A breakdown of why the awarded work, Ice Cube, is significant:
- A neutrino is an elementary subatomic particle. Neutrinos are produced by nuclear reactions inside stars, supernovae, radioactive decay. They are one of the most abundant particles in the universe.
- Neutrinos are known as "ghost particles". They have 0 charge and near-zero mass. They only react with the weak nuclear force and gravity. Incredibly hard to detect. Trillions can pass through a whole planet without hitting a single atom!
- Neutrinos give us a pristine snapshot into the origin of the universe. They have travelled billions of years and trillions of miles without interacting with anything. Unless...we catch them!
- Ice Cube does this. Located in Antarctica, the project turns a cubic kilometer of ice into a neutrino detector. How? Scientists drilled boreholes 2.5km deep into the ice and placed 5000 optical detectors to catch a neutrino interaction.
- When a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atom, it produces charged particles. In ice - not vacuum! - certain particles can travel faster than light. This produces something similar to a sonic boom. A faint, blue glow known as Cherenkov radiation (see it in action https://youtube.com/watch?v=hSuSG19Pcoc).
- IceCube was first to detect neutrinos coming from outside the solar system, establishing the source of high energy cosmic radiation. It also opened a whole new chapter of neutrino astronomy.
paimapi 6 minutes ago [-]
>Neutrinos give us a pristine snapshot into the origin of the universe. They have travelled billions of years and trillions of miles without interacting with anything. Unless...we catch them!
I assume this is not a hard, totalizing law since it seems we're able to get samples of neutrino collisions in just a kilometer sized chunk of ice on Earth (meaning that the probability of collision is not absolutely zero and there's no way to know the full neutrino travelogue through the universe)
garyrob 1 hours ago [-]
" - When a neutrino, rarely, collides with an atom, it produces charged particles. In ice - not vacuum! - certain particles can travel faster than light."
That confused me for a moment so it seems worth clarifying: in ice, certain particles can travel faster than light does in ice.
fspeech 5 minutes ago [-]
Light slows down in dielectric materials because as an em wave it interacts with the polarization of molecules. Neutrino has very little interaction with matter, OTOH.
tyre 24 minutes ago [-]
Thank you, I lost my mind, briefly, reading that part.
vonneumannstan 9 minutes ago [-]
This is also the source of the classic blue glow in water cooled nuclear reactors. Electrons move through the water faster than light and leave behind a kind of 'sonic boom' of photons in its wake.
pryelluw 31 minutes ago [-]
Didn’t the big bang theory show have an episode about this?
nntwozz 1 hours ago [-]
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_Microft 10 hours ago [-]
He receives the prize for conceiving the IceCube neutrino detector, a cubic-kilometer-sized detecter in the Antarctics.
Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:
Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.
brookst 8 hours ago [-]
I am adopting “Furthest possible end of any logistics chain” as a more refined version of “middle of fucking nowhere”. Thank you.
walrus01 8 hours ago [-]
It would probably be harder if they wanted to put it, for instance, on the ocean floor at Point Nemo, but for sure the literal south pole is pretty damn expensive on a $ per kg to get stuff sent to. And on an ongoing basis to sustain operations 24x7x365 (it's my understanding it runs almost entirely on diesel fuel and/or Jet-A for a big-ass set of generators).
r58lf 3 hours ago [-]
It is expensive and it doesn't need to be there, but the reason its at the south pole is that the US has money for SOMETHING at the south pole. They want to maintain a presence at the south pole for international relations reasons. To be consistent with insternational treaties they need to do science there.
