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$3 Million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics Awarded to Steven Weinberg

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SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The Selection Committee of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics today announced a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for Steven Weinberg, commending his “continuous leadership in fundamental physics, with broad impact across particle physics, gravity and cosmology, and for communicating science to a wider audience.”

Weinberg, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, will be recognized at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, along with the annual winners of the Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, Mathematics and Fundamental Physics. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s ceremony has been postponed until March 2021.

Juan Maldacena, the chair of the Selection Committee, said, “Steven Weinberg has developed many of the key theoretical tools that we use for the description of nature at a fundamental level.”

Steven Weinberg is one of the key architects of the Standard Model, one of the most successful physical theories ever,” said Yuri Milner, one of the founders of the Breakthrough Prizes. “He also provided deep insights across the range of subjects in fundamental physics.”

Symmetry Breaking and the Standard Model

There are four known fundamental forces of nature: electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. Early in his career, Weinberg made important contributions to understanding the dynamics of the strong nuclear force, as well as to “soft theorems” that describe electromagnetic and gravitational interactions with very low energy or momentum.

But his single greatest contribution was to the genesis of the Standard Model of particle physics—the description of three of the forces (electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces) in terms of quantum field theory. In 1967, Weinberg was the first to show that the notion of spontaneousgaugesymmetry breaking could be applied to the weak nuclear force. Symmetry breaking is the idea that what appear as disparate phenomena are actually manifestations of an underlying unity, which when tipped past a critical point is “broken” into a non-symmetric state. Weinberg’s theory unified the weak force with electromagnetism, showing that they are manifestations of a single phenomenon. The currently accepted hypothesis is that the “electroweak” symmetry was broken within the first second after the big bang, after which electromagnetism and the weak force were two separate forces.

Other researchers, including in particular Sheldon Glashow, who had been Weinberg’s classmate at the Bronx High School of Science in 1950s, had proposed a theory of the weak nuclear force—the force responsible for radioactive decay—in which it is mediated by a massive particle, today called the W boson. However, this theory had some mathematical problems, preventing accurate quantum computations. Weinberg’s theory would eventually turn out to avoid these problems. Once the weak neutral current was discovered, Weinberg’s theory accurately predicted the masses of the W and Z bosons, which were discovered at CERN in the 1980s.

Moreover, Weinberg’s theory predicted the existence of a new particle, the Higgs particle.

Peter Higgs and other researchers had investigated what are now called Higgs fields in their work on the strong interactions. It was Weinberg who understood that these ideas should be applied to the weak interactions instead, and who predicted a weakly interacting Higgs particle—the particle which was eventually discovered at CERN in 2012. Moreover, it was Weinberg who used gauge symmetry breaking to account for the masses of elementary fermions, such as electrons. Later this idea was extended to quarks. Weinberg’s success in applying nonabelian gauge theory to understand the weak interactions had an enormous influence on the effort to understand the strong nuclear force, and thus to the construction of the full Standard Model as it is today.

A similar proposal concerning the electroweak interactions was independently made by Abdus Salam. Weinberg, Glashow and Salam shared the Nobel Prize in 1979.

Other work

While his contribution to the genesis of the Standard Model has undoubtedly been Weinberg’s greatest single achievement, he has made numerous other significant contributions to fundamental physics, and would be a recognized leader in the field even if he had not made this particular contribution.

These include a fundamental calculation, with Howard Georgi and Helen Quinn, extrapolating from the known particle forces to estimate the energy scale at which a unification of all particle interactions—including the strong nuclear force and gravity—might occur. This computation has been highly influential. Weinberg had the very simple yet fundamental idea that some of the approximate symmetries appearing in particles and spacetime are low-energy “accidents” that follow from the structure of the Standard Model. This way of thinking had a partial confirmation in later discoveries about neutrinos, and an apparent exception to it was a motivation for the prediction of the axion, a leading candidate for dark matter that Weinberg (and, independently, Frank Wilczek) proposed in 1977.

