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.

Inventing worlds

Isaac Newton

Physicists seem to have lost touch with reality. Instead of figuring out how the universe works, they dedicate themselves to designing possible universes, an activity that possibly they find pleasurable, but which doesn't seem very practical. The worst thing is that they often insist that their imaginary universes are real, putting speculations above experimentation and transgressing one of the fundamental principles of the scientific method: theories must adapt to facts, not the other way around.

One of the weak points of modern physics is the difficulty of explaining the passage of time. Since Newton’s theory, but especially with Einstein’s relativity, our physicists have not been able to deal with time. This happens, despite the fact that other conceptions of physics, such as thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, require unidirectional time: quantum superposition and collapse make no sense except with the hypothesis of irreversible time.

The mystery of the missing neutrinos

Detection of solar neutrinos in a one mile deep
South Dakota mine (1972)

One of the pseudoscientific hoaxes running in Internet says something like this:

According to the justification of the Nobel Committee in 2015, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald received their Nobel Prizes for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass. The Nobel Committee donated again Nobel Prizes and 8 million Swedish Coronas for NOTHING, since the numerical value of the frequency, impulse, kinetic energy, and therefore the mass of the neutrinos, are still unknown. Without the numerical value of the frequency, it has not been proved that the neutrinos oscillate and have mass. According to the pseudo-scientific theory of modern physics, one light-year thick layer of lead absorbs only half of the neutrinos, then how is it possible to detect neutrinos and the neutrino oscillation? Since Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald have not one light-year thick layer of lead in their laboratories, therefore the discovery of the neutrino oscillations is only a scam! The neutrino is an invented particle, which comes from the wrong pseudo-scientific theory of modern physics.

This paragraph, which calls pseudoscience the standard theory of particle physics, contains a few glaring mistakes that I will try to detail here: