Nobel Physics Prize to Be Announced

The winner(s) of the Nobel Prize in physics will be announced today.

Posted by Tormod
08 October, 2001 05:07:31

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - A Nobel Prize in physics hasn't brought Robert C. Laughlin much celebrity outside scientific circles.

``Physics is hard for people to understand, unlike literature,' said Laughlin, who shared the 1998 physics award with Horst Stormer and Daniel Tsui for research into electrons. ``Literature is designed to appeal.'

On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was to give out the 2001 prize in physics. Last year, a Russian and two U.S. researchers won it for work that helped create modern information technology.

The Nobel awards - this year each worth $943,000 - started Monday with the naming of three physiology or medicine prize winners. American researcher Leland H. Hartwell and Britons Tim Hunt and Paul Nurse were cited for work on cell development that helps researchers understand how cancer grows and could lead to new treatments.

This year - during the Nobel centennial - the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is breaking with tradition and plans to announce only the physics prize winner on Tuesday. In past years it has included the chemistry winner on the same day.

The chemistry prize will be awarded on Wednesday together with the economics prize. On Friday, the winner of the coveted peace prize - the only one not awarded in Sweden - will be announced in Oslo, Norway.

The date of the literature award, always on a Thursday, won't be known until two days before the announcement.

Last year, the physics prize went to Zhores I. Alferov of the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Herbert Kroemer, a German-born researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both shared half of the prize for developing technology used in satellite communications and cellular phones.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments in Dallas got the other half for his part in the invention and development of the integrated circuit, the forerunner of the microchip, and as a co-inventor of the pocket calculator.

Alfred Nobel, the wealthy Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the physics, chemistry, literature, medicine and peace prizes, left only vague guidelines for the selection committees.

In his will he said the prizes should be given to those who ``shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind' and ``shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics.'

The economics prize was established and endowed by the Swedish national bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.

The Swedish academy, which also chooses the chemistry and economics winners, invited nominations from previous recipients and experts in the fields before whittling down its choices. Deliberations are conducted in strict privacy.

The prizes always are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. To mark the centennial, all living laureates have been invited to the ceremonies and related seminars, with some 150 expected in Stockholm and 30 in Oslo, including former South African President Nelson Mandela and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.