Nobel Prizes in Physics

Have you been empowered?¹

The course in Classical Physics, in priniciple, should have taught you enough to understand work that has lead to several Nobel Prizes in Physics. I am listing a few of them — the Nobel Prize site offers a wealth of details (see the press release as well as advanced information) on the prizes.

• Max Planck (1918)
• Pauli Exclusion Principle (1945)
• Superfluidity in Liquid Helium (1962)
• Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (1978)
• Laser Cooling (1997) Temperatures of the order of 100 $\mu$K are obtained through this method.
• Bose-Einstein Condensation (2001) Temperatures of the order of 10 nK are required and were attained in order to observe BEC.
  
• Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (2006) Nice writeup on CMB anisotropy

Footnotes

1. In a conversation with Prof. Balakrishnan during this semester(Fall 2009), he mentioned to me that there are two kinds of teachers — those that dazzle and those that empower (students). At that moment, I realized that most of my frustration as a teacher lie in my (perceived?) failure to empower.