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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------