Nobel Conference BlogPage 3

Nobel Conference 53 “Honoring the Stories” : Brita DeRemee Taracks

Two weeks after pushing out Son No. 3, I found myself in a barn at the Minnesota State Fair. My parents had come to assist with the adventure. Holding the hands and cajoling the wonder of their ambulatory grandsons No. 1 & 2 on a trip to the Fair was their sheer delight. They bought […]

Nobel Conference 53 “Honoring The Stories”: The Nemmers Twins

  Hayley Nemmers was a surrogate mother to twins. Through the love of Hayley, Ryan, and Amber, and the support of reproductive technology, they welcome Asher and Zoey to the Nemmers family! Their personal blog, taking you through their journey, can be found at http://anemmers.wordpress.com.   Created by Hayley Nemmers, Class of 2016

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of S. James Gates Jr.

Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr. is a theoretical physicist who uses mathematics to explore the fundamental symmetries that are revealed when we seek to answer the most basic question about the matter in our universe—”What is inside of everything?” He is also someone whose work makes connections across disciplines, between science and history, the arts, […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of George Coyne

This year’s conference title, “The Universe at Its Limits,” implies a notion of boundaries—spatial and temporal, beginning and end. As a result, we inevitably consider the questions of where the universe came from, when it emerged, where it’s going, and whether its development is the product of necessity or chance, design or randomness. The debate […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of Lawrence Krauss

Much of the most exciting research being done today feeds our innate human curiosity. It seeks to answer the larger questions always looming in the back of our minds of who we are, how we got here, and if we are unique. Professor Lawrence M. Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist and astronomer. Perhaps […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of George Smoot

Because it takes time for light to travel to Earth from the reaches of space, the farther one looks, the earlier in history one sees. Thus, questions about the formation of stars, galaxies, galactic clusters, and indeed about the beginning of the universe itself are addressed in cosmological investigations of primordial light from the heavens […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of Samuel Ting

Discovering the fundamental nature of the universe requires scientists with vision, ingenuity, and persistence. Nobel Prize winner Dr. Samuel Ting exemplifies these important traits. His experiments have discovered one of the six known quarks, the fundamental building blocks of all matter, and more recently have been probing matter, antimatter, and dark matter from a detector […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of Alex Filippenko

Dr. Alex Filippenko has been involved with some of the most exciting and impactful observational astronomy studies of the last 30 years. He and his coworkers study the light generated by supernovae in an effort to better understand supernova processes themselves, as well as how to use them as indicators of larger cosmological processes. In 1998, […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of Tara Shears

What are the basic building blocks of matter? And how does the macroscopic universe as we encounter it today arise from their interactions? Our current best answers to these questions are given by the Standard Model of particle physics, according to which there are twelve kinds of fundamental particles of matter (the quarks and the […]

Nobel Conference 49 Profile of Frank Wilczek

What is matter? We’ve come a long way toward a solid understanding of matter in the last forty years, while at the same time gaining new insight into the nature of space and an inspiring vision of the symmetry of physical law. Emerging from the strange and once-revolutionary ideas of quantum theory and special relativity, […]