Early Tuesday morning, three physicists—James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz—were rewarded for decades seminal contributions to advancing science with a phone call from Stockholm. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.”
Our world is governed by general relativity, which sees gravity as the effects of massive objects warping space-time. The world of particle physics, on the other hand, envisions all forces as mediated by force-carrying particles — and ignores gravity entirely. This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to three theorists who proposed a way to marry these contradictory descriptions: with a theory called “supergravity.”
From CNN, Sept. 14, 2018: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln writes about Jocelyn Bell Burnell winning the Breakthrough Prize.
From The New York Times, Oct. 4, 2016: Fermilab congratulates scientists David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for winning the Nobel Prize for their discoveries in condensed-matter physics.
Helen Edwards, whose work in the early days of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is a foundation of past, present and future scientific achievements, and whose current work is helping shape the next generation of particle accelerators, has been awarded the 2003 Robert R. Wilson Prize by the American Physical Society.