14 DAY TRIAL // The Nobel Prize committee has announced the recipient of the second award of the year, for physics. The 2012 Nobel Prize awards started yesterday with the Physiology and Medicine prize. The physics prize was awarded to two scientists for quantum optics, the interaction between light and matter.
French Serge Haroche and American David J. Wineland shared the prize for their work in manipulating photons. Haroche's experiments were in "capturing" a single photon and examining it with atoms.
Their pioneering work was in isolating photons and ions and examing them without affecting their properties.
This has the potential of not only bringing quantum computing one step closer, but of also opening the door on a Holy Graal of new observations and measurements of the quantum properties of particles and subparticles.
One of the biggest hurdles those working on quantul mechanics face is learning about particles without altering their states.
"The Nobel laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
The press conference of the announcement is underway, but the live stream is hard to catch due to the understandable huge amounts of traffic the site is seeing at this point.
There were some rumors and speculation about the discovery of the Higgs Boson. However, it was unlikely that it was being considered for this year's prize, the announcement was made in July, after the nominations ended.
Scientists are still wary of calling it a discovery of the Higgs Boson, as predicted by the Standard Model. Picking out one, two or three people to award them would have been hard as well.
The medicine prize was shared by John Gurdon of Britain and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka for their work in stem cell research, particularly, the ability to revert a regular, specialized cell back to its stem cell origins, a discovery that has huge implications on the field.
The prizes for several other categories will be announced this week as well. Chemistry, literature, the peace prize, which is probably the best known, will be handed out in the next few days. The economics prize is scheduled for Monday next week.
The winners of this year's Nobel Prize will get only 8 million Swedish kronor, that's $1.2 million or €929,000, down from the 10 million awarded in previous years, due to the current economic crisis.
