Nobel Pursuits: Decades of Wisdom from Prize-winning Physicists (preview)

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The tools of science have changed since the golden age of physics, but many of the same questions remain

By John Matson and Ferris Jabr ?| June 28, 2012?|

Image: John Hendrix

In Brief

• An annual gathering in Lindau, Germany, brings together promising early-career scientists and veteran Nobel Prize winners in their field. This year's meeting focuses on physics.
• In honor of the Lindau meeting, Scientific American has collected 12 articles from the magazine's archive, excerpted here, written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• Some of the excerpts recount prize-winning discoveries, some speculate on the future of physics and some address eternal questions: What is the universe made of? And are we alone in it?
• Even though some of the articles excerpted here were first published many decades ago, a surprising number remain relevant to the ongoing investigations of modern physicists.

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Every summer nobel laureates converge on Lindau, Germany, to share their wisdom with, and to learn from, up-and-coming scientists hailing from many corners of the globe. This year the 62nd meeting focuses on physics. In honor of that event, the two of us have selected excerpts from some of the most fascinating articles that Nobel winners have published in the magazine over the years, on topics ranging from cosmology to particle physics to technology.

As we gathered these selections, which begin on the opposite page, we were struck anew by the way the problems that puzzled physicists decades ago continue to drive research today. Yes, the field has changed since the days of Albert Einstein, P.A.M. Dirac and Enrico Fermi. Physicists have made vast leaps (such as constructing and honing the Standard Model of particle physics) and encountered strange turns (such as dark energy). Yet many of the questions being tackled now are the same, at root, as those that have spurred research throughout the past century?among them: Why is matter so much more abundant than antimatter? Does the Higgs boson, widely believed to account for the mass of subatomic particles, truly exist? And what does ?spooky action at a distance? betray about the workings of the world?

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