For condensed-matter physicists, the year 2011 was a very special one. It marked the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity, one of the most fascinating topics in quantum physics and still one of the most studied. When certain materials—for example, aluminum and lead—are cooled to nearly absolute zero, they suddenly conduct electricity perfectly, with no resistance. Superconductors also expel magnetic fields, a property that causes magnets to levitate on top of superconductors. Even more fascinating, under certain conditions, the magnet becomes “pinned” to the superconductor. In that case, it can either levitate above the superconductor or remain suspended below it.

The superconductivity that kicks in at very low temperature was explained in the 1960s by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer with what is now called the BCS model. However, more recently discovered families of superconductors conduct perfectly at temperatures up to 10 times that of the usual metals. The BCS model does not seem to apply to those high-temperature superconductors, hence the continuing research. Ultimately, physicists hope to discover a material that superconducts at room temperature.

As part of the centenary celebration, the French research agency CNRS asked researchers in the field to introduce superconductivity to the greater public. We were immediately enthusiastic, but two worries soon came to mind: Isn’t quantum physics too complex to be explained to the general public? And in any case, are people really interested? Some public relations experts warned us that fundamental physics is not as appealing as it used to be. Now, they said, is the time to be talking about neurology or climatology. Interest in physics relates only to applications and new technologies.

Despite those warnings, we spent a year trying to show and explain superconductivity and quantum physics in a great variety of places and to all kinds of people—teenagers, younger children, students, parents, artists, journalists, and more. And we used all sorts of means, including websites, exhibits, movies, YouTube, live demonstrations, conferences, and science fairs. What we discovered was a surprise to most of us.

Bad news first

One lesson we learned was that if you stick to conventional outreach tools and actions, you will end up with a conventional outreach public, namely, people already interested in and familiar with science. We developed pedagogical exhibits and movies to explain superconductivity, a flyer, demonstrations, and even a website. Such content was useful for teachers and students in an academic setting, but it did not work that well for the general public. Our 10-panel exhibit with photos and images was a great decoration in science museums, science fairs, and school halls, but people did not actually spend time reading the content beyond the introductory panel. Our information-packed website attracts about 300 new visitors daily, but the average visiting time is less than 2 minutes. The 11-minute movie we made is just too long for people now used to YouTube videos. We realized too late that the internet has profoundly changed peoples’ capacity to focus and read for more than a minute. Or perhaps people have long had a minuscule attention span.

A second bit of bad news is that outreach conferences do not reach a wide public. We organized many conferences all over France with well-trained, animated speakers who presented great slides and even live experiments. The rooms were often full of enthusiastic participants. But we discovered that the audience was mostly composed of the speakers’ colleagues and their families, engineers, physics students, and retired scientists—essentially scientifically literate people already convinced of the importance of fundamental physics.

Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

Chris Hedges, "We Are All Aboard the Pequod"

Houston Chronicle: Texas lawmakers on Tuesday began weighing changes to the state’s high school graduation requirements to give students more flexibility in which courses they must take.

A closely watched bill by Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, would change the default graduation plan so students would not necessarily have to take four years of English, math, science and social studies. Instead, they could specialize in areas such as arts and humanities or science, technology, engineering and math.

“My focus is to help stem the dropout rate,” Patrick said during a meeting Tuesday, explaining that students would be able to take more courses that interest them.

Lake Houston Observer: Assessments in Algebra II, geometry, English III, chemistry, physics, world geography, and world history have been eliminated from the testing requirements. As a result, the July 2013 STAAR administration will not include assessments for these courses. End-of-course assessments will continue to be offered in Algebra I, English I, English II, biology, and U.S. history.

Texas is a large market due to its sheer size. Thus, a lot of other states emulate them; based their textbook purchase decisions on what they deem are deliberative, informed educational moves.

This was alerted to me by a friend on Facebook. My description/reaction is as follows:

"So, biology only is going to help us design an I-phone? Ye gods, we are destroyed by ideology, lunacy and idiocy! The only "logic" I can see in this: physics and chemistry would destroy their creationist/intelligent design garbage narrative I've read they're trying to get in textbooks K-12. Texas influences a lot of education markets nationally that assume it following a rational course, which this is NOT."

We seem all firmly aboard the Pequod, 'tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine' (Ephesians 4:14); the ship of fools captained by a 1% Ahab fighting against the forces of nature and common sense. Anything that should be eliminated is the testing-industrial-complex, not science in an ever-increasing; ever-complicated world. We need more scientists, mathematicians, engineers and technologists with an appreciation for written discourse, geography and history; more importantly: a citizenry that appreciates these subjects and informed enough to demand such from its leaders and hold them accountable. A canyon gap between 1 and 99% will soon be an untraversable chasm. I do not see a stable society emerging from this Phoenix's ashes.