So, the US/NSF is like "we have a bunch of money to do science, but it has to be at the south pole". People like Halzen who had a crazy idea go to NSF and say how can I get a bunch of money to do this. NSF says, we don't have that kind of money in our physics budget, but if you were to do it at the southpole we could fund it.
patcon 3 hours ago [-]
That's such interesting context. Thank you!
imglorp 7 hours ago [-]
I disagree: anywhere in the ocean is easier logistics than crawler trains over land: ship it there and chuck it overboard. They do that to install oil rigs all the time (but that's more like float it there and sink it). Eg: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/dockwise-vanguard-shipping
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but now imagine the cost of putting large active electronics 4,000 meters down on the sea floor and keeping it running, and getting the data back off it... The cost of running the drill rig seen in the photos of the icecube detector would be a fraction of that.
why would "ship it there and chuck overboard" be easier than "crawler train it there and chuck overboard"?
IAmBroom 1 hours ago [-]
Because shipping is easier than trucking at subzero temperatures on roads constantly being covered in snow.
Also, we've been shipping by water much longer than we've been trucking things on wheels, because the tech is easier: get on floaty wood and paddle.
brookst 7 hours ago [-]
For sure, there are more difficult places, but I don’t think there is any conceivable place where the supply chain runs through the South Pole on its way. I hope not.
And remember, the "speed of light in the medium" depends on the wavelength of the light. This is why prisms separate light by color.
jchallis 7 hours ago [-]
Optical sonic boom.
rramadass 3 hours ago [-]
Actually called a "Luminal Boom" or "Photonic Boom".
rramadass 7 hours ago [-]
This is quite nuanced and not as most people assume.
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
IIRC the group velocity in a medium can also exceed c when you send pulses through certain nonlinear media. Basically, the "lump" of the pulse can appear to "exit before it entered," but what really happens is that the tiny tip of the pulse has already gone through at <= c, and starts growing into the body at the exit before it has completely shrank at the entrance because of the nonlinearity. So it is actually the information/"signal" velocity (the tip of the signal) that cannot exceed c.
fooker 1 hours ago [-]
Are there interesting relativistic effects related to this other than this Cherenkov radiation?
IAmBroom 1 hours ago [-]
To be more perfectly precise, it is only in a vacuum with an infinitely repeating regular signal that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light".
The deviation caused by uncertainty in the package arrival time is typically extremely short, but not zero, for finite signals.
The actual "entity" that is restricted to be <=c is "information velocity". An infinitely repeating pattern would have travel at (phase velocity)=c ... but would ironically transmit no actual information (the bit value is restricted to 1, not 0 or 1).
jgalt212 8 hours ago [-]
The Telescope in the Ice was a solid book about this.
The book about it can also be used to detect neutrinos too?
antonvs 1 hours ago [-]
Only if you bury it a kilometer below the ice.
tonyhart7 9 hours ago [-]
I read all of that and other resources online and still couldn't understand why the hell we need to build that and especially in south pole antartica
joshvm 7 hours ago [-]
Neutrinos need a large detector volume for efficiency because they interact so rarely. You can’t detect them directly so you need a transparent medium to detect their collision byproducts. Good detector mediums are water and ice, and are underground to minimise background light. There are relatively few places you can do this. Mine caverns and under the sea are the most common, but marine detectors are notoriously hard to build. Francis Halzen proposed using ice. At the Pole, the glacial plateau is 2 miles high and the breakthrough was confirming that the ice is in fact highly transparent if you go deep enough.
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
hardtke 3 hours ago [-]
The biggest challenge is finding ice without dust layers from historical volcanic activity, and the South Pole is particularly clean because of it's remoteness as well as the prevailing wind directions. There is, however, one big dust layer that causes signal distortion.
dupdup 1 hours ago [-]
dust layers wont effect them neutrinos can pass anything or I am missing a point
not2b 1 hours ago [-]
You have to see the light from when a neutrino interacts with something, so you want very clear water or ice for that.
Intermernet 8 hours ago [-]
The best science comes from areas that have no obvious use. The original insights into nuclear physics, quantum physics and relativity were all pure thought experiments. They led to the world we live in.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
whizzter 8 hours ago [-]
My best guess would be just the remoteness.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
mr_mitm 9 hours ago [-]
Where else would you go look for a cubic km of ice?
erk__ 8 hours ago [-]
Greenland, though that is probably not much better in any measurable way, when it comes to transport.
cozzyd 2 hours ago [-]
Greenland is much better logistically in some ways (I work on experiments both in Greenland and in Antarctica), but the ice in Greenland is unlikely to be as good for IceCube as in Antarctica, due to a presumed larger number of dust layers from dry periods in Europe.
