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A Queen’s University scientist with close ties to Ottawa has won a Nobel Prize in physics.
The phone rang at Art McDonald’s house in Kingston about 5 a.m. Tuesday. The caller had a Swedish accent, and identified himself as a member of the Nobel committee.
With his wife listening on the extension, the 72-year-old Queen’s University professor spoke to several members of the committee about physics, and then about the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“I had a discussion with Lars Bergstrom (a Swedish physicist) about hockey, and the fact that it would be nice of Mats Sundin still played for the Maple Leafs,” he said Tuesday morning.
Then it was on to business. The news went out to the world at 5:45 a.m. Ontario time, and McDonald was on the phone to talk to reporters at the press conference in Stockholm.
He called the win “a very daunting experience.” But he added that, since he won for leading a large international research group at a lab in Ontario, “I have a group of people with whom I can enjoy the moment.”
McDonald was the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and he shares this year’s prize with Takaaki Kajita of Japan. Both men investigated neutrinos, the most common particles in the universe, but also some of the most mysterious.
Neutrinos are hard to detect because they rarely interact with other matter. Billions of them rush through your body every second, passing through harmlessly.
At Sudbury, McDonald’s international team built a lab to detect neutrinos. They built it two kilometres deep in a nickel mine, where the rock above them would filter out cosmic rays that could interfere with their experiment.
In the mine, they filled a large acrylic sphere with 1,000 tonnes of very pure heavy water. It’s similar to regular water but heavier because some of the hydrogen atoms contain a neutron that normal hydrogen doesn’t have.
And on the rare occasions when a neutrino hits a neutron, it give off a tiny flash that a detector deep under the Sudbury rock can record.
The discovery that neutrinos have mass — doubted for decades — was widely seen as one of the top science stories of 2002, and neutrino research has gone on from there.
McDonald, a Canadian, was teaching at Princeton University in New Jersey when the neutrino project began to take shape in the 1980s.
In 1989, he came to Queen’s on the understanding that he would become the project’s director.
His deputy director was David Sinclair at Carleton University, and Carleton played a major role in the neutrino work.
“He had a really good understanding of how the project should be managed,” Sinclair said Tuesday. “He went about persuading both the scientific and the general community that this was an important experiment that should be done. He provided the overall administration and management.”
Rather than follow every minute detail, McDonald kept his eye on the big goal, recruiting collaborators from around the world, making sire that people took all the necessary steps to get the job done.
“He built the collaboration and directed it through. There were a lot of construction problems and he saw that process through. And the experiment was a great success.”
“We showed that they (neutrinos) have to have mass,” he said. “Neutrinos are by far the most abundant things in the universe, so even a small mass has importance cosmologically.”
The group also traced how neutrinos changed their state — known as changing “flavours” in physics — as they zip from the sun to Earth at nearly light speed.
Sinclair is now head of an extension of the original laboratory called SNOlab.
McDonald has had clues in the past that he might win, though no special rumour this year.
“Reuters put this (project) on the list of possible Nobel Prize winners back in 2007, so it’s something that the (academic) community has been speaking about for quite a few years,” he said.
He said he is “excited certainly, and overwhelmed by the tremendous media attention this is getting. But also somewhat contemplative” about the large number of people who all had a hand in the work at Sudbury.
He will attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Kajita won his share of the prize for his own neutrino research in Japan’s Super-Kamioka (or Super-K) neutrino research lab.
The last Canadian Nobel winner was Alice Munro of Clinton, Ont., who won for literature in 2013.
—
CORRECTION: This story has been updated from a previous version to correct the spelling of Art McDonald’s surname.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
The phone rang at Art McDonald’s house in Kingston about 5 a.m. Tuesday. The caller had a Swedish accent, and identified himself as a member of the Nobel committee.
With his wife listening on the extension, the 72-year-old Queen’s University professor spoke to several members of the committee about physics, and then about the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“I had a discussion with Lars Bergstrom (a Swedish physicist) about hockey, and the fact that it would be nice of Mats Sundin still played for the Maple Leafs,” he said Tuesday morning.
Then it was on to business. The news went out to the world at 5:45 a.m. Ontario time, and McDonald was on the phone to talk to reporters at the press conference in Stockholm.
He called the win “a very daunting experience.” But he added that, since he won for leading a large international research group at a lab in Ontario, “I have a group of people with whom I can enjoy the moment.”
McDonald was the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, and he shares this year’s prize with Takaaki Kajita of Japan. Both men investigated neutrinos, the most common particles in the universe, but also some of the most mysterious.
Neutrinos are hard to detect because they rarely interact with other matter. Billions of them rush through your body every second, passing through harmlessly.
At Sudbury, McDonald’s international team built a lab to detect neutrinos. They built it two kilometres deep in a nickel mine, where the rock above them would filter out cosmic rays that could interfere with their experiment.
In the mine, they filled a large acrylic sphere with 1,000 tonnes of very pure heavy water. It’s similar to regular water but heavier because some of the hydrogen atoms contain a neutron that normal hydrogen doesn’t have.
And on the rare occasions when a neutrino hits a neutron, it give off a tiny flash that a detector deep under the Sudbury rock can record.
The discovery that neutrinos have mass — doubted for decades — was widely seen as one of the top science stories of 2002, and neutrino research has gone on from there.
McDonald, a Canadian, was teaching at Princeton University in New Jersey when the neutrino project began to take shape in the 1980s.
In 1989, he came to Queen’s on the understanding that he would become the project’s director.
His deputy director was David Sinclair at Carleton University, and Carleton played a major role in the neutrino work.
“He had a really good understanding of how the project should be managed,” Sinclair said Tuesday. “He went about persuading both the scientific and the general community that this was an important experiment that should be done. He provided the overall administration and management.”
Rather than follow every minute detail, McDonald kept his eye on the big goal, recruiting collaborators from around the world, making sire that people took all the necessary steps to get the job done.
“He built the collaboration and directed it through. There were a lot of construction problems and he saw that process through. And the experiment was a great success.”
“We showed that they (neutrinos) have to have mass,” he said. “Neutrinos are by far the most abundant things in the universe, so even a small mass has importance cosmologically.”
The group also traced how neutrinos changed their state — known as changing “flavours” in physics — as they zip from the sun to Earth at nearly light speed.
Sinclair is now head of an extension of the original laboratory called SNOlab.
McDonald has had clues in the past that he might win, though no special rumour this year.
“Reuters put this (project) on the list of possible Nobel Prize winners back in 2007, so it’s something that the (academic) community has been speaking about for quite a few years,” he said.
He said he is “excited certainly, and overwhelmed by the tremendous media attention this is getting. But also somewhat contemplative” about the large number of people who all had a hand in the work at Sudbury.
He will attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Kajita won his share of the prize for his own neutrino research in Japan’s Super-Kamioka (or Super-K) neutrino research lab.
The last Canadian Nobel winner was Alice Munro of Clinton, Ont., who won for literature in 2013.
—
CORRECTION: This story has been updated from a previous version to correct the spelling of Art McDonald’s surname.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
