STOCKHOLM (AP) — Latest developments in the announcements of the Nobel Prizes (all times local):
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1:15 p.m.
Professor Barbro Asman says the discovery made by the 2015 Nobel Prize physics laureates will fundamentally change the scorebooks in physics and could help explain human existence and the origin of the universe.
Asman, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, compared Takaaki Kajita’s and Arthur B. McDonald’s discovery that the neutrino particles can change identities to the groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs particle.
She said, “This is a really big discovery” that “opens up a new window in physics.”
Asman said the discovery could help explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, a riddle that has eluded scientists for years.
“When matter is created, it’s created with equal amount of matter and antimatter,” she says. “So the problem we have then is why are we here containing only matter?
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12:30 p.m.
Arthur McDonald has described the publicity surrounding winning the Nobel Prize for physics as “a very daunting experience, needless to say.”
Speaking by phone to the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, he said his eureka moment was when it became clear that his experiment had proven witih great accuracy that neutrinos change from one type to another as they travel from the sun to Earth.
Asked about impact of the discovery, McDonald said that if you don’t know whether neutrinos have mass, it is diffcult to understand how to incorporate them into basic theories of fundamental physics. So finding that they have mass helps in that regard.
Asked what other questions about neutrinos remain to be answered, McDonald said that scientists would like to know what the actual mass of the neutrino is. And experiments are looking at whether there are other types of neutrinos beyond the three clearly observed.
11:55 a.m.
Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald have won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the researchers “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.”
Neutrinos are particles that whizz through the universe at nearly the speed of light.
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9:55 a.m.
The winner or winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics are set to be announced at 0945 GMT by a committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Since the Nobel Prizes were first handed out in 1901, 198 laureates have received the physics award. Only two were women.
American scientist John Bardeen is the only person to have won the physics award twice, in 1956 and 1972.
On Monday the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine went to scientists from Japan, the U.S. and China who discovered drugs that are now used to fight malaria and other tropical diseases.
The prize announcements continue with chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics award next Monday.
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