4:00am
About the time I was finally able to get to sleep last night, a certain member of the Caltech faculty was abruptly awakened by the ringing of his telephone. Professor of Theoretical Physics David Politzer must have first awakened in annoyance when he heard the phone, then fear as he subconciously prepared himself for some sort of emergency, and finally elation when he realized what day it was. 10.05.2004: the day the Nobel Prize in Physics is announced.
He lifted the receiver and was connected with Stockholm.
I like to think the King himself was on the phone, but, as far as I know, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, though founded by the Crown, is entirely independent; I do not believe the current King is a member.
Dr. Politzer was awarded the prize for his earlier work in on the concept of asymptotic freedom. The strong nuclear force is responsible for holding together such “everyday” particles as the proton and the neutron (together known as nucleons). These nucleons are in turn comprised of other, more fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. The odd thing (at least in the early 1970’s) is that particle collision experiments suggest that quarks are held together only very weakly inside a nucleon, however they have never been observed on their own outside of a nucleon. How can particles held together so very weakly not be pulled apart and examined individually?
