Three Scientists Win Nobel Prize In Physics

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T.S. Eliot wrote in a poem that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. The Nobel Prize for physics will go to three scientists who discovered that, after the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate.

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As T.S. Eliot put it in his poem, "The Hollow Men," the world ends not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. This year's Nobel Prize in physics goes to three scientists who discovered that the universe will not only end with a whimper, but with a rather perplexing one.

NPR's Richard Harris has our story.

RICHARD HARRIS: Scientists know how the universe got started. First came the Big Bang, which created matter, and that stuff has been spreading out for more than 13 billion years. As it cruises outward the distances between all the galaxies keep getting bigger and bigger.

Dr. SAUL PERLMUTTER: But we'd always thought that gravity would be slowing that expansion.

HARRIS: Saul Perlmutter, at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, wanted to find out just how much gravity was actually putting the brakes on our expanding universe.

PERLMUTTER: We didn't know whether there was enough stuff in the universe to slow it to the point that it would come to a halt and perhaps someday collapse.

HARRIS: So in the 1980s, Perlmutter set out to figure out whether the universe would collapse and end with the bang, or just keep expanding forever and end with a whimper. He did that by seeking out distant supernovas, exploding stars, to see what the universe was doing billions of years ago. And finally, after 10 years of searching, Perlmutter came up with an answer so bizarre he wasn't at first sure whether to believe it.

PERLMUTTER: We thought we were finding out how much the universe was slowing down, and whether it was slowing down enough to come to a halt. And, of course, the answer was that it's not slowing down enough to come to a halt. In fact, it's not slowing down at all. It's speeding up.

HARRIS: Speeding up - how could that be? Matter in the universe was supposed to be coasting since the Big Bang, but not so. Somehow or other it was picking up speed, accelerating.

PERLMUTTER: And this was, of course, a big shock.

HARRIS: Borderline unbelievable, but as luck would have it, Perlmutter and his colleagues weren't the only team probing this question. A second team was also on the case, including Adam Riess, now at Johns Hopkins University, and Brian Schmidt, an American, now working in Australia.

ROBERT KIRSCHNER: Well, these are my children.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: Robert Kirshner at Harvard is speaking here in terms of his academic progeny.

KIRSCHNER: Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess were both graduates students with me, working on supernovae and working on using supernovae to measure cosmic distances.

HARRIS: And, as Kirschner tells a story, one day Schmidt came to him and said he wanted to track down distant supernova and try to answer the same kinds of question that Saul Perlmutter's team was after. He would need to write new software to pick through telescope images and identify those rare supernovas.

KIRSCHNER: And I said, well, these other guys have been working on it for five years - three people - that's 15 years. He said yeah, yeah, I could do it in a month. So...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KIRSCHNER: He did, too. It was terrible software. It had crashed all the time and, you know, gave false results some of the time. But he really did whip it together very quickly.

HARRIS: And it really did work. After a time, Adam Riess moved on to U.C. Berkeley to continue this work. And Schmidt stayed at Harvard through most of the next few exciting years, racing with Perlmutter to determine the fate of the universe. In the end, this team also came up with the same odd result at about the same time - namely that the universe will not only and in a whimper, but the expansion toward that ultimate demise is picking up speed as it goes.

Something weird is at work here driving that acceleration. Exactly what this is nobody can say, but they call it dark energy. And Kirschner says it seemingly makes up 75 percent of the universe.

KIRSCHNER: The simplest kind of dark energy would be everywhere. And so that means it would be present here on the earth. If we could figure out a smart way to detect its presence in a physics laboratory, that would be fantastic.

HARRIS: But nobody knows how to do that for now. So astronomers are hoping to gain more clues about it by looking out more into the universe.

And, as for the Nobel Prize, the rules say it gets split at most three ways, no matter what. So the committee doled it out to three of the deserving principles in this story: Perlmutter, Riess and Schmidt.

Richard Harris, NPR News.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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3 Astronomers Win Nobel Physics Prize

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Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The three will share $1.5 million.

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DAVID GREENE, host: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News I'm David Greene.

LYNN NEARY, host: And I'm Lynn Neary. The Nobel Prize for physics goes to three astronomers this year. They discovered that the expansion of our universe is speeding up. That completely unexpected discovery suggests that empty space is actually filled with some mysterious form of energy called dark energy and that dark energy is pushing our universe apart. Joining us to talk about the winners and their science is NPR's Richard Harris.

Good morning, Richard. Good to have you with us.

RICHARD HARRIS: Good morning.

NEARY: That sounds so fascinating. Tell us something about these astronomers who won the price today.

