The Kenyan link to the Nobel Prize for Physics
Riccardo Giacconi shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physics for discoveries that involved the Uhuru satellite which was launched from the San Marco launch pad in Malindi, Kenya on December 12, 1970. GRAPHIC | MICHAEL MOSOTA | NATION NEWSPLEX
What you need to know:
- Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton who was the first man in history to split the atom, was born 112 years ago today in Ireland.
- In 2014, half the Nobel Prize for medicine was shared by May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for discovering “cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”.
- One person, John Bardeen has won the Nobel Prize for Physics twice, in 1956 and 1972.
On October 6, the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics was jointly awarded to Takaki Kajiita from Tokyo University and Arthur B. Macdonald from Queen’s University in Canada. On this date, two physics Nobel Laureates were born.
One of them, Riccardo Giacconi, has a connection to Kenya. According his Nobel Prize biography, and information from Harvard University, Giacconi with colleagues, devised and led the implementation for Uhuru, the first satellite in the world launched for x-ray astronomy, earlier in his career.
In his Nobel Lecture, Gaccioni recalled building the satellite and how it improved the team's research. "UHURU was a small satellite which we had labored over at AS&E for seven years between conception, development, testing, and integration. It was the first observatory entirely dedicated to x-ray astronomy and it extended the time of observation from minutes to years or by 5 orders of magnitude", he wrote.
Gerti was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for medicine, and the Cori Crater on the moon and on the planet Venus are named after her.
According to Nasa, Uhuru was launched on the seventh anniversary of Kenya’s independence, on 12 December, 1970, from the Luigi Broglio Space Centre, near Malindi, Kenya. The mission ended after more than two years, in March 1973. The space centre is run by the San Marco Project Research Centre, affiliated with the University of Rome.
Giacconi, who was born in Italy on October 6, 1931, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002, jointly with Raymond Davis Jr and Masatoshi Toshiba, for advances in astrophysics, or the branch of physics concerned with the origin and evolution of bodies in space such as stars and planets.
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Another Laureate, Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, who was the first man in history to split the atom, was born 112 years ago today in Ireland. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 jointly with John Cockcroft. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1931 under the supervision of Ernest Rutherford, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908.
Also born on this date was Mario Capecci who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology of Medicine and Physiology in 2007 for creating a method through which “knockout mice”, or mice in which certain genes could be turned off, could be produced. Dr Capecci shared the award with Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies.
PRIZE-WINNING COUPLES
Although the new Physics Laureates are not related, family relationships have featured prominently in Nobel Prize history.
Four couples have shared a Nobel Prize. In 1903, Marie Marie Curie and her husband Pierre won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, and eight years later, Marie Curie won another in 1911 for Chemistry, this time singly.
Their daughter, Irene Joliot Curie, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with her husband, Frederick Joliot in 1935.
Another couple, Gerti and Carl Cori won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1947 for discovering how glycogen, which comes from glucose, is broken down and stored, in the Cori cycle. Gerti was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for medicine, and the Cori Crater on the moon and on the planet Venus are named after her.
In 2014, half the Nobel Prize for medicine was shared by May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for discovering “cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”, according to the Nobel citation.
A third couple, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, are the only couple to have won both science and non-science Nobel Prizes, Nation Newsplex has found.
Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 1974. Over a distinguished career, Alva Mrydal served as a Swedish diplomat and cabinet Minister.
She won the Nobel Prize for Peace for her work in convincing the superpowers to disarm during the Cold War, including fighting for nuclear weapon-free zone in Europe.
34 PRIZES FOR PARTICLE PHYSICS
Other relationships featuring Nobel winners include father-son pairs and two siblings. In 1906, John Joseph Thompson won the Nobel Prize for Physics, for among other things, his discovery of the electron. His son, George Paget Thomson, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics 31 years later, proved that in addition to being a particle, the electron also had wave-like properties.
The numbers of Physics Laureates in different age brackets. GRAPHIC | THE NOBEL PRIZE
The Physics award today means that 11 Laureates in Physics and 23 in total were born in Japan, while four Laureates in Physics and 18 in total were born in Canada. Satoshi Omura, who shared half the 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday, was also born in Japan.
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for research into neutrinos. Neutrinos “are subatomic particles produced by the decay of radioactive elements and are elementary particles that lack an electric charge,” according to the Chemistry Department at the University of Wisconsin.
Although only two prizes have been won for research in neutrino astrophysics according to the Nobel Prize web site, 34 prizes, the most in the field, have been won in the broader field of particle physics in which neutrinos also belong.
One person, John Bardeen, has won the Nobel Prize for Physics twice, in 1956 and 1972.
