
Physics Nobel won by laser wizardry – laureates include first woman in 55 years - okket
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06752-z
======
DanielleMolloy
\+ Arthur Ashkin, at 96, is the oldest nobel prize laureate ever (
[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-
by-a...](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-laureates-by-age/) ),
and declined an interview this morning because he is "busy doing research". He
did much of is research at Bell Labs and has his own lab at home now.

\+ The most cited Strickland / Mourou paper is this one: Compression of
amplified chirped optical pulses.
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.673...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.673.148&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
It has a humble length of 3 pages and has collected 4600 citations in 23
years.

\+ This is a good time to remember Lise Meitner:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner#Nobel_Prize_for_n...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner#Nobel_Prize_for_nuclear_fission)
and check out James Watson's 'opinion' of Rosalind Franklin:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBWPzdyyPic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBWPzdyyPic)
But also note that Marie Curie was one of very few nobel laureates who got
awarded twice, and she got her awards very early on in the history of the
nobel prize (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nobel_laureates_with_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nobel_laureates_with_multiple_Nobel_awards)
).

~~~
bzbarsky
Though note that at least according to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#Nobel_Prizes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#Nobel_Prizes)
it took Pierre Curie objecting Marie being excluded from the nomination to get
the Nobel committee of the time to acknowledge Marie Curie's work...

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Upvoter33
Not pointed out in the article is the fact that Strickland is still an
"associate" professor at Waterloo -- something sure to be rectified asap --
indicating that the department there wasn't super keen on promoting her to
full professor, for some reason. Oops!

~~~
kgwgk
Do you know whether she was super keen on being promoted or are you just
assuming she was being pushed down “for some reason”? (I have no idea,
myself.)

~~~
anon946
I have no idea either, but it's probably worth pointing out that, for better
or worse, promotion to full will entail a certain degree of bean counting.
Thus, there are a number of perfectly respectable ways to not meet those
metrics. For example, someone who decides to tackle a very hard problem with
very high risk of failure is likely to look less productive on paper.

~~~
nopinsight
Is the admin work for full professors that much more involved than for
associate professors?

~~~
anon946
Not in my department, but I have no idea how representative it is.

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j7ake
I am surprised that one of them got a nobel prize for work that was done
during PhD. Often times the boss would take all the credit, including the
prizes.

For example, Jules Hoffmann in 2011 won the prize but not Lemaitre, the
postdoc in the lab who did the work.

~~~
evanb
Physics has some history of PhD work being recognized. Abrikosov won for his
very first paper, if I recall correctly. Wilczek also won for a paper he
published as a grad student (albeit with his advisor). And de Broglie
essentially won for his thesis, which was only a few pages long.

On the other hand, one need only think of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell to find an
instance where a grad student got totally screwed.

~~~
ISL
The Mössbauer Effect is named for the graduate student who discovered it. He,
and not his advisor, won the associated Nobel Prize.

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randlet
Cool! She taught me 2nd year E&M in 2000 or 2001, although truth be told I
remember it being one of my least favourite classes during my physics degree.
I had no idea at the time the calibre of physicist she was.

~~~
rapfaria
Being brilliant and being a brilliant teacher are indeed distinct things.

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BeetleB
I'm glad Ashkin won. Many felt he had been deprived a Nobel in 1997, when his
former colleague Steven Chu won it (the cooling and trapping of atoms with
laser light). I believe Chu worked with Ashkin, or Ashkin was his mentor, or
something like that.

Incidentally, Arthur's paper is very readable.

[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.24...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.24.156)

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relyio
Now I feel silly dropping her course during my second year at Waterloo.

Well, to be fair I had a packed schedule that semester...

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woodandsteel
It's such a crime that Emmy Noether never got the Nobel Prize in physics. I
wonder how many of the physics prizes were for discoveries that would never
have happened if not for Noether's theorem.

~~~
ASipos
Problem is, the prize is usually awarded for experimental work, or for
theoretical work whose predictions are validated by experiment. Noether's
theorem is a purely mathematical result.

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andrewflnr
Her first ever scientific paper. All politics aside, let me just say: holy
crap, that's awesome.

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w0mbat
The slightly ambiguous headline might make some think that no woman has won
ANY Nobel prize in the last 55 years. That only applies to the Physics prize,
many women have won Nobels in other categories.

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hsnewman
Wouldn't it be nice to take gender out of the discussion?

~~~
vixen99
Absolutely. There are attempts in other fields. For instance it's encouraging
to find that no one (I believe and hope) has complained that 82 per cent of
obstetrics and gynaecology medical residents in the US in 2016 were female.

------
Gauc2
Relevant creepy music video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6i7A8Plqb8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6i7A8Plqb8)

------
Create
_" Really? Is that all? I thought there might have been more,"_ Strickland
responded, sounding surprised.

It has now been a while, that achievements are rarely done in trios, duos or
in solitude. It is a farce to all other hard working scientists.

This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a
given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt.

~~~
shrewduser
Try as I might I can't make heads not tails of your comment.

~~~
dpwm
> It has now been a while, that achievements are rarely done in trios, duos or
> in solitude. It is a farce to all other hard working scientists.

Achievements in modern science are usually seen as incremental, done as part
of a larger team and based on a substantial body of prior work. I think the
author is trying to say that behind these successes, there are people who may
have committed as much to the field but achieved no recognition. In my
experience the larger teams / collaborations thing seems to be more of a
Particle Physics thing.

> This recognition is for those, who successfully appropriate the spirit of a
> given time. Aside from the propaganda/marketing stunt.

The author, I believe, is saying that success is more to do with luck. I'm not
sure I agree -- there tends to be a network effect with science that people
who have proven themselves get offered better opportunities and so can in some
cases have a cluster of successes, but I have heard similar sentiments and
they're not so easily dismissed.

