[HN Gopher] The little-known story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize i...
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The little-known story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics
Author : wglb
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-03-19 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The violation-of-conservation-of-parity experiment that Wu came
| up with to test the Lee-Yang hypothesis is well described here:
|
| > "The defining experiment involved cooling Cobalt-60 down to a
| hundredth of a degree Kelvin, a temperature at which its atoms
| can be induced to spin in one direction, and measure the number
| of electrons spun off from the top and bottom of the cobalt mass.
| If they are the same, then parity is conserved, since that way
| both the original cobalt atom and its opposite-spinning mirror
| copy will appear exactly the same. But, if one side emits more
| electrons than the other, parity would not be conserved, as
| whichever pole the atoms appear spewing from in the original,
| they will be spewing from the opposite pole in the mirror
| reflection, which would be like our clock hand stubbornly
| insisting on moving clockwise in spite of being reflected."
|
| https://womenyoushouldknow.net/razor-sharp-physics-chien-shi...
|
| Another good one:
|
| > "To test the hypothesis, Wu needed three things. The first was
| a nucleus that decayed due to weak force (beta decay). The second
| was that the nucleus must have an intrinsic quantum mechanical
| spin. The third and the tricky thing was that all the nuclei
| spins must be made to point in the same direction. So why is
| this?"
|
| https://www.secretsofuniverse.in/parity-violation-weak-exper...
|
| Richard Feynam wrote quite a bit about the Lee-Yang hypothesis on
| conservation of partity in weak decay processes and its
| experimental verification by Wu, that's where I first heard of
| it, symmetry in physical laws:
|
| https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html
|
| Of course, Feynman's lectures were delivered to an all-male
| audience at Caltech, which didn't allow women until 1970 or so,
| see the class:
|
| https://physicstoday.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publ...
|
| That issue has certainly greatly improved since then.
| ambicapter wrote:
| > In 1945, when the silence between the U.S. and China lifted,
| China was embroiled in a brutal civil war, and relatives
| cautioned against returning too soon. By 1949, the year Wu
| observed evidence of the criterion for entanglement, Mao Zedong
| had established communism in the People's Republic of China, and
| McCarthyism was ramping up in the U.S., making travel home nearly
| impossible. She never saw her family again.
|
| This is tragic, but I can't help but think it would make it would
| make a heartbreaking movie, especially tied with her work on
| entanglement.
|
| edit: To be fair, I think the article goes down this route as
| well
|
| > Entanglement emerges from the most rigorous branches of
| mathematics and physics yet has poetic appeal. Abner Shimony, a
| philosopher and physicist, called it "passion at a distance."
| Entanglement offers the wild notion that once certain particles
| or systems interact, they can no longer be described
| independently of one another.
| shusaku wrote:
| In addition to the nice biography about a superb scientist, I
| also found this interesting:
|
| > Wu might have been hesitant to discuss evidence of entanglement
| because throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such quantum-foundations
| work was stigmatized as junk science. Back then, explains David
| Kaiser, a professor of physics and history of science at the
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the idea of using an
| experiment to prove or disprove theories about quantum physics or
| to test for local hidden variables was "not even an inkling" for
| most physicists. Researchers who explored questions about
| entanglement often disguised their research because backlash
| could stymie a promising career.
|
| I suspect their are similar things going on today, like
| astronomers who want to look for signs of intelligent life but
| packaging it as something more mundane
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| The ideas of lines of research being suppressed is a rich topic
| in science fiction novels. Usually hidden aliens or secret
| factions on Earth actively steer scientists away from certain
| topics, usually that will lead to break throughs in star drives
| or weapon-of-mass-destruction designs.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Similar things are for sure still going on. Sean Carroll
| regularly laments the fact that research of the foundation of
| quantum mechanics is often actively discouraged.
| kurthr wrote:
| Weird, it seems like that's one of the most popular
| discussions in pop-sci. The real question is more
| philosophical... does Many Worlds even mean anything
| scientific (eg is it testable or a usefully simple model).
| Certainly, it's entertaining.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| He published a paper with some colleagues on a way to
| disprove Everettian Mechanics. It falls into the difficult
| but not impossible category. It involves looking for
| minuscule energy spikes that would be evidence of some kind
| of "collapse of the wave function" that would rule out Many
| Worlds.
|
| The Copenhagen Interpretation isn't a theory, it it is an
| attitude.
