
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics - okket
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2016/press.html
======
danielmorozoff
For those interested in the Soviet / Ukranian scientist who was part of the
discovery and for whom the transition(BKT) is also named- Vadim Berezinskii

He passed away in 1980, here's his obituary:
[http://ufn.ru/ufn81/ufn81_3/Russian/r813k.pdf](http://ufn.ru/ufn81/ufn81_3/Russian/r813k.pdf)

~~~
dcgudeman
It's all in Russian. Does it say why he died so young?

~~~
bzbarsky
It just mentions a "lengthy serious sickness". Other sources (e.g.
<[https://snob.ru/selected/entry/114493>](https://snob.ru/selected/entry/114493>))
mention him being seriously ill for at least three years before his death...

------
jackgavigan
Some will be disappointed that this year's Prize was not awarded to Ronald
Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, in recognition of their work on LIGO.
Ronald Drever is in poor health and there are some who fear that, despite
being deserving of a Nobel Prize, he may never receive one.

~~~
abecedarius
Nobel's will actually directed that the prize to go "those who, during the
preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind" by a
discovery or invention. The previous-year part isn't even mentioned on the
Wikipedia page. (I get that it's hard to judge.)

[https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/](https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/)

~~~
cperciva
Isn't the "previous year" part usually interpreted to mean that the benefit is
in the past year, rather than the work being done in the past year?

~~~
abecedarius
I don't know; I wondered about that too. But this proviso hardly seems to come
up at all in what I read, and that's interesting -- I wonder how often unusual
wills get carried out to the letter.

~~~
telotortium
I believe on Wikipedia it is mentioned that the price was originally awarded
soon after the discovery. However, after several occasions where a discovery
awarded the Nobel price was later invalidated Kama they switch to the present
practice of interpreting it as the benefits becoming clearer in the past year,
rather than the discoveries.

~~~
abecedarius
Thanks for pointing that out -- the relevant section is the middle:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Recognition_time_lag)

------
westoncb
From the article:

> The three Laureates’ use of topological concepts in physics was decisive for
> their discoveries. Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes
> properties that only change step-wise.

I've never heard topology characterized that way. Typically I think of it as
dealing with connection properties—sort of a more abstract geometry where
objects can be considered the same even if their shape changes; identity is
only defined by which parts are connected to which.

Could anyone elaborate on the 'step-wise' change aspect from the article?

~~~
miles7
In the context of physics, topological phases of matter often reveal
themselves by causing certain quantities that are usually continuous to change
in discrete steps instead. A key example is the electrical conductivity of
certain quantum Hall effect systems, which jumps in discrete steps (is
"quantized" in physics jargon) as an ever stronger magnetic field is applied
to the system in a transverse direction.

The connection to the donut/bagel thing more familiar in topology is that
topology also deals with integers: a manifold can have 0,1,2,3... holes in it,
that sort of thing.

One key mathematical quantity that comes up in the works of Thouless and
Haldane is the Chern number
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern_class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern_class)

The reason the physics quantities jump is that the Chern numbers of certain
electron bands change, and by definition a Chern number is an integer.

------
musgravepeter
Can anyone recommend a "cannonical" textbook that describes K-T transitions at
an upper-year undergraduate level?

~~~
rubidium
Thouless himself wrote one:

[https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Quantum_Mechanics_o...](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Quantum_Mechanics_of_Many_Body_Syste.html)

It doesn't assume graduate level physics.... but it may be a bit advanced for
undergraduate. I can't recall.

~~~
sytelus
Fixed link: [https://goo.gl/ay9KEi](https://goo.gl/ay9KEi)

Reader needs to be familiar with non-relativistic quantum mechanics +
statistical mechanics.

------
Waterluvian
Fractioning the prize off to me seems silly. A half, a quarter, and a quarter.
Why not just have three winners? Is this purely to deal with prize money
distribution? Surely there's a more elegant solution.

~~~
mongol
It is according to Alfred Nobels' will. It can not be divided further than
half and half of one half.

~~~
77pt77
Not true.

Many times it's divides in thirds.

Here it wasn't because someone (in my opinion correctly) decided Kosterlitz
and Thouless deserved less money.

------
oneloop
I still remember my condensed matter professor saying "The Kosterlitz-Thouless
transition is the most important discovery in physics in the second half of
the 20th century". Surely partly motivated by professional bias, no doubt, but
there's still merit to the claim. If you believe that "all physics is either
harmonic oscillators or phase transitions", the Kosterlitz-Thouless is the
first example (I believe) of a phase transition that does not contain a local
order parameter. Because of that certain materials proved illusive to all
mathematical models of the time.

