These days, reporters have to work not to get scooped by the institutions they cover. Harvard, MIT and BU have their own in-house publishing operations, churning out newsy-looking stories with newsy deadlines.
So, both the Harvard Gazette and the Globe have stories on Harvard’s links to this week’s Nobel Prize in physics, which when to three researchers for the 1998 “discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe (sic) through observations of distant supernovae.”
You know those puzzles that show two similar pictures and ask — Can you tell the difference? Try that here.
..Two of the Nobelists – Brian Schmidt of Australian National University and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – were graduate students at Harvard.
It is in Cambridge where they did their scientific training and got started on the work that would ultimately build to their Nobel, working with Robert Kirshner, a Harvard professor and member of the High-Z Supernova Search Team that made the discovery, though he did not share in the prize. Riess and Schmidt will each receive a quarter of the $1.4 million prize, while Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at Berkeley and a Harvard graduate, will receive half.
“I think it would be great if the Nobel prize could go to entire teams of people, because it’s really a lot of teamwork that allows these projects to succeed,‘’ Riess said during a press conference. "If you want to know how science is really done and how recognition is doled out – I think it should be the whole team. I wish that could be true.’’
From the Harvard Gazette:
“It was a theory we couldn’t believe was true,” said astronomer Robert Kirshner, Clowes Professor of Science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Kirshner was dissertation supervisor for the two former graduate students who are new Nobel laureates. He is also the author of “The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos.”
The undergraduate-turned-laureate is Saul Perlmutter ’81, who directs the Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was awarded half the $1.5 million Nobel Prize. While at Harvard College, Perlmutter lived in Leverett House, performed with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and graduated with a degree in physics, magna cum laude.
Brian P. Schmidt, Ph.D. ’93, and Adam G. Riess, Ph.D. ’96, both studied at CfA. Kirshner said their student investigations into cosmic measurement led directly to their shares in the Nobel