HARRIS: Well, half of the prize goes to Saul Perlmutter, who is at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab at the University of California at Berkeley. And the other half is shared by Adam Riess who is now at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; and he shares his half with Brian Schmidt who was born in Missoula, Montana, but now works at the Australian National Observatory.

So, they're all young. They're all still pretty young, in the prime of their careers. Perlmutter is 52; Schmidt is 44 and Adam Reese's 42. And, as I mentioned, Schmidt and Reese actually worked together on one team and Perlmutter headed up a second team. And the big breakthrough, the big papers they both published independently came out in 1998.

And they independently came to the same rather remarkable conclusion, which is that the universe is not only expanding - which people had been measuring actually since the 1920s - but the expansion is actually speeding up.

NEARY: Now, how do they figure that out and what exactly does that mean?

HARRIS: Well, they figured it out by studying some very distant stars called supernovas. They measured how fast the universe was expanding long ago by looking at these very distant supernovas and they found that the universe had been actually expanding faster in the last five billion years ago, than it had been before that time. That means the expansion is getting faster. It's accelerating, which is totally bizarre

Now until these teams made this discovery, we had a reasonably tidy view of the universe. It started about 13 billion years ago. You remember the Big Bang? Well, you don't personally remember it. But...

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: ...the thought was that all the matter sort of came out a fact huge Big Bang and some expansion that followed that. And then basically it was coasting through the universe ever after. And the question until these guys came along was: Is it just going to coast forever and gradually gravity would strong enough and pull it all back together for Big Crunch, or what?

But it turns out it wasn't just expanding out, just sort of coasting out. It's speeding up. It's moving away faster and faster and faster.

NEARY: Well, what's causing that? What's causing that acceleration?

HARRIS: Well, you can get the next Nobel Prize if a few can answer that question, actually.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: That is the big question. And with these two independent observations, these scientists are confident that it is happening. But exactly why it's happening is a real mystery. And that's actually what makes this such an exciting discovery, is that it's something fundamentally new and different about our universe, and obviously Nobel-caliber work here.

But what's causing that acceleration is still hotly debated. One major idea is that empty space isn't actually completely empty. It's filled with some serious energy which has been nicknamed dark energy. And that energy is somehow working against gravity to push the universe apart faster and faster.

NEARY: Oh, sounds kind of scary, actually.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

NEARY: But this discovery, they published this discovery about supernovas back in 1998. So, at that time, did people understand, did they realize it was a really big deal?

HARRIS: Yeah, it's one of those things where you look at it and you say wow, this is totally amazing. And the world of science woke up and it was page one stories around all the world. And it was really one of those key moments where you said these guys are onto something fantastic. Assuming it's correct, and with two independent results, it seemed pretty likely it was correct.

It's sort of equivalent in some ways to discovering this weird microwave hum that was discovered many years ago in the universe, which was the major clue that actually a Big Bang had occurred. Or even the earlier discovery from the 1920s that the universe is expanding.

NEARY: Well, Richard, I want to assure you I'm never going to get the Nobel Prize in physics. But thanks for being with us this morning.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: My pleasure.

NEARY: NPR's Richard Harris.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Israeli Chemist Wins Nobel Prize For Quasicrystals

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Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.

The 1982 breakthrough fundamentally changed the way chemists look at solid matter, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Scientists used to believe that atoms were arranged inside crystals only in ordered, repeating patterns. Shechtman's work showed that the atoms could be packed in a pattern that did not repeat — a new chemical structure known as a quasicrystal.

NPR's Joe Palca said Shechtman was in the U.S. studying a mixture of aluminum and manganese through an electron microscope when he made the discovery. The microscope allowed him to see how the atoms in the compound were packed together — but the pattern didn't make sense because it seemed to violate the rules of nature by not repeating.

"This was such a fundamental change in what people understood about crystals that it just seemed impossible," Palca said. "So he sent in a paper to a scientific journal, and they basically sent it right back without even ... looking at it at all. But he knew he had something very weird."

All crystals were thought to have rotational symmetry, so that when they are rotated, they look the same. On April 8, 1982, Shechtman first observed crystals with 10 points — pentagonal symmetry, which most scientists said was impossible.

"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.

It took years for Shechtman and other researchers to prove that he was right, and he was asked to leave his research group in the course of defending his findings.

Even double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the research.

"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,' " said Shechtman, a professor of materials science at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

The type of nonrepeating patterns that follow mathematical rules seen in quasicrystals are also seen in tile mosaics across the Arabic world, most notably in buildings such as the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran. Mosaics like these from as early the 13th century, made of just five unique tiles, "have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level," the academy said.

Quasicrystals have been synthesized in laboratories around the world since their discovery in 1982, but it wasn't until 2009 that the first naturally occurring quasicrystals were found.

