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Art McDonald was wearing a suit and looking less than comfortable posing for photo after photo at Carleton University.
“The whole point of being here is to NOT be the star,” Canada’s new Nobel Prize winner said a little plaintively.
“Being here” referred to Carleton University, where the physics department and other well-wishers crowded around the 72-year-old physicist from Queen’s University Thursday morning.
Since winning the Nobel last Tuesday, McDonald has shot from not being well known outside science circles to being a celebrity.
“I did 12 straight hours of interviews on the first day,” he confided. That was Oct. 6, when the Nobel committee phoned him with the dramatic news well before sunrise in Kingston.
Now he is spending a lot of his time deflecting the glory, or trying to. And Carleton has a special place in this.
Carleton was a major participant in the science megaproject that won the Nobel shared by McDonald and Takaaki Kajita of Japan.
Two kilometres underground, in a working Sudbury nickel mine, the team built detectors that can find tiny, mysterious particles shooting out from the sun. The thick rock overhead filters out other cosmic rays but lets these particles — neutrinos — get through.
Scientists weren’t really sure what neutrinos were like — a difficulty, since they are common enough to make up a huge proportion of the matter in the universe.
McDonald summed up the problem for a crowd of 200 Thursday:
“It’s hard to detect neutrinos,” because they rarely interact with other matter, he said.
“They only stop if they hit a nucleus (of an atom) or an electron head-on. For them, matter is open space.”
Neutrinos by the billion are zipping through your body as you read this, almost never hitting anything. (In the rare case where one strikes an electron it is not harmful.)
The key was to build a container with 1,000 tonnes of heavy water (water with extra-dense hydrogen atoms). Neutrinos hitting this would give off a tiny flash of light. And detecting those flashes, which led to analysis of neutrinos, expanded our knowledge of what the universe is made of.
“This project is something that was done by an enormous number of people,” said McDonald. They include the present director of the expanded Sudbury lab, Carleton’s David Sinclair.
Others involved in the multi-year project include the National Research Council and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
For now, there’s a major social whirl for the new prize winner. Scientists all want to meet him, and in December he’ll fly to Sweden, receive his award, and possibly meet the King.
It all sounds formal, but he’s pretty sure the students will have a bash afterward where he’ll be able to loosen his tie and relax.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
“The whole point of being here is to NOT be the star,” Canada’s new Nobel Prize winner said a little plaintively.
“Being here” referred to Carleton University, where the physics department and other well-wishers crowded around the 72-year-old physicist from Queen’s University Thursday morning.
Since winning the Nobel last Tuesday, McDonald has shot from not being well known outside science circles to being a celebrity.
“I did 12 straight hours of interviews on the first day,” he confided. That was Oct. 6, when the Nobel committee phoned him with the dramatic news well before sunrise in Kingston.
Now he is spending a lot of his time deflecting the glory, or trying to. And Carleton has a special place in this.
Carleton was a major participant in the science megaproject that won the Nobel shared by McDonald and Takaaki Kajita of Japan.
Two kilometres underground, in a working Sudbury nickel mine, the team built detectors that can find tiny, mysterious particles shooting out from the sun. The thick rock overhead filters out other cosmic rays but lets these particles — neutrinos — get through.
Scientists weren’t really sure what neutrinos were like — a difficulty, since they are common enough to make up a huge proportion of the matter in the universe.
McDonald summed up the problem for a crowd of 200 Thursday:
“It’s hard to detect neutrinos,” because they rarely interact with other matter, he said.
“They only stop if they hit a nucleus (of an atom) or an electron head-on. For them, matter is open space.”
Neutrinos by the billion are zipping through your body as you read this, almost never hitting anything. (In the rare case where one strikes an electron it is not harmful.)
The key was to build a container with 1,000 tonnes of heavy water (water with extra-dense hydrogen atoms). Neutrinos hitting this would give off a tiny flash of light. And detecting those flashes, which led to analysis of neutrinos, expanded our knowledge of what the universe is made of.
“This project is something that was done by an enormous number of people,” said McDonald. They include the present director of the expanded Sudbury lab, Carleton’s David Sinclair.
Others involved in the multi-year project include the National Research Council and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
For now, there’s a major social whirl for the new prize winner. Scientists all want to meet him, and in December he’ll fly to Sweden, receive his award, and possibly meet the King.
It all sounds formal, but he’s pretty sure the students will have a bash afterward where he’ll be able to loosen his tie and relax.
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
