Prof. Mario Livio, who is hosted in Israel, and among other things gave a lecture yesterday as part of a chair, talked to the science website about two Nobel laureates: Adam Ries, whose Livio was his mentor at the Space Telescope Scientific Institute, and Dan Shechtman - his former colleague from the Technion and the protagonists of his book "The Golden Cut"
A guest in Israel, Prof. Mario Livio who, it turns out, has been at the Space Telescope Scientific Institute for 21 years. Yesterday (Friday) he gave a lecture as part of the 'Cathedral' Institute at the AI Museum in Tel Aviv. After the lecture he had an interview with the knowledge site.
It turns out that Prof. Livio's paths crossed with the paths of two of this year's Nobel Prize winners: Prof. Adam Rees, his colleague at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Nobel Prize winners in Physics for the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and whom Prof. Livio served as his mentor when he arrived at the Institute, and Prof. Dan Shechtman, his colleague at the Technion where he worked for many years and who in a different hat also crossed paths when his heart described Prof. Shechtman's discovery of quasi-crystals in his book "Cutting the Gold" (Read here about the topic towards the end of the interview with Prof. Shechtman)
"When Adam Rees came to the institute, it was shortly after he wrote the first paper after he wrote with his partners the paper about the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, I was his mentor because he was a young scientist and young scientists who came one of the senior scientists became their mentor.
"From the beginning I saw, it's not just a matter of him being smart, in the end Nobel prizes are awarded not for being smart but for making a discovery and he made a very impressive discovery and in addition to the discovery what is very typical is the drive he has which is unusual. He is a very ambitious person, who realized from the beginning that he had a very important discovery and who did everything in the future to establish it. I was a contributor to his papers after that where we showed that dark energy 9 billion years ago was less important than it is now. But he mostly went for anything that could improve our understanding of dark energy."
"For example, what he has been dealing with for the last two or three years almost exclusively is refining the measurements of the Hubble constant that determines the current rate of expansion of the universe. If you improve the accuracy of the measurement of the Hubble constant (and currently it has been able to reach an accuracy of 3%), it puts very large barriers on all the different cosmological barriers, including those related to dark energy."
He is currently making observations to reduce the error of measuring the Hubble constant from 3% to 2% because at this level it will be possible to determine barriers to other constants, such as determining how many families of neutrinos there are. These neutrinos have three families. There are good chances that there is a fourth family of neutrinos, which we have not noticed so far. The measurements he is doing now on the mourning constant may increase the constraints to such an extent that we can clearly say whether it is three or four families."
"All in all, he is a young man, he is 41 years old and is one of the youngest to receive a Nobel Prize. He has a chance to receive one more award in his scientific life. A man with his drive and his knack for observations he might get another. Marie Curie received two Nobel Prizes but one was in chemistry and the other in physics. John Bardin is the only one so far to have received the Nobel Prize in Physics twice. Maybe Adam will be the second. Of course you also need a little luck. Louis Pasteur said that luck favors those who are well prepared. A well prepared person. But you also need a little luck. Because he started to measure the deceleration of the universe and if he had measured the deceleration of the universe, it would have been a good result, but he would not have received a Nobel Prize for it, so it was a bit of luck that it happened that the universe is not slowing down at all, but accelerating."
"The neutrino experiment in Sarn It is an excellent experiment, they have already repeated it a second time. They showed as if neutrinos travel faster than light. This is a very difficult measurement, and in this respect the experiment is fantastic that they were able to achieve such a level of accuracy. I must say that my first guess was that it would turn out that the problem was the width of the pulse, because the width of the pulse is a factor of 100 greater than what they are trying to measure. But in the meantime they repeated the experiment with much shorter pulses that do not have such a width and they claim that they get the same result. I find this a surprising result. I must say that we have been testing special relativity for a hundred years and we have not found any problem with it. And if there was a problem with her, it has consequences for so many things that it's just hard to believe that this is the right result, so I have a 95% certainty, let's not say 100%, that it will be discovered that there is a mistake that they need to discover after all. There are two other groups that plan to repeat the experiment, one in the US and one in Japan, I hope that when they repeat it with a different system we will know better."
A few words about your Technion colleague Dan Shechtman: I am very proud, I cannot describe to you how happy I was when Danny Shechtman received the Nobel Prize. I wrote about Dan Shechtman and his discovery of the quasi-crystals in the gold cutting books. Of course, I didn't know then that he would receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, certainly a very impressive discovery. This part that he stood confidently in front of all kinds of people, among them important ones who said it couldn't be. Really, very beautiful. I think that the Nobel committee in this case sometimes made mistakes and sometimes did not show greatness and gave to the person who deserved it and I was happy to read about all the efforts he has made to improve scientific education in Israel, a person of his caliber and I am happy for his happiness.
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Comments
No, the interview was in Hebrew.
Avi,
Did you use machine translation?
I strongly agree with 95%.
And as for the villains, they greatly exaggerated the importance of the prize. Lots of people contribute to science in lots of ways. And it is not fair to place the importance of the contribution on the Nobel Prize. It reminds me of TV shows.