied with the opinions of his colleagues about his work. Just like entrepreneur Steve Jobs famously said: Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning American physicist whose life was a combination of his intellect, curiosity, humor and a willingness to jump into an adventure. What made Feynman the man that he was? What was the role of his parents in shaping his character? What of his love life?

All those personal details have been covered in the book, and more. There is a lengthy discussion as to how Feynman exposed NASA's poor organizational culture and decision-making processes that led to the Challenger disaster in 1986. Although technical in nature this part of the book is an interesting story in itself.

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Feynman realized quickly that The Rogers Commission set up by the government was trying to protect NASA and not seek the real truth behind the fatal accident. During the investigation, Feynman's health worsens due to the cancer but he still manages to reveal the truth in a heroic fashion.

You should give it a read to know what caused the tragic disaster that cost 7 people their lives and a nation's people lose faith in their space program (for a while). Feynman's reveal forced NASA to set up the Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance to address safety concerns better.

Coming back to the less technical and more personal part of the book. Feynman talks about his childhood and relationship with his father. His dad Melville Feynman who never himself had the opportunity to make a career in science, encouraged both his son and daughter Joan (nine years younger than Richard) to take up science. She went on to become a distinguished astrophysicist herself.

This is the part that will inspire you the most. Feynman's dad taught him how to think (not what to think) and how to teach, something that you can take advantage of in your life. Feynman's mom Lucille gave him the unique sense of humor we love him for. One story goes like this: When Richard was named the smartest man in the world by Omni magazine, his mom quipped, 'If that is the world's smartest man God help us!'

Yet that is still not the best part of the book. The best part is when Richard starts talking about Arline. One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century could not control his tears upon reminiscing of the time he spent with the love of his life. He wrote in a letter to his deceased wife: 'You dead are so much better than anyone else alive'. Thus, it is not only a romantic tale but also of personal loss.

In summary, this is the book of learnings Feynman gained from his father, mother and lover. What self-help books cannot do this will as it feels more personal. Lastly, this is also a book on science. No matter the authority in question it is duty of a scientist to dig out the truth. What do you care what other people think? an attitude Feynman carries to his death and you should too in your adventures in life.

10 Kip Thorne Facts That You Didn't Know

Kip Thorne is a celebrated American theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his role in the detection of gravitational waves. He is also well known outside the realm of physics as Thorne is a man of many talents.

Born in 1940, Thorne grew up in a highly academic environment. His father was a professor of soil chemistry and his mother was a famous economist. Although his upbringing was in the Latter-day Saints faith, Thorne became an atheist later on.

When Kip was 8 years old, he attended a children's lecture on solar system and fell in love with astronomy. He wanted to uncover the secret of the stars (and so he did). Following are 10 facts related to Kip Thorne that will blow your mind.

1. Thorne received his bachelor of science degree from Caltech and his PhD from Princeton University. He was ONLY 30 years old when he joined Caltech as one of the youngest Professors in the institute's history.

2. Thorne is remembered by his students as someone with the ability to make a mundane topic exciting and fun to learn. In his illustrious academic career, Thorne has assisted at least 50 physicists in obtaining their Ph.D. at Caltech.

3. Thorne was trained under John Wheeler, renowned physicist who coined the term black hole. Thorne was among the first scientists to research on black holes, time travel and worm holes. He accurately predicted that red supergiant stars existed.

4. Thorne was friends with Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. In the movie The Theory of Everything, Thorne was played by actor Enzo Cilenti. Thorne had contributed ideas on wormhole travel to Carl Sagan for use in his novel, Contact.

5. The story of record breaking movie Interstellar (2014) was conceived by producer Lynda Obst and physicist Kip Thorne. Thorne acted as an executive producer and scientific consultant on the film. He also wrote a book explaining the science of Interstellar.

6. Not only Interstellar, Kip also helped Nolan for the movie Tenet on the ideas of quantum physics and time. Christopher Nolan said in an interview: I've been very inspired by working with great scientists like Kip Thorne.

7. Thorne has also acted. He appeared in The Big Bang Theory when the Coopers are trying to get some Nobel winners on their side to counter their rivals. Kip breaks Sheldon's heart by refusing his gift (or bribe) but it was a fun collaboration nonetheless.

8. Kip loves to write. He even resigned from his position at Caltech to pursue a career in writing and making movies for the big screen. Thorne is the winner of Phi Beta Kappa Science Writing Award, one of the most prestigious recognitions in America.

9. Thorne also became a Nobel laureate, the highest honor in physics, for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, an extraordinary journey of over 30 years of work, displaying incredible persistence.

10. Not proven yet, but Thorne has a theory that predicts the existence of a universally anti-gravitating matter, the element which is causing the universe to expand at accelerated rate and might make warp drive and worm hole travel a possibility.

5 Richard Feynman Quotes on Quantum Mechanics

American physicist Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics. Feynman was a man who always jumped into an adventure: as an artist, a story-teller and an everyday joker whose life was a combination of his intelligence, curiosity and uncertainty.

Despite making fundamental contribution to the field of quantum mechanics, Feynman was often perplexed by its complexity. Feynman said, We don't know what an atom looks like but we can calculate its behavior. It is like a computer trying to calculate how fast a car is going without being able to picture the car.

Following are five quotes by Richard Feynman that reflect his views on quantum physics. As students, we may derive one or two equations, solve few problems and be done with it. But it is a great insight to look back as to how a previous generation of physicists grappled with the bizarreness of quantum mechanics.

1. Personal struggle: I always have had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that quantum mechanics represents. Because I'm an old enough man that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me, okay? I still get nervous with it. And therefore, some of the younger students, you know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there's no real problem. It has not yet become obvious to me that there is no real problem.

2. Nature is absurd: What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school. It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does. Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is - absurd.

3. Relativity VS quantum mechanics: There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, (Einstein) because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, "But how can it be like that?" which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. But nature is not classical, dammit, the imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of man.

4. The mystery of atom: It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time.

How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypotheses that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple.

5. On nature of reality: Does this then mean that my observations become real only when I observe an observer observing something as it happens? This is a horrible viewpoint. Do you seriously entertain the idea that without the observer there is no reality? Which observer? Any observer? Is a fly an observer? Is a star an observer? Was there no reality in the universe before life began? Or are you the observer? Then there is no reality to the world after you are dead? I know a number of otherwise respectable physicists who have bought life insurance.

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5 Major Differences Between Sgr A* and M87*

Take a close look at the two black hole images and you can ascertain a few differences by your own. Notice the speed of accretion disk, which is a gas-like flow around the black hole. Or the size of dark spots in the center that give you a faint idea of the black hole event horizon.

The latest image by event horizon telescope is that of Sagittarius A*, a black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. That this is a supermassive black hole was first recognized by physicists Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, for which they won the Nobel Prize in 2020.

Event horizon telescope or EHT is a worldwide network of radio telescopes that took the first ever picture of a black hole in 2019. It was that of M87*, an enormous supermassive black hole in the heart of Messier 87 galaxy in the constellation Virgo.

While the two black hole pictures look almost similar, for the laws of physics that govern their behavior are the same, the new image is more exciting than before. For one, it is located in our neighborhood; and second, it was way too difficult to catch a glimpse of.

1. Schwarzschild radius: It is the size of the sphere from which even light will fail to escape. For supermassive M87* this is 18 billion km, four times the radius of our solar system! For Sgr A*, Schwarzschild radius is only 12 million km.

2. Relative size: Our black hole is 31 times wider than the Sun, as shown in the figure below. Whereas the black hole in Messier 87 is 27,000 times wider than the Sun. If Sgr A* was the size of a doughnut, then M87* would be the size of a football stadium.

3. Distance: Our neighborhood black hole Sagittarius A* is obviously closer, located 25,000 light years away from the earth. Whereas M87* is 55 million light years away! So if it took 1 hour to get to Sgr A*, then it would take 91 days to reach M87*.

Despite being closer, observing Sgr A* was more challenging than expected. Scientists had to look through the galactic plane and filter out the noise from intermediate stars and dust clouds in their data, collected across continents.

4. Mass: M87* is 6 billion times more massive than the Sun whereas Sgr A* weighs 4 million Suns. Thus, our black hole Sgr A* is 1500 lighter in comparison.

5. Speed: Around the black hole is a bright ring of materials that swirl at great velocities. The material disk of M87* rotates over a course of many days at roughly 1,000 km/s, while it takes only a few minutes for material to move around Sagittarius A* because it is much smaller.

Why is the picture of our black hole kind of blurry? One of the reasons is that we don't have a direct view of the object while sitting on one of the arms of the galaxy and secondly, its accretion disk is spinning very fast compared to M87* so it's like taking a picture of a toddler who cannot stand still.

Why You Should Read Physics of The Impossible

Do you happen to be a Doctor Who or a Star Trek fan? Have you ever wondered how force field, time travel, teleportation or invisibility could become a reality without breaking the laws of physics? If yes, then this book by Michio Kaku is a must for you!

Physics of the impossible discusses technologies of tomorrow by introducing topics of fundamental physics to the reader, such as relativity, uncertainty principle and how LASER works, etc. This book will help one grasp how physics is applied to the advancement of human civilization.

The guiding philosophy of the book is: If, in principle, something is possible, then it can be achieved. Like going to the moon was possible but only an engineering problem. In similar way, futuristic tech may only be an engineering solution away.

One can divide technology into three different classes of impossibilities, meaning how unlikely they are going to be, given our current understanding of physics.

• Class I impossibilities are "technologies that are impossible today, but that do not violate the known laws of physics."
• Class II impossibilities are “technologies that sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world."
• Class III impossibilities are “technologies that violate the known laws of physics but their development would mean a crucial shift in our understanding of physics!"

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The author of the book is renowned American theoretical physicist Michio Kaku who is known for his contributions to the string field theory. Physics of the impossible is primarily aimed for aspiring physicists, that is, undergraduate and graduate students; but engineers will also enjoy it maximum.

Why did Kaku decide to write a whole 350-pages book predicting the technology of tomorrow? Because, he's am ardent science fiction fan and strongly believes that what is impossible today, might be commonplace tomorrow.

For example: William Thomson Kelvin, a mathematical physicist and creator of the Kelvin scale had declared that “heavier than air” flying machines would be impossible.

Ernest Rutherford, the physicist who discovered nucleus of an atom and won the Nobel Prize always thought the idea of atom bomb was impossible and compared it to moonshine (a crazy thought).

Such technologies were considered impossible because the basic laws of physics and science were not understood as well at the time as they'd subsequently be.

Michio Kaku has shown in the book, with numerous examples, how scientists and technicians around the world are trying to realize technology of tomorrow...today...in their own individual laboratories.

There is also something for history fans in the book. Historical development of telepathy and artificial intelligence has been described in a manner that makes you want to keep on reading on. It gives you a sense of fulfilment to have learned what all has been done.

And as you unravel the secret of alien technologies (which you might only have seen on TV shows and movies so far) you will be inspired to join forces with scientists and engineers to harness the true power of nature.

The book Physics of the impossible will surely renew your confidence in the endless possibilities of physics. The phrase, "one of a kind" is well suited for such a book because not only it entertains you but also teaches a multitude of things about how science works.