As professors and researchers across the world await the announcement of this year’s Nobel laureates, professors at the University have not only responded with their thoughts, but also have been involved in Nobel research.
The Nobel winners, all of whom were announced by Monday, include six Americans, and University astronomy professor Bradley Schaefer was directly involved in this year’s Nobel prize in physics, won by Saul Perlmutter, Brian G. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess. Schaefer was part of Perlmutter’s research team in the 1970s that made the Nobel-winning discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Schaefer said he is proud to have contributed to the Nobel prize, but the three research team leaders deserve their honor.
“It’s a fantastically important result, and they well deserve their prizes,” Schaefer said.
Michael Cherry, physics department chair, agreed, saying this Nobel result has ignited research about the dark energy in the universe.
“The idea that there’s a whole big piece of the universe that we can’t see, but we know is there, is just tremendously exciting and a challenge,” Cherry said.
The University’s chemistry department also features an X-ray crystallography lab, similar to the one this year’s Israeli Nobel laureate Dan Shechtman used for his discovery of crystals with aperiodic orders instead of typically repeating patterns.
“It made people think differently about how atoms could be arranged in solids,” said Andrew Maverick, Chemistry Department chair. “It was revolutionary in the sense that some people said, ‘No, you must be