Come si festeggia un premio Nobel
Il New Yorker racconta il party alla Meyer Hall della New York University in onore di Peter Higgs e Francois Englert, i fisici che quest'anno verranno insigniti del premio Nobel per la loro ricerca sul bosone di Higgs.
Platters with several varieties of cheese and sliced meat were spread out across a low coffee table in the physics-department lounge in New York University's Meyer Hall. Scientists squeezed in and out, snatching prosciutto before making a run for the door. About twenty of them, mostly young men, lingered, though they did not sit down. The 11 A.M. sunlight beamed in from Washington Place as professors and graduate students stood in tight clusters, occasionally gliding over to the corner for some celebratory champagne.
"I know it's early, but, you know," the professor Kyle Cranmer said, as if by way of apology, even as he wore an irrepressible grin. He was in a festive mood, dressed in a dark purple shirt and square-tipped black shoes. Earlier this morning, Cranmer and his colleagues learned that the physicists who discovered the Higgs boson, or the "God particle," had won the Nobel Prize. About three thousand scientists contributed to the research process, including Cranmer and several colleagues at N.Y.U., who promptly threw themselves a party.
Sven Kreiss, Cranmer’'s graduate student, was the first to see the statistical evidence needed to claim the discovery in, June, 2012. He told me in a strong German accent that they don’t host a lot of parties in the physics lounge. "We are very serious here," he said.