Controversies are manufactured to keep us divided: "Smokey James: ['Blue Collar' voice over echoing earlier line] They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place." A fill-in-the-blank modern extrapolation is pretty simple.

Chris Hedges opined on climate change, which takes an appreciation of science. The conclusions of science have long been opposed since Galileo as it destroys the narrative of authoritarians in sheep and shepherds' clothing (Canis Lupus would be too obvious), more driven by their warped sense of order and power than any concern...as sociopaths lack empathy nor real concern for the well-being of their fellow humankind, spiritual and scientific efficacy in this country.

Shoulders thrown into the effort of rowing; brine spraying our collective faces, we steady our feet above deck as someone shouts:

"There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"

"Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence."

"From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

"Ignorance is the parent of fear."

There she blows, a great force of nature and alas, we cannot all be Ishmael...

Luis F. Leloir

Born: 6 September 1906, Paris, France

Died: 2 December 1987, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Affiliation at the time of the award: Institute for Biochemical Research, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Prize motivation: "for his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates"

Field: Biochemistry

Luis F. Leloir was born in Paris of Argentine parents on September 6, 1906 and has lived in Buenos Aires since he was two years old. He graduated as a Medical Doctor in the University of Buenos Aires in 1932 and started his scientific career at the Institute of Physiology working with Professor Bernardo A. Houssay on the role of the adrenalin carbohydrate metabolism. In 1936 he worked at the Biochemical Laboratory of Cambridge, England, which was directed by Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. There he collaborated with Malcom Dixon, N.L. Edson and D.E. Green. On returning to Buenos Aires he worked with J.M. Muñoz on the oxidation of fatty acids in liver, and also together with E. Braun Menéndez, J.C. Fasciolo and A.C. Taquini on the formation of angiotensin. In 1944 he was Research Assistant in Dr. Carl F. Cori's laboratory in St. Louis, United States and thereafter worked with D.E. Green in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York. Since then he has been Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas, Fundación Campomar. With his early collaborators, Ranwel Caputto, Carlos E. Cardini, Raúl Trucco and Alejandro C. Paladini work was started on the metabolism of galactose which led to the isolation of glucose 1,6-diphosphate and uridine diphosphate glucose. The latter substance was then found to act as glucose donor in the synthesis of trehalose (with Enrico Cabib, 1953 ) and sucrose (with Carlos E. Cardini and J.Chiriboga, 1955). Other sugar nucleotides such as uridine diphosphate acetylglucosamine and guanosine diphosphate mannose were also isolated. Further work showed that uridine diphosphate glucose is involved in glycogen synthesis and adenosine diphosphate glucose in that of starch.

Bernardo Alberto Houssay

Born: 10 April 1887, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Died: 21 September 1971, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Affiliation at the time of the award: Instituto de Biologia y Medicina Experimental (Institute for Biology and Experimental Medicine), Buenos Aires, Argentina

Prize motivation: "for his discovery of the part played by the hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe in the metabolism of sugar"

Bernardo Alberto Houssay was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 10, 1887, one of the eight children of Dr. Albert and Clara (née Laffont) Houssay, who had come to Argentina from France. His father was a barrister. His early education was at a private school, the Colegio Británico. He then entered the School of Pharmacy of the University of Buenos Aires at the exceptionally early age of 14, graduating in 1904. He had already begun studying medicine and, in 1907, before completing his studies, he took up a post in the Department of Physiology. He began here his research on the hypophysis which resulted in his M.D.-thesis (1911), a thesis which earned him a University prize.

In 1910 he was appointed Professor of Physiology in the University's School of Veterinary Medicine. During this time he had been doing hospital practice and, in 1913, became Chief Physician at the Alvear Hospital. In addition to this he was also in charge of the Laboratory of Experimental Physiology and Pathology in the National Department of Hygiene from 1915 to 1919. In 1919 he became Professor of Physiology in the Medical School at Buenos Aires University. He also organized the Institute of Physiology at the Medical School, making it a centre with an international reputation. He remained Professor and Director of the Institute until 1943. In this year the Government then in power deprived him of his post, as a result of his voicing his opinion that there should be effective democracy in the country. Although receiving many invitations from abroad, he continued his work in an institute which he organized with the support of funds contributed by the Sauberan Foundation and other bodies. This was the Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental, where he still remains as Director. In 1955 a new Government reinstated him in the University.

I almost hesitate to post it because many who do not "believe in the Big Bang Theory" will shout: aha! I say: ah, science - self-examining, exploring; learning more tomorrow than we thought we knew yesterday. Quantum mechanics had its trials and tribulations: Weins Law, Rayleigh-Jeans Law and the "ultraviolet catastrophe" eventually getting to Max Planck (of Planck's constant) and light seen as quanta. This eventually led to Einstein and the photoelectric effect in his Annus mirabilis papers generated in a lowly patent office in Munich. Thus we have the Internet, I-phones, flat screens, etc.