Related: Onsager received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, also for 2D phase
transitions. Trivia: Onsager was a Chemist! :D

EDIT: I believe this is the original paper:
[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010/...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010/pdf)

~~~
okket
FYI, Wikipedia page about the Kosterlitz–Thouless transition:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosterlitz%E2%80%93Thouless_tr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosterlitz%E2%80%93Thouless_transition)

~~~
oneloop
I expect that article will see lots of improvement in the coming weeks/months.

~~~
flashman
Good. It's one of those bloody articles that requires a layman to read all of
the attached articles, two or three links deep, to have any chance of
understanding just the parts without mathematical formulae.

And before anyone accuses me of wanting to dumb down Wikipedia: yes, that's
exactly what I want. Wikipedia should be written to a generalist audience, not
by specialists for specialists.

edit: I can't say it any better than this article:
[https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-
wr...](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/24/wikipedias-writing-
tests-show-its-too-sophisticated-for-its-audience/)

~~~
oneloop
Physics is complex man, what did you expect. If you know nothing, you need to
learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point.

And regarding wikipedia articles, there's two big design alternatives: for
each article you either write into it all the necessary background, or instead
link to the necessary background in different articles. I suspect that the
modus operandi that wikipedia has chosen is that you should do the former for
mainstream topics and the latter for niche topics.

~~~
flashman
Here's a complex biology article that contains a lot of technical terms and
links, yet still manages to be readable to a general audience:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf)

I get the feeling that most math-involving Wikipedia pages are simply compound
regurgitations of various textbooks.

> you need to learn a lot in order to even understand their starting point

This is kind of a cop-out. In the coming days there will be reams written on
these laureates in the scientific press, much of which will be more
enlightening, informative and contextually relevant than the dedicated
encyclopaedia article.

~~~
ghaff
Although even that Leaf article highlights some unfortunate Wikipedia
tendencies such as the tendency to unnecessarily insert pseudo-academic
jargon. Take the third sentence: "Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves
collectively." With two footnotes even. This could easily have been worded as
something along the lines of "Leaves are collectively referred to as foliage,
as in "autumn foliage."

~~~
wahern
Except the former shows that "mass noun" is a thing. And indeed the phrase was
a hyperlink to a fascinating page discussing the concept. Unfortunately,
somebody took your criticism to heart and changed the page to your formulation

    
    
      https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leaf&type=revision&diff=742673936&oldid=741796479
    

excising the hyperlink in the process.

Your phrasing would be better were Wikipedia not a hyperlinked encyclopedia.
Because Wikipedia is a hyperlinked encyclopedia, it's perfectly acceptable and
even preferable to use stilted phrasing when it benefits the concise
exposition of related concepts.

~~~
wahern
In law school we were taught that it's preferable to use simple English
phrasing--so-called plain language--in legal writing, and to avoid terms of
art. But look at what that has wrought in reality--legal instruments that are
dozens of page longer than necessary, more often than not with dictionaries
prepended. They're more inscrutable than ever, and arguably more difficult to
approach for both layman and jurist.

Archaic legal writing relied heavily on terms of art. Terms of art, IMHO,
provided many benefits, including 1) concision, 2) consistency, and 3)
signaling. Concision because terms of art are a way to reference more complex
concepts that you don't need to spell out. Consistency because widespread use
of terms of art meant that there was only one way to say something; if you
used other phrasing it was presumed you meant something different than what
was meant by a related term of art. And signaling because using a term of art
made it clear and obvious you were referring to some concrete legal concept,
even if the reader wasn't familiar with it.

Notably the shift to "plain language" legal writing did not in the least
change expectations in the legal community regarding the consistency and
signaling aspects of legal language. Today, instead of using terms of art,
lawyers literally copy+paste whole blocks of long-winded clauses.

IMO, all three of those aspects--concision, consistency, and signaling--should
likewise be emphasized in an encyclopedic text, _especially_ in the context of
hyperlinked text.

Different contexts require using language differently. You wouldn't criticize
a musician for using a different style of prose, right? It's not just the
medium that dictates how we phrase things, but the context and function of the
communication.

------
jsingleton
For the lazy:

> British trio win Nobel prize in physics 2016 for work on exotic states of
> matter

> Prize to be shared by David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael
> Kosterlitz...

> ...in the field of condensed matter physics. They discovered totally
> unexpected behaviours of solid materials - and came up with a mathematical
> framework (in the field of topology) to explain these weird properties. The
> discoveries have paved the way for designing new materials with all sorts of
> novel properties.

> Topology, which was central to this year’s discoveries, explains why
> electrical conductivity inside thin layers changes in integer steps.
> Kosterlitz and Thouless studied the electrical behaviour of surfaces or
> inside extremely thin layers (physicists call these two-dimensional
> materials). Haldane studied matter that forms threads so thin they can be
> considered one-dimensional.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2016/oct/04/nobel-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2016/oct/04/nobel-
prize-in-physics-2016-to-be-announced-live)

Perhaps this will open up new ways to build microprocessors and other
semiconductor electronics?

There's a live stream here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qpoBG5hy-A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qpoBG5hy-A)

~~~
okket
8 minute Interview with a Nobel Committee member (Thors Hans Hansson) about
the prize and the science behind it:

[https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/783253434044600320](https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/783253434044600320)

