From Dr. Becky.
AD – To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/DrBecky and you’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. | The Nobel Prize in Physics is the biggest prize in all of physics – it’s what every scientist secretly hopes their work will lead to. To be included in the list of greats that have come before us. But has there even been a Nobel Prize in Physics where the science it was awarded for was later shown to be wrong? Because famously, the Nobel Prize committee doesn’t remove prizes once awarded. It’s happened in medicine a few times, but what about in physics? Because there have been 118 Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded since 1901 shared by 226 different people, the majority of which have gone to nuclear and particle physics: understanding the building blocks of matter. And it’s one of those prizes that went to Enrico Fermi in 1938 that is now partly considered “wrong”, although the science was right, the interpretation was wrong…
Nobel Prize 1938 citation – https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1938/summary/
Fermi (1934) – https://www.jstor.org/stable/2935604?origin=ads
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
