How a Nobel prizewinner is chosen.

 

1. The Nobel Committees send invitations to hundreds of scientists and scholars around the world, asking them to suggest names for the Nobel prizes in the coming year.

2. The names are sent in by February 1.

3. Each committee, with the help of specially appointed experts, discuss the names suggested, and makes out a short list to present to the prize-awarding institution. A vote is taken for the final choice.

4. The names of the prizewinners are announced in October or November.

5. The prizes are awarded on December 10. The Peace Prize is presented at Oslo University, the others at a ceremony in Stockholm. The King of Sweden presents a diploma, a medal and a cheque to each prizewinner and there is a ceremonial dinner afterwards in the City Hall. Each Nobel prizewinner is expected to give a “Nobel lecture”.

 

READING IV

 

PLUNGING INTO THE UNKNOWN

 

CERN is a French acronym of the European centre for Nuclear Research. It began operating in 1954 just outside Geneva on the French border and began building its first accelerator, though at the time nuclear science and atomic weapons were linked in the public mind and Switzerland was alarmed that the presence of the laboratory would compromise Swiss neutrality.

So in the mid-1960s, Geneva refused CERN’s application to build the world’s first proton collider, arguing lack of space. As a result the laboratory turned to France, now the location for most of its major installations.

Since then relationships with Geneva have warmed and for good material reasons. CERN’s status as the world’s foremost nuclear physics laboratory and winner of three Nobel prizes for its scientists has been not only a source of prestige for Switzerland but a big money-spinner for Swiss industry, from precision engineering to office supplies.

CERN is also the largest international organization in Geneva after the United Nations with an annual budget of SFr 1.3bn and 2,000 employees.

In addition it plays temporary host to 7,000 scientists from more than 80 countries. The majority are from CERN’s 20 European members, but more than 700 are from Russia and nearly 600 from the US with others from Japan, India and Pakistan.

And, while the best known of CERN’s inventions – the worldwide web and detectors now used in medical imaging – were made universally available, others have formed the basis for company start-ups, often Geneva-based, by ex-CERN scientists that have advanced the city’s high-tech reputation.

For the moment CERN ’ s pre-eminence in particle physics research seems assured with the opening of the world’s most powerful atom-smashing machine; the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC aims to identify the most fundamental building blocks of our world by reproducing conditions that existed a few million millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

It does this by whipping zillions of particles around a 27km circle at about the speed of light, crashing them into each other and observing the results.

But studying tiny particles requires giant structures. To generate energy levels equivalent to the heat of hundreds of thousands of suns the LHC uses superconducting magnets operating at temperatures close to absolute zero, colder than outer space.

The experiments themselves are housed in structures as big as office blocks in vast underground caverns. The biggest of them, Atlas, has a detector 20 metres high whose innermost sensors contain about 10bn transistors – nearly as many as the number of stars in the Milky Way.

And to process and store the data resulting from these experiments, equivalent to a 20km pile of CD-roms every year and far beyond the capacities of any supercomputer, CERN is in the forefront of developing Grid technology that will link tens of thousands of computers in high-energy physics laboratories all over the globe.

The LHC, which will cost more than $3bn, saved cash by using the existing circular tunnel that was built for its predecessor, the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider. Even then, cost overruns forced cuts in other experiments and belt-tightening all round.

However, most particle physicists expect the next machine – another electron positron collider – to be straight rather than circular, to produce even higher energy levels. Scientists at CERN are working on new linear electron-positron collider technology that would generate the required energy levels with shorter tunnels, making it possible to build them there. But a decision on what should follow the LHC must wait until the early results of the LHC experiments are known.

Among the first discoveries will, scientists hope, be the elusive Higgs Boson or “God particle” that under the so-called Standard Model of nuclear physics gives particles mass. “If the Higgs Boson exists, the LHC will definitely find it”, says CERN’s director-general. “And if it doesn’t, it will discover other things. With the LHC, we plunge into the unknown.”

(from the Financial Times)

 

[1] Art for art’s sake искусство ради искусства; art for heart’s sake искусство для души; for the sake of smb./smth., for smb’s sake ради кого-либо/ чего-либо

[2] Albert Einstein

[3] PhD – the university degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

[4] Charles Spencer Chaplin - an American actor and film director, was born in 1889 in a poor family in

the London East End and at an early age became famous all over the world as a comedian. His most famous films are “A Dog’s Life”, “The Kid”, “The Gold Rush”, “City Lights”, “Modern Times” and “Limelight”. He died in 1977.

[5] Universal studios, the Universal Film studios in Hollywood.

[6] Assistant Professor,(AmE) (BrE) senior lecturer - доцент

[7] exercise,(зд.) моцион In this meaning the noun is uncountable