The US has a research station at Summit Station Greenland but compared to South Pole, it's spartan (like, the first time I went there, I slept in a tent because of lack of hard-sided berthing, but then a Polar bear came a few years later and now hard-sided berthing is required). There are longer-term plans to improve the station in Greenland but we'll see.
walrus01 8 hours ago [-]
Another option that's been popular is to get it as deep underground as possible, hard rock mines with empty areas:
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
trebligdivad 7 hours ago [-]
Right, but for those they need to make/move/collect a large amount of transparent material, like heavy water etc for the particles to interact with. But they get that 'for free' with the ice.
Logistics is much easier for Greenland, but the optical properties of the ice are not as good as at the south pole.
jimberlage 6 hours ago [-]
If we're serious about AI taking over jobs, we'll probably need to get more comfortable with any kind of undirected work-for-its-own-sake, not less.
ls-a 3 hours ago [-]
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westurner 4 hours ago [-]
> which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
A Twistor model can model such;
westurner 49 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps this was downvoted in ignorance?
This question could have avoided the offense:
What is the relation between Cherenkov relation and effective mass in longitudinal plasma waves?
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
felixthehat 9 hours ago [-]
The same guy (Johan Jarnestad) has been doing all the nobel prize illustrations and infographics for years!
Looking at the behance site it's a pretty good choice, glad some illustrators are still making a living in the AI age.
Sharlin 10 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the base was already there and logistically essential. The IceCube topside building is just a part of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, about a km or so from the Elevated Station.
jrowen 7 hours ago [-]
This image* from Wikipedia surprised me. The topside building is...you could say...the tip of the iceberg. The detectors span a huge area going over 2km deep. The predecessor AMANDA array was also down there.
The building is just for housing the data gathering and comms equipment and whatever maintenance and engineering stuff the array needs. I don’t think anybody physically works there regularly.
ungovernableCat 10 hours ago [-]
A trillion of these silly small guys pass through us every second.
Funny to imagine them like that.
Kelteseth 9 hours ago [-]
There are many things that my brain just can't handle, the size of the universe, more than 3 dimensions and this fact especially.
sulam 5 hours ago [-]
I will argue on your behalf that your brain can handle just one more dimension than the 3 you are likely referring to. :)
antonvs 1 hours ago [-]
Most people are pretty bad at accounting for the effects of time.
IAmBroom 1 hours ago [-]
Is this a Gödel Completeness thing?
BurningFrog 5 hours ago [-]
If you ever feel lonely, think about all those little friends who come visit you!
steve_adams_86 2 hours ago [-]
We rarely bump into each other, actually. When we do it happens in a flash.
southpolesteve 6 hours ago [-]
What an amazing accomplishment! I played a very tiny part in this project and went to the South Pole in 2009 to help with construction. Didn't see any neutrinos the entire time I was there though :/
dekhn 5 hours ago [-]
I worked with a guy who worked on IceCube. He flew down to the South Pole, went all the way to the station, just to install debian for their data processing systems. I was... a bit jealous.
joshvm 13 minutes ago [-]
I wintered for IceCube - most of the job is on-call Linux admin, cluster management and a bit of field work depending on the year.
antonvs 58 minutes ago [-]
"You know I could just do it remotely. Hmm wait... never mind, forget I said anything... when does my flight leave?"
weinzierl 10 hours ago [-]
We think of receiving a Nobel Prize as something super rare and exceptional and it is. What still always astounds me though, is this:
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
NitpickLawyer 9 hours ago [-]
> yearly meetup for them in Lindau
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
PopePompus 9 hours ago [-]
Every year a few of the Nobel Prize winners attend the IgNobel Prize ceremony and dance on stage.
cgeier 10 hours ago [-]
The first time in as long as I can think that a single physicist was chosen.
dguest 7 hours ago [-]
All of science is collaborative and this is especially true in these big experiments: the IceCube collaboration is over 400 people [1] from several dozen institutes. There are a lot of experiments where giving a Nobel prize would be impossible because there's no "principal investigator" for the experiment.
