Posted on 10/08/2002 6:45:16 AM PDT by Physicist
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:34:50 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
You used that word. That's how I know you really are a physicist. Or at least a mathematician.
Heh! A lot of "conceptually simple" experiments turn out to be blasted honking difficult to execute in the real world. Theorists are nice, but experimentalists RULE!
At least that's how the Nobel prizes are awarded.
Being an experimentalist, I tend to agree with you, but I can't help thinking of the overthrow of the conservation of parity. It turned out to be a fairly easy experiment. Of course, in that case the Nobel prize went to the theorists, T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang, and not to the experimentalist, C.S. Wu.
Ah, that's very interesting; I thought I had read somewhere that the day/night asymmetry was too small for the MSW effect to account for the "missing" Solar neutrinos, but maybe that was an out-of-date reference I saw... Wolfenstein (of MSW) should be delighted.
I take it you mean Gary Bernstein. He's sharp. He gave a colloquium here last year about weak gravitational lensing. I raised a very clever point in the Q&A and he shot it down in about two seconds. Gotta love that.
A great link, thank you for posting it! In my opinion, most science writers cannot write their way out of a paper bag. This one, however, is very good. Here is just one paragraph that delighted me:
Pauli, who didn’t dare publish his theory until three years later, “thought he had done a bad thing scientifically,” says Mann. “He had given this particle properties that prevented it from being observed. It was massless. It had no charge, and all it did was carry energy and momentum. You see, lay people mostly think about science as proceeding in a straight line, but science rarely proceeds in a straight line and we don’t live our lives in a straight line. We go in and out, we make mistakes, we do all kinds of foolish things—and occasionally some intelligent things.” It wasn’t until 1956, shortly before Pauli’s death, that the neutrino was first detected in a nuclear reactor, and Pauli’s intelligent solution to the puzzle was proven. “For a physicist, that’s romantic.”
Ah, but the poor schmucks that REALLY don't get the credit are the instrument designers/builders who actually "make it happen". Lots of really clever things have been done with extremely simple/elegant equipment. (And yes, I'm an instrument designer--chemistry, though--not physics).
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