British scientists ‘stumble on their discoveries’ and win Nobel Prize
Print Edition
BRITISH-BORN scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz have won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for studies on exotic matter that could result in improved materials for electronics or quantum computers.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the laureates’ work in the 1970s and 80s opened the door to a previously unknown world where matter takes unusual states or phases.
“Their discoveries have brought about breakthroughs in the theoretical understanding of matter’s mysteries and created new perspectives on the development of innovative materials.”
Thouless, 82, is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Haldane, 65, is a physics professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. Kosterlitz, 73, is a physics professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Speaking by a phone link to a news conference in Stockholm, Haldane said he was “very surprised and very gratified” by the award, adding that the laureates stumbled on their discoveries.
“Most of the big discoveries are really that way,” he said. “At least in theoretical things, you never set out to discover something new. You stumble on it and you have the luck to recognize what you’ve found is something very interesting.”
Kosterlitz, currently a visiting professor at Aalto University in Helsinki, said: “I’m a little bit dazzled. I’m still trying to take it in.”
While most people are familiar with objects in three dimensions, the Nobel laureates analyzed materials so thin they have only two dimensions, or even one.
Scientists had once been skeptical that any interesting atomic-scale behavior takes place in these settings, but the Nobel laureates proved them wrong, said Phillip Schewe, a physicist and writer at the University of Maryland.
For example, Kosterlitz and Thouless showed that, against expectations, two-dimensional materials could conduct electricity without any loss to resistance. That property is called superconductivity.
Kosterlitz said he was in his 20s at the time and that his “complete ignorance” was an advantage in challenging the established science because “I didn’t have any preconceived ideas.”
Their analysis relied on topology, which is the mathematical study of properties that don’t change when objects are distorted. A doughnut and a coffee cup are equivalent topologically because they each have exactly one hole. In topology, properties change only in whole steps; you can’t have half a hole.
Prize committee member Thor Hans Hansson explained the concept by holding up a cinnamon bun, a bagel and a pretzel with two holes in it to reporters in Stockholm.
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