I wonder - was there really no other people they could have given it to? The detection of gravitational waves was split between a theorist, experimentalist and a person who had a big hand in shepherding the project along. Could not the same have been done here?
dguest 7 hours ago [-]
I would imagine the problem is that there are too many of them.
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
lokimedes 5 hours ago [-]
I was in the IceCube experiment for a bit as well as the ATLAS Experiment at CERN. So you could say I contributed a bit to both this and the Higgs Nobel. Being part of these big collaborations, you know what the deal is. The Nobel is excellent PR for physics, and science in general, but it is just a prize. Francis is the singular leader of IceCube, and a visionary in the area, it is perfectly fair to award it to him, if not to the total collaboration.
As for theory, I don’t think this award hinges on theoretical predictions but the enablement of observation itself.
sliem 4 hours ago [-]
other relevant people are probably dead
hardtke 3 hours ago [-]
I can confirm. The most relevant other contributors are dead but even then Francis is the most deserving.
Pretty cool. One of the big challenges in trying neutrino detection in ice is dealing with funding agencies. The optical properties of ice only get good when you are actually a few kilometers deep in very old ice. That is you can't just build a demonstrator in the nearest glacier with a few leftover photomultipliers, you need to go directly to Antarctica and bore a three kilometer hole into the ice. And projects where the MVP is quite expensive are always very hard to get funded.
immmmmm 8 hours ago [-]
I remember one of my professor, a pioneer of neutrino detectors in Europe, mentioning Ice Cube in a lecture more than 20 years ago. Long time scale (due to funding).
ronbenton 8 hours ago [-]
Anyone else romanticize going to work at some remote location like the IceCube? Probably some escapism going on
southpolesteve 6 hours ago [-]
I worked on IceCube. Was at the South Pole for a little over a month. Wild once in a lifetime experience. And if I am being honest I was terribly bored after the first 2 weeks. Its very flat and white and cold and not much to do. I was asked to go back the next year and I said no.
steve_adams_86 2 hours ago [-]
Field work even in beautiful places can get stifling. When you don't have access to friends, family, routine, various freedoms... It can be a bit much.
I romanticized that kind of work, but I think my limit is roughly what you said at around 2 weeks. The novelty wears off. Especially because I miss my kids a lot after a few days.
Actually, another big one: I love cooking. When you eat what you're given and don't have a choice, even if the food is pretty good it's kind of... I don't know... I really just want to go home and make something that is distinctly 'my food', something I would only have at home.
Even so, I absolutely love field work. The stuff I do is nowhere near as crazy as the Antarctic. I'm typically on the semi-remote islands of the British Columbia coast. My wife goes to the Arctic; her experience is probably more like yours. Lots of time isolated on icebreakers. Occasionally visiting remote navy or military bases, though. Some indigenous communities. Not as middle-of-nowhere as the Antarctic! The longest she has done is 7 weeks, with ~4 days off of the ship.
freecodeio 5 hours ago [-]
was there any clear sky ever? how did it look like? I'm assuming you went during daylight?
joshvm 7 minutes ago [-]
Clear skies happen regularly enough. You can see refractive phenomena frequently (sun dogs, moon halos and the like). Same for night, plenty of clear skies and auroras during the winter when it’s dark enough to see them.
I spent a bit over a year at South Pole for IceCube. There's an old joke in the Antarctic: the first time is for the adventure, the second time is for the money, and the third time is because you don't fit in anywhere else anymore.