They have also been found in some of the most durable kinds of steel in the world, and they are used in products such as razor blades and thin needles used in eye surgery. Scientists are also experimenting with using quasicrystals in surface coatings for frying pans, heat insulation in engines, and energy-saving LED lights.

Shechtman will receive the 10 million kroner ($1.5 million) prize in December.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this story.

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Israeli Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize For Quasicrystals

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Israeli chemist Daniel Schectman's discovery of how atoms fit together inside of crystals changed the way chemists look at solid matter.

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LYNN NEARY, host: The Nobel Prizes are being awarded all this week. Today, the chemistry prize goes to Daniel Schechtman for his work on something called quasicrystals. Schechtman discovered these crystals in 1982, and they fundamentally changed the way scientists looked at solid matter. Joining me to discuss this year's prize is NPR science correspondent, Joe Palca.

Good to have you with us, Joe.

JOE PALCA: Good to be here.

NEARY: So tell us about Schechtman and his discovery.

PALCA: Well, Schechtman is an Israeli. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1941. And he's now a professor at the Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa. In 1982, he was working on a sabbatical here in the United States in what was then called the National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And he was looking at a mix of aluminum and manganese through an electron microscope. And when he - he saw a pattern through the microscope. It was very strange. It was 10 concentric dots. Now, what does that mean?

Well, to him it meant that these atoms were packing together in this mixture in a way that no one had seen before. Ten dots suggested there was something going on that was very strange, a kind of a 10-fold symmetry. And so he couldn't believe it at first, because it violated the rules of - then the rules of what crystals were.

NEARY: So did he see this over a period of time, or did he see it suddenly, all...

PALCA: No, this is one of those amazing things, Lynn. He actually saw it on a particular day. And here's Professor Sven Lidin of the Swedish Academy of Sciences at the press conference this morning, describing the work.

SVEN LIDIN: We can date this discovery perfectly. Often, the Nobel Prize is awarded to something that has developed over a long time. For this particular discovery, we know it took place on April the 8th, 1982.

PALCA: And that's because they have his lab notebook with the date on it, and also his writing in the margin, saying: Tenth? - question mark, question mark. So he obviously knew he had seen something very weird.

NEARY: So when he told the world about this discovery, what was the reaction?

PALCA: They didn't believe it.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

PALCA: They said you've made a mistake. You're seeing something wrong. He sent in a paper. It was rejected right away. And it took almost two years just to get the paper published, and then it was not universally accepted, but obviously, over time, it did come to be accepted.

NEARY: All right. So this changes the way crystals are understood. But are there any practical implications to this at all?

PALCA: Well, yes. These crystals have some interesting properties. First of all, they're harder than other materials, in many cases. And so they've actually been - they're used in things like razor blades and surgical steel. They're also poor conductors of heat. And so they can be used as insulators, and they're also - they have what's called thermo-electric properties, which means when you heat them up, they give off an electric current. And so they're used in LEDs, these light-emitting diodes that are used in many kinds of displays.

Now, the other interesting thing that I found about this is that they - these crystals were never seen in nature before two years ago, when the first one that was ever discovered in nature was discovered in a river in Eastern Russia. So these have all been laboratory-built things. And what's different about these crystals from others is that crystals used to be defined as something that was regular and repeating - regular and repeating. But these quasi-crystals are regular in the sense that they're made of the same kinds of shapes, but the shapes go together in a non-repeating way. So they go on, but each - as you keep going, the patterns are different, even though the bits that go together are all the same.

NEARY: Hmm. So remind us, Joe, before we finish this, remind us of just how much this prize is worth.

PALCA: Well, the prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, which is about $1.5 million - U.S. dollars. And there's one other interesting thing about this prize - or at least I thought it was interesting. The prize goes to just one person. The other prizes awarded this week were to teams or groups.

NEARY: Yeah.

PALCA: And I thought that was unusual. But actually, I looked it up, and it turns out that 62 of the chemistry Nobels have gone to just one person. So - or now, 63. So I guess it's something you can do in a solitary way. You don't have to have pals to win the Nobel in chemistry.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

NEARY: OK. Thanks, Joe. NPR's Joe Palca. Thanks so much for being with us.

PALCA: You're welcome.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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Cancer kills Nobel physician before he hears of prize

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Nobel prize for medicine winner Canadian-born Ralph Steinman.

Credit: Reuters/Zach Veilleux/Rockefeller University

By Patrick Lannin and Mia Shanley

STOCKHOLM | Mon Oct 3, 2011 4:16pm EDT

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A scientist who won the Nobel prize for medicine on Monday used his own discoveries to treat himself for cancer, but died of the disease just days before he could be told of the award.

Calling it "bittersweet" news, colleagues of Canadian-born Ralph Steinman at New York's Rockefeller University said he had prolonged his own life with a new therapy based on his prize-winning research into the body's immune system.

