One of the benefits of being on Physics World is that you get to meet some of the world’s best and brightest physicists – some of whom are Nobel laureates and some whom could very well be one of this year’s winners.
For years I attended the March Meeting of the American Physical Society – a gathering of upwards of 10,000 physicists and where you are sure to bump into a Nobel laureate or two. At the 2011 meeting in Dallas I had the pleasure of interviewing MIT’s Frank Wilczek, who shared the 2004 prize with David Gross and David Politzer for their “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction”.
But instead of looking back on his work on quarks and gluons, Wilczek was keen to chat about the physics of superconductivity and it’s wide-reaching influence on theoretical physics. You can watch a video of that interview above or here: “Superconductivity: a far-reaching theory”.
Amusing innuendo
Wilczek was a lovely guy and I was really pleased four years later when he recognized me at the Royal Society in London. We were both admiring portraits of fellows, and the amusing innuendo found in one of the picture captions. On a more serious note, we were both there for a celebration of Maxwell’s equations and you can read more about the event here: “A great day out in celebration of Maxwell’s equations”.
Also at that event in London were John Pendry of nearby Imperial College London and Harvard University’s Federico Capasso – who are both on our list of people who could win this year’s Nobel prize. Pendry is a pioneer in the mathematics that describes how metamaterials can be used to manipulate light in weird and wonderful ways – and Capasso has spent much of his career making such metamaterials in the lab, and commercially.
The Royal Society was also where I recorded a video interview with Albert Fert, who shared the 2007 prize with Peter Grünberg for their work on giant magnetoresistance (watch below). A decade or so earlier, I had completed at PhD on ultrathin magnetic materials, so I was very happy to hear that two pioneers of the field had been honoured.
In the interview, Fert looks to the future of spintronics. This is an emerging field in which the magnetic spin of materials is used to store and transport information – potentially using much less energy than conventional electronics.
I recorded a second video interview that day with David Awschalom, now at the University of Chicago. He is a pioneer in spintronics and much of his work is now focused on using spins for quantum computing. Another potential Nobel laureate perhaps?
We don’t do video interviews anymore – instead we chat with people on our podcasts. As you can see from our videos, I really struggled with the medium. The laureates, however, were real pros!
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