Anyway, I'd love to do it again
bananasbandanas 7 hours ago [-]
We hire two people to stay over the winter and operate the detector each year. No icecube affiliation or physics background required, although a technical background helps.
ConorHH 7 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the intro to a horror.
senderista 2 hours ago [-]
The Shining with a nerd cast
antonvs 56 minutes ago [-]
The scariest thing about the Neutrino Monster is that you can't see it and it can walk right through you.
Starman_Jones 7 hours ago [-]
I had a professor who talked about working there. In his words, “Thank God for whiskey!”
While there is some romantic imagery (penguins!) down there, and the disconnect from the rest of the world might be appealing, for large parts of the year you’re just stuck inside.
scheme271 3 hours ago [-]
It depends on where you are, Away from the coast, there's no penguins or any large creatures.
Great news for UW-Madison and all the work that went into such a forward thinking, creative scientific instrument!
PaulHoule 9 hours ago [-]
Neutrino physics is the frontier. It’s one area where we know there are “physics beyond the standard model” though IceCube hasn’t quite been able to answer the neutrino mass question.
crawshaw 2 hours ago [-]
I love Ice Cube, as it is great engineering contributing significantly to science. It is also the perfect way to describe the concept of a great “hack” to people outside the field.
exmadscientist 4 hours ago [-]
Well holy shit. I didn't expect to wake up this morning and see the "outside" guy from my thesis committee (aka, the only one who wasn't a rubber stamp) winning the Nobel Prize.
Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.
It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.
Congratulations.
gizmodo59 2 hours ago [-]
Its rare to have noble prize given to just one person! This feels extra special for the work he has done.
senderista 2 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't the prize have been co-awarded to Ice Cube for inspiring the name?
That's an uncharitable take. The proposed observatory was through pristine dense forest, and one of the most important elephant corridors in Asia. It was opposed by the democratically elected government, and litigated in courts in an open and transparent way. The physics gains do not outweigh the environmental cost, and the fact that scientists were able to get valuable data from an observatory in the lifeless Antarctic is further justification not to build this.
tesnorindian 9 hours ago [-]
IceCube observatory is for studying the high energy cosmic neutrinos from a distant galaxy or black holes. But the one proposed INO is to study the low and medium energy atmospheric neutrinos. INO was designed to study the mass ordering of neutrinos. Both observatories are for studying different aspects and properties of neutrinos and are not the same.
IAmBroom 1 hours ago [-]
But all the objections GP mentioned are still valid.
assemblyman 4 hours ago [-]
As a trained high-energy physicist who loves the subject, I wouldn't want the destruction of forests, tiger and elephant habitats (or any other habitats) for "science". There are always alternatives - alternate sites, alternate designs, alternate experiments.
One of my primary disagreements with my friends and colleagues was based on their insistence that opposing a new facility was anti-science and only done by the "uneducated". IMO, while this was true for a small subset of opposing factions, there were often real reasons for not building which took realities outside research into consideration.
UI-EDITOR 9 hours ago [-]
isnt theni the place where hemp farm were destroyed in 1800?
NoHedgeAllBets 8 hours ago [-]
Quite rare for a it to be awarded to just one person.
v3rm1n 5 hours ago [-]
Madison WI mentioned!
Smooveemaan 3 hours ago [-]
woah, mindblowing!
jdw64 9 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I think it would be nice if there were biographies that laid out when and how Nobel laureates made their discoveries. Then wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
Kotlopou 8 hours ago [-]
Not Nobel laureates, but people have tried this. I once was looking for the early education of famous scientists and found the book Cradles of Eminence [1], which compares the childhoods of several hundred famous people.
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
Uh not sure Halzen personally made discoveries, in the original sense of the word!