| lmm wrote:
| Shouldn't that be "does the Copenhagen intepretation even
| mean anything scientific"?
| whatshisface wrote:
| The answer to both is "no." It is really obvious that the
| answer is no, because they lead to the same predictions.
| There is real work being done in quantum foundations
| (which is not the same thing as fundamental physics), but
| it doesn't involve arguing about MWI and Copenhagen. :-)
| ar9av wrote:
| It is worth pointing out that zero actual information is
| transferred, it's just an inexact analogy to describe a problem
| space which lacks terms in plain English to describe it. It's
| not possible to communicate faster than light with this
| mechanism. What can be done is to generate same random numbers
| in two and only two distant places at the same time. That has
| great application in secure communications because it bypasses
| the entire need for potentially insecure key exchange
| mechanisms, but because the numbers generated are truly random
| they contain no information and this mechanism cannot be used
| to cause an effect faster than light, it does not violate
| relativity in any way.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| How are the random numbers generated? Like, what are they
| generated from?
| quantum_mcts wrote:
| I've already quite a long time ago noticed that in particle
| physics we usually do stuff that quantum-computing people will
| call an "entaglement". We just don't phrase it like that, because
| we are used to it and we aren't much "in awe" about it.
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/40872/386
| psychphysic wrote:
| If you like reading about Wu from a woman in physics hidden in
| plain sight aspect you might like the story of Emmy Noether[0].
|
| A mathematician who worked a few doors down from Einstein and
| produced era defining result in physics. The connection between
| symmetry and conservation. Noether's theorem to this day is one
| of the most profound holy shit moments in many physicists
| education.
|
| Her life was been cut tragically short.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/04ERSb06dOg
| mhh__ wrote:
| Although I am a huge Noether fan, hidden in plain sight?She's
| one of _the_ most important names in theoretical physics.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Wu is quite well known too _within_ the physicist community.
|
| But go to the street ask the first 100 people you come across
| to list their top 5 important contributions by woman in maths
| or physics. What's on it? How many will mention Noether? I'd
| say about as many as Wu. Less than 1.
|
| Probably few could name many. Maybe it'll be the woman led
| the team to image the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
| Will anyone know her name though? I don't.
|
| Ada Lovelace is better known but not for maths or physics.
| She was a mathematician of course.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Ask them to name 5 of any gender and the youngest is
| probably Einstein or Hawking.
|
| There is definitely a gender bias. But there's also a
| "people on the street don't care as much as physicists
| think they ought to" bias.
| wannabedev22 wrote:
| Noether's lack of recognition has nothing to do with her
| gender. Her symmetry theorem is known to any undergrad student
| in physics.
|
| The general public simply doesn't know about physicists (beyond
| Einstein and Newton). In fact the general public is more likely
| to know of Neil deGrasse Tyson than far more influential
| physicists in the 20th century. Most people aren't aware of
| Dirac, von Neumann, Schrodinger, Bohr, Wigner, etc...
| emmelaich wrote:
| https://archive.is/CSRZ4
|
| Chien-Shiung Wu found evidence of entanglement in 1949.
|
| This is not mentioned in the 2022 prize.
| renox wrote:
| The Nobel prize was about experiments showing that QM
| entanglement is different from 'normal' entanglement, so I 'm
| not surprised.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Could you link anything that gives a quick rundown on the
| difference between 'QM entanglement' and 'normal'
| entanglement?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| prizes are only for the living. Why would we think the Nobel
| prize committee would want to admit to making a mistake and not
| handing one out 25 years ago to wu?
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| If the magnet was really so big, I doubt that the Columbia
| football team would have been able to move it.
| soheil wrote:
| Nobel Prize in science is typically awarded several years or
| decades after the discovery to make sure it sticks, specially if
| the scientist is young like Wu was. See Frank Wilczek's Nobel
| prize in physics awarded in 2004 for the work he did when he was
| 22 in 1974.
| macintux wrote:
| See also the 1957 Nobel Prize discussed in the article that was
| awarded the same year as the discovery that overthrew parity
| because it was so unexpected.
|
| And that Wu designed and conducted and was excluded from the
| prize.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Wu was specifically excluded from the prize in 1957 while her
| male colleagues got the prize. She devised the experiment that
| knocked down parity. They won the prize for the idea.
|
| 2022 was too late, as Wu passed in 1997.
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