Oct 7, 2008
Nobel Prize for Physics 2008
The Nobel Prize for Physics 2008 is announced here Tuesday, October 7.
The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Yoichiro Nambu (born 1921) of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics” and to Makoto Kobayashi (b. 1944) of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa (b. 1940) of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University Kyoto, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”. You can read the full press release from the Nobel org here.
As I mentioned in my previous post on the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology item, yesterday, the team, led by Simon Frantz have been using modern web 2.0 type technologies, including RSS and twitter to get the word out to journalists as fast as they can. Part of the reason, apparently, was to save journalists from suffering serious F5 button finger strain at announcement time.
Anyway, here’s the twitter update page – Nobel tweets. They also created a neat little widget so that we could embed the timetable into a website (see left). As you can see, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be announced Wednesday October 8. I’m hoping once again for some straight chemistry, rather than bio-flavoured molecules, as this will give me a chance to get my teeth into my journalistic alma mater as it were.
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October 7th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Yep, Simon Frantz has done a great job of hauling the org into the web 2.0 era…
Whitesides, yes. But, Stoddart, Rebek etc are supramolecular they’ve already given one for that. It needs to be someone in straight unadulterated chemistry with no prefixes.
October 7th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Twitter really did give me the full running commentary on the Physics prize:
Update: Announcement for the Nobel Prize in Physics delayed to 12:00 CET
Update: Announcement for the Nobel Prize in Physics delayed to 12:15 CET
Now that is “new media”… finger on the pulse stuff.
Whose turn for chemistry is it this year, I wonder? Surely Whitesides or Stoddart need to get one at some point.