Who are the 2007 Nobel Prize Winners?

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics

"for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance"

Two men share this prize, Albert Fert of the Université Paris-Sud; Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES in Orsay France, and Peter Grünberg of the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.

Giant Magnetoresistance sounds like something that a villain from a James Bond film would use to attempt to take over the world. In fact, you’re probably sitting close to an applied use of Fert and Grünberg’s discovery right now. Your computer hard disk, or another kind of portable hard disk, your iPod music player.

If you could zoom in very close and see the data on your hard disk, you would realise that it is made of tiny dots. The difference between where a dot is located is measured by reading how much electrical resistance is located at any particular location. Fert and Grünberg realised that not only could they make the magnetic dots smaller, but they could create a much higher magnetic resistance than ever possible. And so amongst other technologies based on giant magnetoresistance we have much smaller hard disks, which can contain more information.

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature

"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

British writer Doris Lessing has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah Iran in 1919 – but moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925. She left school at 13 and continued her own education by reading politics and sociology material.

Lessing has published more than 50 novels with major themes examining issues from politics through to psychology and mysticism – as well as experimenting with new literary forms and the science fiction genre. Her novel ‘The Golden Notebook’ is considered by many academics as being a feminist classic.

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

"for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces"

German scientist Gerhard Ertl of Berlin’s Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft is the winner of the 2007 Prize in Chemistry.

Chemical reactions on surfaces are involved in processes ranging from rust on iron, catalytic convertors in cars, manufacturing computer chips and the production of nitrogen for soil fertilisers. Gerhard Ertl has produced an extremely valuable methodology for understanding how surfaces react in the way that they do at an atomic and molecular level.

Ertl appears to be a wonderful example how science is composed of a sequence of small steps, careful thinking and a willingness to go back and challenge assumptions.

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"

Three men share the 2007 Prize in Economic Sciences, Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota Minneapolis USA, Eric S. Maskin of Princeton USA’s Institute for Advanced Study and Roger B. Myerson of the University of Chicago USA.

The 2007 award has gone to the three researchers who have been hugely innovative and formative in the development of Mechanism Design Theory.

The work of Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson is based upon producing a mathematical description which is used to describe social processes (mechanisms) such as elections or public auctions. Their framework allows for the exploration of possible mechanisms such as voting or bidding schemes – and demonstrating which should produce the best result for society.

What would Albert Nobel think of our world today?

Some believe that Nobel was motivated to donate his estate to the prize fund by a mistakenly published obituary of his own death in an 1888 French Newspaper. ‘The merchant of death is dead!’ the obituary claimed.

Perhaps, the false obituary did motivate Nobel – or perhaps he already had a belief that somehow, science and technology could end wars. Two years later in 1891, Nobel is documented as commenting that ‘…on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops." He believed that the power of the dynamite based technology which he was working with would soon result in the refusal of nations to engage in it.

Almost certainly, Alfred Nobel didn’t foresee World War I. And doubtless, he would have been horrified to find that after 40 million people lost their lives in the earlier conflict, that twenty years later, another 60 million would be lost during World War II.

Far from the mutual annihilation of two army corps , which was unacceptable to Nobel in 1891, it is estimated that 70,000 people died instantly in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki – and the same number again in the days and months afterwards.

While Nobel believed that science alone could make a better world, it appears that knowledge does not arrive hand in hand with wisdom.

For more information

The Nobel Foundation
http://www.nobelprize.org

The Nobel Peace Prize
http://nobelpeaceprize.org/