A hat-trick of Nobels

Link: The Sceptical Chymist: Eyes on the prize.

The third Nobel prize in the basic scientists is given for chemistry. This year's award is to a single recipient, Gerhard Ertl, according to Andy Mitchison of Sceptical Chymist blog and an associate editor at Nature (link above) "one of the fathers of the area, famous for his seminal work on hydrogen adsorption to metal surfaces, the mechanism of the Haber-Bosch process and the oxidation of carbon monoxide on platinum". Here is the Nobel foundation's summary of Ertl's work.

Andy goes on to ruminate: "I’ll be curious to see how much coverage the chemistry prize gets in the national press [tomorrow morning]. The prize for medicine certainly attracted a lot of attention in the UK (but of course, one of the prizewinners was a Brit). The physics prize seems to have had less coverage, despite being branded as “The Physics of the iPod”. This year’s chemistry prize has perhaps the most obvious real-world relevance of recent Nobel awards for the subject - but will that be enough to inspire the press?"

There is a bit more updated chat about the Nobels at The Great Beyond, the Nature news blog.

Comments

[Peter]

If my comment here has any interest, it is due to my dismal ignorance. I've compared the three news stories with which my paper announced the Nobel Prizes physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry for the degree to which they made the relevant science comprehensible.

The medicine-prize story did a good job and the chemistry prize a fair one of explaining the winning research. But I read the physics story and understood nothing. Do dopes like me generally find it harder to understand physics than the other sciences? (As in all such cases, of course, the fault lies at least in part with the writer who failed to make the subject comprehensible.)
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

[Maxine]

I think that the physics prize has been very poorly presented, because of the spin the Nobel foundation put on the announcement, dragging in the iPOD. What have iPODs got to do with hard disks? I think a lot of the coverage has focused on the iPOD application, instead of the basic discovery itself, which has resulted in confusion.
Here is Nature's take, don't know if it is any clearer (iPODs come into it, but not till near the end):

Two researchers who discovered an effect that has dramatically shrunk the size of magnetic storage devices have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Albert Fert of the University of Paris-South in France and Peter Grünberg of Jülich Research Centre in Germany split the prize for their 1988 discovery of an effect called giant magnetoresistance (GMR). The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award on 9 October in Stockholm.
The effect has been heralded as one of the first major applications of the fields of nanotechnology and 'spintronics'.
"I am so proud and so happy," Fert said in a press conference via telephone from France. "Science is something marvellous."
At the heart of GMR are the spins of electrons, which generate a magnetic field and can be aligned either up or down. An electron can easily pass through a material whose electrons are similarly aligned, but will encounter resistance when it passes through one with electrons aligned in the opposite direction.
Fert and Grünberg discovered the effect independently of each other using multiple layers of magnetic and non-magnetic materials only tens of nanometres thick. When all the layers were aligned in the same direction, say 'up', electrons with the same alignment passed through the material easily, whereas those with the opposite alignment struggled. But when the layers were organized in an alternating 'up-down' alignment, all electrons encountered resistance. The net effect was a rise in resistance that was much bigger than any seen before — hence 'giant'.
This led to devices that are very sensitive to tiny magnetic fields. A hard disc drive stores bits on its surface as a pattern of magnetic fields. Until the discovery of GMR, hard discs used metal induction coils to read out the data. But the laws of induction meant that the coils, and thus the bits, had to be quite large. GMR opened up a way to build much smaller magnetic heads, says Claude Chappert of the University of Paris-South. The discovery revolutionized consumer electronics. "I think this triggered the common use of MP3 players," he notes.
By the end of the 1990s, the technology had become standard across the electronics industry, thanks partly to the work of physicist Stuart Parkin at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, who came up with a simple way to create the thin multilayers. Although Parkin has shared physics prizes for GMR with Fert and Grünberg in the past, he was not included in the Nobel announcement. Parkin conducted vital work that allowed the effect to be commercialized, but Fert and Grünberg were the ones who discovered it, says Tony Bland, from the University of Cambridge, UK. "I think the field will generally see this as fair," he adds.
Storing information is not the only application, says Fert. The discovery has also opened the door to the possibility of 'spintronics', the idea of using electrons' spins, as well as their charge, in electronic devices. Spintronics could soon lead to random-access memory that remains stable even without power, securing data and allowing some computers to start up more quickly, says Bart van Wees of Groningen University in the Netherlands. It could also create new ways for fibre-optic systems and conventional semiconductors to talk to each other.
Even further out is the possibility of processing information using spin, rather than electrical current. Although still highly speculative, Chappert says, such a computer could run faster and on much lower power than existing devices. "Spintronics could bring a lot."

[Peter]

I like that account better, though my understanding is still probably mistier than that of the other prizes. Nature's account explained the science, which any popular account ought to do.

The iPod hook was an easy angle, so easy that it ought to have been thrown out.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/