Hi Folks,

Congrats Prof. Zewail!!!!!!! Prof. Zewail of Caltech won this year's nobel
prize for Chemistry. He is a fellow African (from Egypt), did his
undergraduate studies at Alexandria University in Egypt and graduate work
at U. of Penn.

I personally met Prof. Zewail four years ago when he visited the Chemistry
Dept. at UBC as a guest speaker in the prestigious Mcdowell Chemical
Physics lecture series....hence, not surpised by his latest
accomplishment.

Prof. Zewail, you are a role model!!!!! Keep it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers,
Madiba Saidy, Ph.D; MCIC
---------------------------

By MATS KARLSSON
.c The Associated Press


STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - A U.S. scientist won the Nobel Prize for chemistry
today for capturing ultrafast snapshots of atomic reactions. Two Dutch
researchers won the physics prize for refining the theory predicting the
existence and behavior of some of the smallest particles in the universe.

Ahmed H. Zewail, 53, of the California Institute of Technology was honored
for pioneering a revolution in chemistry by using the rapid-fire laser
flashes that illuminate the motion of atoms in a molecule as they occur, the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

The academy said Zewail's work in the late 1980s led to the birth of
femtochemistry, the use of high-speed cameras to monitor chemical reactions
at a scale of femtoseconds. A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth of a second,
or one-thousandth of a millionth of a millionth second. The technique works
regardless of whether the material is solid, liquid or gas.

``We have reached the end of the road. No chemical reactions take place
faster than this,'' the academy said in an announcement. ``We can now see the
movements of individual atoms as we imagine them. They are no longer
invisible.''

Zewail, who holds U.S. and Egyptian citizenship, has held the Linus Pauling
chair of chemical physics at Caltech since 1990.

Zewail has described femtochemistry as ``taking an x-ray image of the
molecule itself. You are seeing the individual arrangements and structures.''

Earlier today, the Academy announced that Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G.
Veltman won the physics prize for creating more precise calculations for
predicting and confirming the subatomic particles' existence and behavior.

In the early moments of the universe, when conditions were much hotter,
physicists believe, electromagnetism and a weak force were one in the same.
But the forces diverged as the universe cooled and expanded into its current
state.

Today, scientists use large machines known as accelerators to try to recreate
those hot, primordial conditions for a split second to determine whether
subatomic particles behave in the ways predicted by theory, or even if the
particles exist at all.

The research by Veltman and 't Hooft provided a roadmap for experimental
physicists using accelerators to find the particles and shed light on how
these particles behave and interact.

``This is the entire framework we (particle physicists) use when calculating.
We'll get finite answers. Earlier calculations only resulted in nonsense,''
said Lars Brink, a professor of Chalmers University of Technology Institute
and a member of the academy.

Veltman, speaking on Dutch television, joked of his struggles trying to
explain his work.

``It is a difficult and abstract subject and something that I have never been
able to explain to my wife and children,'' Veltman said.

Their calculations were vital in calculating the mass of the top quark, which
was observed for the first time in 1995 at the Fermilab in the United States.

Yet-to-be-confirmed is the much-heavier Higgs particle. In Switzerland, an
accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is being developed to
test for the Higgs particle, among others.

Veltman, of Bilthoven, is professor emeritus at the University of Michigan
and former professor at the University of Utrecht; 't Hooft has been a
professor of physics at the University of Utrecht since 1977. Their
association began in 1969 when 't Hooft studied with Veltman in Utrecht.

U.S.-based scientists won or shared the chemistry prize in nine of the
previous 10 years, and the physics prize in eight of the previous 10 years.

The literature prize was awarded Thursday to German novelist Guenter Grass.
The medicine prize was awarded Monday to Dr. Guenter Blobel, 63, a German
native and U.S. citizen, who discovered how proteins find their rightful
places in cells.

The economics prize winner is to be announced Wednesday in Stockholm and the
peace prize on Friday in Oslo, Norway.

The prizes, worth $960,000, are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the
death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who
established the prizes.

AP-NY-10-12-99 1230EDT

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