Birth of Neutrino Astrophysics (Nobel Lecture)

The KamiokaNDE experiment for the observation of proton decay, an array of photomultipliers containing over 3 000 tons of water, allowed the observation of charged particles travelling faster than the velocity of light in water. The subsequently developed Super‐KamiokaNDE could be used to measure the amounts, the path, the energies, and the oscillation parameters of neutrinos, generated either by supernova explosions in the sun, or in the atmosphere. This work was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.     

The Dawn of X‐Ray Astronomy (Nobel Lecture)

Riccardo Giacconi joined the American Science and Engineering Corporation (AS & E) after leaving Princeton University in 1959, and in 1962 his group there detected the first extrasolar Xray source. Prof. Giacconi was subsequently responsible for the launch and use of the satellite UHURU (1970) and the EINSTEIN observatory (1978). He was appointed Associate Director of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Harvard‐Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1973 and was also appointed Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University that same year. In 1981 he became the first Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and was also appointed Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. In 1992 he was appointed Director General of the European Southern Observatory, an intergovernmental organization of eight nations. Prof. Giaconni is currently President of Associated Universities, Inc., and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He was awarded the Wolf Prize in 1987, and the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002.     

Synthetic DNA and Biology (Nobel Lecture)

Most of the significant work has been summarized in a number of reviews and articles. In these there was, of necessity, a good deal of simplification and omission of detail…. With the passage of time, even I find myself accepting such simplified accounts. F Sanger^[1]     

A Half‐Century with Solar Neutrinos (Nobel Lecture)

The Sun derives its energy from fusion reactions in which hydrogen is transformed into helium. Every time four protons are turned into a helium nucleus, two neutrinos are produced. These neutrinos take only two seconds to reach the surface of the Sun and another eight minutes or so to reach the Earth. Thus, neutrinos tell us what happened in the center of the Sun eight minutes ago. The Sun produces one‐third as many neutrinos as predicted by the standard solar model of particle physics. The author's pioneering work proved that nothing was wrong with the experiments or the theory; something was “wrong” with the neutrinos, in the sense that they behave in ways beyond the standard model.