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a one-man discovery (or has more of a chance to become one) than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
The mechanism for which Higgs was awarded was also independently discovered by at least ten other people (I can't count)
>The Higgs mechanism is therefore also called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism,[9] Anderson–Higgs mechanism,[10] Anderson–Higgs–Kibble mechanism,[11] Higgs–Kibble mechanism by Abdus Salam[12] and ABEGHHK'tH mechanism (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)
Can't wait for OpenAI to get the nobel prize; Swedes are more sympathetic than mathematicians!! (so that human beings might completely separate discovery from reward/awards/recognition. Discovery is a human right!!!)
rramadass 5 hours ago [-]
> wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.
The common denominator is money and time. The only way to get more results is to put more funding out there (and accepting that not everything is about a direct ROI).
karlkloss 9 hours ago [-]
Still no affordable antigravity? Dang.
bookofjoe 8 hours ago [-]
He's working on it; still in deep black.
fahrvrgnugen 9 hours ago [-]
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alexx-devv 9 hours ago [-]
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Rugscreation 9 hours ago [-]
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dauertewigkeit 10 hours ago [-]
Just happy it's not another AI related prize.
newsicanuse 9 hours ago [-]
+1
rator9521 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, it's amazing that the AI didn't prize.
terminalbraid 9 hours ago [-]
Why? They gave that out already.
logicchains 9 hours ago [-]
There's no such thing as AI, it's just Jürgen Schmidhuber in a small room typing really really quickly. And no way they're giving him a Nobel Prize.
omeysalvi 10 hours ago [-]
Just woke up this morning to this news. Thank God. Today is a good day.
birdboat00 9 hours ago [-]
Makes me sad, that even there we put our human stuff and Metal boxes
hyperionultra 9 hours ago [-]
What is practical application of Francis work?
mr_mitm 7 hours ago [-]
It could be the beginning of Neutrino astronomy [1]. So far, we only used the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, to observe the universe. If we could equally leverage neutrinos or gravitational waves, we could observe much more of the universe. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation enables us to deduce the conditions at 300ky after the Big Bang. The cosmic neutrino background [2] could give us insight in the conditions 1s after the Big Bang.
The million dollars. A Nobel prize is worth a million dollars.
mr_mitm 7 hours ago [-]
Similar to the Millennium prize by the Clay institute, the amount of luck and effort you need to receive the prize don't make it worthwhile. Plus, it's generally expected to use that money for further research. It would be advisable to focus on other endeavors, if money is your motivator.
HoldOnAMinute 6 hours ago [-]
So, two years salary in the Bay Area where it's a lot warmer?
kryptiskt 6 hours ago [-]
Knowing the properties of neutrinos is essential for building the neutrino bomb, the most ethical weapon possible.
guidopallemans 8 hours ago [-]
Neutrino detectors are essential in receiving communication from other galaxies.
pfdietz 8 hours ago [-]
That doesn't make any sense. Photons would work much better.
dguest 7 hours ago [-]
Photons work better for driving a car too but being able to hear is still quite useful.
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
terminalbraid 6 hours ago [-]
Neutrinos are not an analog to sound in the point you are trying to make. They are many orders of magnitude more weakly interacting and much, much difficult to measure.
pfdietz 7 hours ago [-]
That may be the case, but it doesn't explain why neutrinos would be essential for intergalactic communication. Maybe the person I was responding to didn't realize neutrinos travel very close to the speed of light, not infinitely fast?
toast0 5 hours ago [-]
Neutrinos might be a better medium for intergalactic communication, since they can travel through most objects.
There isn't anything in the way that would require this. I mean, we can see back to (shortly after) the Big Bang.
freebsd_lovefes 3 hours ago [-]
What a circle j*k that academia is. Fake Science is what it is. It's, like, they take everything good and pervert it into something ungodly. We could've been eons ahead in science if academia wasn't a leftist bastion off backend lickers, bottom to top, working assiduously to create more and more artificial complexity with one objective in mind - their own job security. I'm not even afraid to generalize because they all bend over when they graduate. They are literally discouraging critical thought at this point and intelligence is discouraged as well. It's all about control. See if there's any real conversation about anything important anywhere anymore.