In cosmology, among other insights he was one of the first to seriously study quantum field theory at high temperature, and he was perhaps the first to fully understand the physics involved in the spontaneous production of baryons (the building blocks of atomic nuclei), in particular the fact that this effect is proportional to the expansion rate of the Universe. This proved essential in the development of the theory of cosmic inflation—the most widely accepted current theory of the early Universe, to which Weinberg has also been an important contributor. One of his most provocative ideas has concerned the extreme smallness of the cosmological constant—the energy density of empty space, which is the leading candidate for the dark energy causing the Universe’s expansion to accelerate. At a time when, observationally, the cosmological constant appeared to be precisely zero, Weinberg argued that a very small but nonzero cosmological constant would be naturally expected in an “anthropic” view of the Universe. In this view, the cosmos extends far beyond what we see, with different elementary particles and forces in different regions. We inevitably live where the expansion of the Universe is not too violent, because elsewhere any complex structure would be ripped apart. This view, though it remains speculative, received dramatic support a little over 20 years ago when it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe is indeed accelerating.

Books

As well as being one of the most important and productive physicists of his generation, Weinberg has been a major influence on succeeding generations through his teaching and his meticulously written textbooks. Numerous physicists, including some of the greatest working today, have learned General Relativity, cosmology and quantum field theory from these works, which include Gravitation and Cosmology, Cosmology and The Quantum Theory of Fields. His latest technical book is Lectures on Astrophysics.

Alongside his scientific books and articles, he has also written bestselling popular books, which explain the deepest ideas in science with exceptional clarity and readability. They include The First Three Minutes, Dreams of a Final Theory, and his recent To Explain the World, a fresh account of the history of science.

Science advocacy

For decades, Weinberg has been a highly visible public spokesman for science and rationality. In his articles, especially for the New York Review of Books, he has communicated to the public not only the profound ideas of theoretical physics, but the importance of the scientific worldview and the broader meaning of science in human culture.

Weinberg’s 1993 testimony before the United States Congress in support of the Superconducting Super Collider is an iconic defense of the societal worth of fundamental science not just for technological progress but for the intrinsic value of the pursuit of knowledge.

2020 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Steven Weinberg

The University of Texas at Austin

Citation: For continuous leadership in fundamental physics, with broad impact across particle physics, gravity and cosmology, and for communicating science to a wider audience.

Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

A Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics can be awarded by the Selection Committee at any time, and in addition to the annual Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics awarded through the public nomination process. The Special Prize is not limited to recent discoveries.

This is the sixth Special Prize awarded: previous winners are Stephen Hawking; seven CERN scientists whose leadership led to the discovery of the Higgs boson; the entire LIGO collaboration that detected gravitational waves; Jocelyn Bell Burnell for her discovery of pulsars; and Sergio Ferrara, Daniel Freedman and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen for their theory of Supergravity.

The Selection Committee for the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics includes: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Charles Bennett, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Sheperd Doeleman, Michael Green, Alan Guth, Joseph Incandela, Charles Kane, Alexei Kitaev, Andrei Linde, Arthur McDonald, Eugene Mele, Juan Maldacena, Lyman Page, Saul Perlmutter, Alexander Polyakov, Adam Riess, John Schwarz, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen, David Spergel, Andrew Strominger, Kip Thorne, Cumrun Vafa, Yifang Wang, Rainer Weiss and Edward Witten.

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognizes individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge. It is open to all physicists—theoretical, mathematical and experimental—working on the deepest mysteries of the Universe. The prize can be shared among any number of scientists.

Breakthrough Prize

For the ninth year the Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars of Science,” will recognize the world’s top scientists. Each prize is $3 million and presented in the fields of Life Sciences (up to four per year), Fundamental Physics (one per year) and Mathematics (one per year). In addition, up to three New Horizons in Physics Prizes, up to three New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes and up to three Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes are given out to early-career researchers each year. Laureates attend a live televised award ceremony designed to celebrate their achievements and inspire the next generation of scientists. As part of the ceremony schedule, they also engage in a program of lectures and discussions.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. The Prizes have been sponsored by the personal foundations established by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma, Yuri and Julia Milner and Anne Wojcicki. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners. Information is available at breakthroughprize.org.

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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