Nobel Prizes in Physics

Have you been empowered?¹

The two core courses for Physics Minors at IITM (Classical and Quantum 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

You can also read about the Nobel Prizes given to Lorentz and Stark, Zeeman, and the bigwigs of QM (Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Born) at the same site. Here is a complete listing of Physics Nobel Laureates. Chemistry Nobel Laureates such as Pauling also have made fundamental contributions to Quantum Chemstry. So it might be worthwhile to peruse through the Chemistry listing as well.

Footnotes

1. In a conversation with Prof. Balakrishnan during 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.