MinimalAction 3 hours ago [-]
While I understand academia has its own systematic problems, I do not get your rant. Could you give concrete examples of how academia is "discouraging critical thought at this point and intelligence is discouraged as well"?
freebsd_lovefes 3 hours ago [-]
I won't even go down to that level of yours where you think people would say waste, fraud, and abuse for no reason. Read the news, see how much waste, fraud, and abuse Trump's administration has uncovered. The left and the entire academia were entirely moot about all of that horrible stuff going on in our country.
I don't see academia shouting at every street corner to think about all this brain implant craze because there are people who are being tortured for years remotely using brain implants and other invasive techniques. Zero word from academia 'bout that. Oh, wait, yeah, history shows the crazy psychos from the intel agencies doing terror on human subjects on unimaginable scale were recruiting from the academia. Yeah, okay, plenty critical thought by the academia when nothing has been done to prevent that from happening again.
I guess they're all compliant now, as there's no real pushback for using remotely controlled terrorists with brain and body implants to wreak havoc on the populace. Like I said, nobody asks any really hard questions anywhere.
howunfortunate 3 hours ago [-]
My own PhD leaves me inclined to share your rage against the machine but do you care to expound on why this applies to this award?
Because, knowing little about physics, this strikes me as reasonably interesting work compared to the slop in my own field.
freebsd_lovefes 3 hours ago [-]
Did you read what I wrote? Waste, fraud, and abuse! They do virtually ZERO theoretical physics and then expend gazillions of resources on contraptions to study elusive stuff they could've derived theoretically first and in very elegant fashion. It's just making themselves indispensable at any cost. And they are clever, which is why they are successful in that enterprise so far, but it's not the enterprise that has anyone's interests in mind, except them being in control.
stonedivot 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you'll be in line for the Nobel Prize next year once you derive all of this theoretically in a very elegant fashion! Think of the money they could have saved if someone had just come ask you to show them it was possible.
freebsd_lovefes 1 hours ago [-]
And who's gonna pay for the hordes of PhDs who vote overwhelmingly Democrat then?
95% of faculty political donations in Cornell went to the Democrats. 98% in Princeton. Whereas 100% of billions of federal funds disbursed to all the universities comes from the tax base that's Republican as equal share. Is this not weaponization of education?
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBML_wEeSk)
Nobody cares about the Nobel Prize as anything more than a circle j*k anymore. Someone would even say a bunch of filth sell outs propping each other up.
howunfortunate 56 minutes ago [-]
You have a real point but the way you're communicating it is hurting your cause rather than helping it
Rendered at 20:24:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I assume this is not a hard, totalizing law since it seems we're able to get samples of neutrino collisions in just a kilometer sized chunk of ice on Earth (meaning that the probability of collision is not absolutely zero and there's no way to know the full neutrino travelogue through the universe)
That confused me for a moment so it seems worth clarifying: in ice, certain particles can travel faster than light does in ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
This was also discussed recently if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655286
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse
https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...
Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.
So, the US/NSF is like "we have a bunch of money to do science, but it has to be at the south pole". People like Halzen who had a crazy idea go to NSF and say how can I get a bunch of money to do this. NSF says, we don't have that kind of money in our physics budget, but if you were to do it at the southpole we could fund it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM3NeT
Also, we've been shipping by water much longer than we've been trucking things on wheels, because the tech is easier: get on floaty wood and paddle.
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible!
https://xkcd.com/1053/
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
What really is the speed of light in a medium/vacuum, group or phase velocity? - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450377/what-real...
The deviation caused by uncertainty in the package arrival time is typically extremely short, but not zero, for finite signals.
The actual "entity" that is restricted to be <=c is "information velocity". An infinitely repeating pattern would have travel at (phase velocity)=c ... but would ironically transmit no actual information (the bit value is restricted to 1, not 0 or 1).