The 68-year-old physician, who joked last week with his family about hanging on until the annual prize announcement, died on Friday after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

He never knew his life's work was crowned with the highest accolade science can bestow, becoming the first man in half a century to win a posthumous Nobel prize after a day of confusion in Stockholm, where the Nobel Committee rules have long insisted, in principle, on recognizing only living laureates.

"We wanted him to be here for this," said his daughter Alexis Steinman, 34. "We were like 'OK Dad, I know things aren't going well but the Nobel, they are going to announce it next Monday'. And he's like: 'I know I have got to hold out for that. They don't give it to you if you have passed away.

"'I got to hold out for that.'"

The Nobel Committee spent the morning calling Steinman to offer the traditional congratulations before discovering they faced a "unique" situation. Hours of urgent talks with lawyers on the fate of the prize money, worth three quarters of a million U.S. dollars, finally saw them decide to hand it to Steinman's heirs.

Two other pioneers whose work on the immune system has also driven ground-breaking possibilities for curbing infections and cancers, American Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman from France, shared the other half of the 10 million-crown prize.

"It's really impossible to describe how our family is feeling right now. We're devastated to have lost Ralph," Steinman's son Adam told reporters in New York. "We're so incredibly proud of dad for receiving this wonderful honor ... We know he will live on through his scientific contributions."

Steinman's research contributed to the launch last year of the first vaccine designed to kill tumors.

"BITTERSWEET NEWS"

Colleagues said he was working until his final days.

Admitted to hospital last Sunday, he lost consciousness on Thursday and died surrounded by family the following day. But Rockefeller University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne said the university only heard of his death from the family about half an hour after news of the Nobel prize came out from Sweden.

Nobel Committee secretary general Goran Hansson told Reuters: "I am, of course, saddened that Dr Steinman could not receive this news and feel that happiness.

"He was a great scientist."

After examining a rule which bars giving the prize to the dead, and a second which says a laureate nonetheless keeps the prize if they die between the announcement and the award ceremony held some weeks later, the committee said it found the latter rule to be more fitting to Steinman's case.

"The Nobel Prize shall not deliberately be awarded posthumously. However, the decision to award the Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel laureate was alive," the committee said.

His university said: "Steinman ... was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design."

Those cells, which the Montreal-born Steinman discovered in the 1970s, are vital to the attack the body launches on tumors and infections if they breach its first line of immune defense.

The other prizewinners, Beutler and Hoffmann, studied the first stages of the body's immune responses in the 1990s.

Lars Klareskog, who chairs the Nobel prize panel, said: "I am very excited about what these discoveries mean.

"We will have new, better vaccines against microbes and that is very much needed now with the increased resistance against antibiotics."

Beutler, 53, is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Luxembourg-born Hoffmann, 70, conducted much of his work in Strasbourg.

SELF-Defense

The work of all three prizewinners has been pivotal to the development of improved types of vaccines against infectious diseases and novel approaches to fighting cancer. The research has helped lay the foundations for a new wave of "therapeutic vaccines" that stimulate the immune system to attack tumors.

Better understanding of the complexities of the immune system has also given clues to treating inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, in which the body's defense system ends up attacking its own tissues.

Beutler told Reuters his work "might lead to new treatments for inflammatory and auto-immune disease and possibly new treatments for other kinds of diseases as well."

In the United States, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society said the trio's work "formed the foundation of immunotherapy which holds great promise for the cancer community."

Beutler and Hoffmann discovered in the 1990s that receptor proteins act as a first line of defense, innate immunity, by recognizing bacteria and other microorganisms. Steinman's work, explained how, if required, dendritic cells in the next phase, adaptive immunity, kill off infections that break through.

The research ultimately led to the launch of the first therapeutic cancer vaccine last year, Dendreon's Provenge, which treats men with advanced prostate cancer.

It was unclear how Steinman had treated his own pancreatic cancer -- a notoriously deadly form of the disease. The development of treatments from research can take many years. Former student Michel Nussenzweig said Steinman's discovery was only now reaching that stage after a particular wait.

"No one believed it for a really long time," Nussenzweig said of the work on cells. "His dream was to use his discovery to develop vaccines and it's a dream that's pretty close."

Medicine is usually the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. They were first awarded in 1901 using a bequest from dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

The only previous posthumous awards were to Swedes: poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, for literature, in 1931; and U.N. chief Dag Hammarskjold, given the 1961 peace prize weeks after dying in a plane crash while on a peacemaking mission in Africa.

(Additional reporting by Ben Hirschler in London, Michelle Nichols in New York and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm; writing by Alastair Macdonald; editing by Andrew Roche)

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