The Best Nobel Prize Winners in Physics of the 21st Century

Matin Durrani, writing in Physics World, analyzes the 25 Nobel Prizes awarded during the 21st century and selects those that he believes to be the five best. His criteria are based on looking for prizes that meet the following conditions:

·         It must be easy to understand.

·         The awarded theoretical or experimental work was an exceptional effort (a tour-de-force).

·         It opened new paths for science.

Can we see the beginning of the universe?

As I often point out in these posts, the mainstream media, and sometimes high-profile popular magazines as well, may not be quite accurate when they announce science news. With headlines, especially, they tend to make major mistakes, because they try to make them as appealing as possible, which means that they also suffer from the greatest distortions.

Let us look at a recent news. This is the headline:

Scientists figured out how to see the beginning of time

The problem with the Hubble constant

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
NASA-WMAP

The Hubble constant, which measures the speed of expansion of space in the universe, has very curious properties. For instance, although we call it constant, it turns out that it is not a constant, as it varies over time. That is why its current value is represented by the symbol H₀, but since its value was different at other times, it can be represented by other symbols, such as H_CMBR, which refers to its value at the time when the cosmic microwave background radiation originated, about 13.7 billion years ago.