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1137280085
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
The US has a research station at Summit Station Greenland but compared to South Pole, it's spartan (like, the first time I went there, I slept in a tent because of lack of hard-sided berthing, but then a Polar bear came a few years later and now hard-sided berthing is required). There are longer-term plans to improve the station in Greenland but we'll see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Neutrino_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNO+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
A Twistor model can model such;
This question could have avoided the offense:
What is the relation between Cherenkov relation and effective mass in longitudinal plasma waves?
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
https://www.infographics.se/
https://www.behance.net/JohanJarnestad
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory#/...
The building is just for housing the data gathering and comms equipment and whatever maintenance and engineering stuff the array needs. I don’t think anybody physically works there regularly.
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
[1]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/meet-the-collaboratio...
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2011-february-13...
I romanticized that kind of work, but I think my limit is roughly what you said at around 2 weeks. The novelty wears off. Especially because I miss my kids a lot after a few days.
Actually, another big one: I love cooking. When you eat what you're given and don't have a choice, even if the food is pretty good it's kind of... I don't know... I really just want to go home and make something that is distinctly 'my food', something I would only have at home.
Even so, I absolutely love field work. The stuff I do is nowhere near as crazy as the Antarctic. I'm typically on the semi-remote islands of the British Columbia coast. My wife goes to the Arctic; her experience is probably more like yours. Lots of time isolated on icebreakers. Occasionally visiting remote navy or military bases, though. Some indigenous communities. Not as middle-of-nowhere as the Antarctic! The longest she has done is 7 weeks, with ~4 days off of the ship.
Not right now though! https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm
Anyway, I'd love to do it again
While there is some romantic imagery (penguins!) down there, and the disconnect from the rest of the world might be appealing, for large parts of the year you’re just stuck inside.
https://archive.org/details/quarksleptonsint0000halz
Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.
It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.
Congratulations.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/why-the-neu...
One of my primary disagreements with my friends and colleagues was based on their insistence that opposing a new facility was anti-science and only done by the "uneducated". IMO, while this was true for a small subset of opposing factions, there were often real reasons for not building which took realities outside research into consideration.
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cradlesofeminenc0000goer_l9f8/pa...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181207045746/https://www.maa.o...
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a one-man discovery (or has more of a chance to become one) than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
The mechanism for which Higgs was awarded was also independently discovered by at least ten other people (I can't count)
>The Higgs mechanism is therefore also called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism,[9] Anderson–Higgs mechanism,[10] Anderson–Higgs–Kibble mechanism,[11] Higgs–Kibble mechanism by Abdus Salam[12] and ABEGHHK'tH mechanism (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
Can't wait for OpenAI to get the nobel prize; Swedes are more sympathetic than mathematicians!! (so that human beings might completely separate discovery from reward/awards/recognition. Discovery is a human right!!!)
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.
See also my older comment for more resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976697
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_astronomy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
Or we can all just think big thoughts at the same time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_Occupants_of_Interplan...
I don't see academia shouting at every street corner to think about all this brain implant craze because there are people who are being tortured for years remotely using brain implants and other invasive techniques. Zero word from academia 'bout that. Oh, wait, yeah, history shows the crazy psychos from the intel agencies doing terror on human subjects on unimaginable scale were recruiting from the academia. Yeah, okay, plenty critical thought by the academia when nothing has been done to prevent that from happening again.
I guess they're all compliant now, as there's no real pushback for using remotely controlled terrorists with brain and body implants to wreak havoc on the populace. Like I said, nobody asks any really hard questions anywhere.
Because, knowing little about physics, this strikes me as reasonably interesting work compared to the slop in my own field.
95% of faculty political donations in Cornell went to the Democrats. 98% in Princeton. Whereas 100% of billions of federal funds disbursed to all the universities comes from the tax base that's Republican as equal share. Is this not weaponization of education? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBML_wEeSk)
Nobody cares about the Nobel Prize as anything more than a circle j*k anymore. Someone would even say a bunch of filth sell outs propping each other up.