This description matches some of the wording I've seen over the years of the "universe as hologram" and admittedly either didn't understand or regarded as new age mystic pop culture. This challenge will have to be peer-reviewed and experiments performed to verify. Stay tuned...

However, Pluto is still not a planet.

A few nine-year-olds will send me hate mail now...

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

It is also difficult to explain how a violent Big Bang would have left behind a Universe that has an almost completely uniform temperature, because there does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium.

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.

The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.

Baruj Benacerraf

Born: 29 October 1920, Caracas, Venezuela

Died: 2 August 2011, Boston, MA, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Prize motivation: "for their discoveries concerning genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions"

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 29, 1920 of Spanish-Jewish ancestry. My father, a self-made business man, was a textile merchant and importer. He was born in Spanish Morocco, whereas my mother was born and raised in French Algeria and brought up in the French culture. When I was five years old, my family moved to Paris where we resided until 1939. My primary and secondary education was in French which had a lasting influence on my life. The second World War caused our return to Venezuela, where my father continued to have a thriving business. It was decided that I should pursue my education in the United States, and we moved to New York in 1940. I registered at Columbia University in the School of General Studies, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in 1942, having also completed the pre-medical requisites for admission to Medical School. By that time, I had elected to study biology and medicine, instead of going into the family business, as my father would have wanted. I did not realize, however, that admission to Medical School was a formidable undertaking for someone with my ethnic and foreign background in the United States of 1942. In spite of an excellent academic record at Columbia, I was refused admission by the numerous medical schools I applied to and would have found it impossible to study medicine except for the kindness and support of George W. Bakeman, father of a close friend, who was then Assistant to the President of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. Learning of my difficulties, Mr. Bakeman arranged for me to be interviewed and considered for one of the two remaining places in the Freshman class. I was accepted and began my medical studies in July 1942. While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students, as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943 I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented. I received what I considered to be an excellent medical education in the relatively short time of three war years.

ARGONNE, Ill. – Just like people, materials can sometimes exhibit “multiple personalities.” This kind of unusual behavior in a certain class of materials has compelled researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory to take a closer look at the precise mechanisms that govern the relationships between superconductivity and magnetism.

Previous measurements of magnetic and electronic properties in these superconducting oxide materials relied on aggregate or “bulk” measurements of a large area. By using advanced scanning tunneling microscopy at the laboratory’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne physicist John Freeland and materials scientist Nathan Guisinger were able to develop a clearer picture of the physical and chemical behavior of boundary regions within the material.

According to Guisinger, the most important regions of study in oxide superconductors are the boundaries or interfaces.

“You can think of the sample as kind of like lasagna,” Guisinger said. “There are layers within it that have different properties, and we want to see if the ‘cheese’ in one section mixes with the ‘sauce’ in another.”

Born: 13 June 1911, San Francisco, CA, USA

Died: 1 September 1988, Berkeley, CA, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

Prize motivation: "for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis"

Field: Particle physics

Luis W. Alvarez was born in San Francisco, Calif., on June 13, 1911. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Chicago in 1932, a M.Sc. in 1934, and his Ph.D. in 1936. Dr. Alvarez joined the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, where he is now a professor, as a research fellow in 1936. He was on leave at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1940 to 1943, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1943-1944, and at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan District from 1944 to 1945.

Early in his scientific career, Dr. Alvarez worked concurrently in the fields of optics and cosmic rays. He is co-discoverer of the "East-West effect" in cosmic rays. For several years he concentrated his work in the field of nuclear physics. In 1937 he gave the first experimental demonstration of the existence of the phenomenon of K-electron capture by nuclei. Another early development was a method for producing beams of very slow neutrons. This method subsequently led to a fundamental investigation of neutron scattering in ortho- and para-hydrogen, with Pitzer, and to the first measurement, with Bloch, of the magnetic moment of the neutron. With Wiens, he was responsible for the production of the first 198Hg lamp; this device was developed by the Bureau of Standards into its present form as the universal standard of length. Just before the war, Alvarez and Cornog discovered the radioactivity of ³H (tritium) and showed that ³He was a stable constituent of ordinary helium. (Tritium is best known as a source of thermonuclear energy, and ³He has become of importance in low temperature research.)

Contrary to classical mechanics, quantum physics states that a particle can act like a wave and vice versa – an idea that was first proposed by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Louis de Broglie back in 1923. While the idea that tiny particles such as electrons could behave like a wave came as a shock, scientists now know that even objects a million times more massive than electrons, such as complex molecules, also show quantum interference. Massive molecules have very small wavelengths and therefore a grating with extremely thin and closely spaced slits is needed to observe their diffraction. Currently, such sophisticated devices are specially fabricated using nanotechnology techniques.