British trio win Nobel prize for physics A trio of British scientists working in US universities have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for physics. The prize will be shared by David Thouless (82), Duncan Haldane (65) and Michael Kosterlitz (76) for their work on exotic states of matter. The men will share the 8 million Swedish kronor (£720,000) prize. Thouless …
The UK brain drain sounds much like what goes on in Oz. The politicians talk about science this and smart economy that, but it's far easier to earn way too much money just being a drill monkey or nailgun maniac. The mining boom has left a legacy of thick shits that got paid far too well and an poorly funded education sector where too many people now think the streets are paved with gold as long as they wear a fluoro jacket.
Thouless moved to the US in the fifties to do his doctorate with the (German, somewhat Jewish) renowned nuclear physicist Hans Bethe.
The attractiveness of a venue for your research career is mostly determined by the environment: secure post, non-invasive bureaucracy, company of accomplished scientists you can hope to learn from.
Resources for research and a non-insulting salary are something but they are relatively unimportant. The UK is on a relatively good footing at the moment because the US has joined it in a race to the bottom in terms of a managerialistic ("work-like") culture.
"Haldane discovered how topological concepts can be used to understand the properties ..."
Get real!
No mere mortals have a hope of understanding it! But whatever it is it's probably brilliant ... :-)
Meanwhile, if anyone finds one, I appear to have lost the inside of my Klein bottle ...
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Purely as an observation, Cambridge UK occasionally mentions how many Nobel laureates they have and a fair proportion of those were born abroad, so if the US wants to claim these three then the UK can hardly object.
It probably ought to be credited to the institution(s) that supported them when they did most of the work.
I did read somewhere that a possible approach to HTSC beyond 163K in cuprates is to replace the copper with magnesium, as the resonating valence bond theory suggests that the heavy metal oxide-oxide-metal- layering structure is more important than the elements in it.
As Mg is *almost* identical to copper in many ways substituting Mg into YBCO copper sites could also superconduct and this has indeed been documented, with Sr substituting for Ba also giving a boost to Tc.
The critical temperature seems to be a factor of periodic compression so the actual upper limit for cuprates may be as high as 270K.
Trump fits the standard psychological profile with many symptoms common to: a mild bipolar person with delusions of grandeur, pathological liar, illogical (uses many of Aristotle's 144 fallacies) bully syndrome, self-centered egotistic but with low self-esteem, denial of culpability, the deflector of truth, the perfector of diverting blame, the master of half-truths, the pretender of great self-integrity ( no drink and smoke is not enough) and the mistaken leader who doesn't care what others think as long as he gets his way or else you will be a victim of his revenge. but with strong opinions and never loses an argument due to his exceptionally talented/ignorant use of fallacy. He has built a political empire capability of withstanding any attack from seemingly irrational actions but are very rational from a point of view of person who will put himself above every law. Already he has thwarted Nepotism, Money Laundering in his vast empire of Trump Towers, taunting Russians to tamper Hillary's e-mail
... not to mention that morality and ethics are voids in his clean-cut yet fake blonde and orange personal image.
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